Ep 151 - Rob Greer: From Rove Pest COO to Chris Voss co-author

Rob Greer: It's easy for us to look into somebody else's life and think that we know what they need, it's a whole other thing to be able to help them find it on their own. 

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Patrick Baldwin: Paul, I have a lot more to say about Rob Greer now, more than just a surfer boy. This went on a whole other direction just when I think I know what we're going to talk about. Rob's new book, he co-wrote with Chris Voss. We know Chris from Never Split the Difference, a very popular book, and now a second book coming out about empathy and Rob is co-writing this with Chris and a collaboration. I thought it'd be great to get him on but then things took a turn later in this interview. 

Paul Giannamore: How did they? 

Patrick Baldwin: You and Rob. I love it. It reminded me of Jonathan Pototschnik. That wasn't that long ago but it's like, “All right.” I've got Paul on the box here, let's talk about, in this case, books. You all listed off some books and I did my best to keep up. 

Paul Giannamore: I was glad to get Rob on, we've known him for a long time. The first time I met him in person was at PestWorld in Hawaii 2023. I've known him for a long time and he's a great guy. Obviously, we've had his business partners, Lenny and McKay. What was the title of that episode? That was an early episode. 

Patrick Baldwin: Fifty Shades of Gray and McKay, episode nine. It's a longer title but that's the part that matters. 

Paul Giannamore: They've been partners for a long time. Rob is the Chief Operating Officer of Rove. He's responsible for conducting business as opposed to what Lenny and McKay do. Quite frankly, I'm uncertain as to what Lenny and McKay do over there so maybe we can get them to call into the show and let us know. This was a long interview, Patrick, it was a great one, and it was a different one. That's what I'm hoping to do, do different interviews. Rob is a deep thinker about things, he's not your standard operator out there so it was great to have him on. Shall we do this? 

Patrick Baldwin: I loved it. Let's do this. Let's step into The Boardroom with Rob Greer. 

Paul Giannamore: Let's do this, Patrick. 

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Paul Giannamore: Rob, welcome to The Boardroom.  

Rob Greer: Thank you. It's awesome to be with you guys. 

Paul Giannamore: It's great to have you. We just saw each other in person in Hawaii. You got to meet the Mexican live and in person. I thought I would ask you, what was your first impression? 

Rob Greer: He's quite the character. You hear a lot about him and maybe a few interactions on the podcast but it is nothing like meeting him in person from just the initial appearance to conversation topics to tangents that he can find to go on. I don't think left field even describes it but entertaining individual. Despite the shock and surprise at the beginning, after talking to him for a little bit longer there and then interacting with him a few more times during the conferences we crossed paths, it makes a lot of sense why you have him on your team. There's a lot of potential that he brings to everything that you guys do. 

Patrick Baldwin: That's the most backhanded compliment I've ever heard, he has a lot of potential. 

Paul Giannamore: Shock is usually the normal reaction, that's pretty much the standard, it's like the full-frontal attack of the Mexican for the first five minutes, and then your body adjusts. 

Rob Greer: It's cool because it wakes people up from whatever mode they thought they were going to enter in. At least for a brief second, you have nothing but your raw person exposed because of that.  

Paul Giannamore: That's right. We use him for destabilization purposes in the negotiation process. 

Rob Greer: Very wise. 

Paul Giannamore: Interestingly enough, we're going to talk about the new book that you co-authored with Chris Voss. He'll be down here in Puerto Rico in February 2024. He's speaking to my YPO chapter. I was thinking about, afterwards, we're having a cocktail hour. I was going to bring the Mexican to meet him. 

Rob Greer: You have to do that. That would be a wonderful experience there. 

Paul Giannamore: Yes, for all.  

Rob Greer: So much to observe. 

Patrick Baldwin: Are you worried that might end up in another book? 

Rob Greer: It could be the fodder for an entire book. 

Paul Giannamore: A dystopia or at least a mental health care practitioner guide. Overall, how was PestWorld for you? 

Rob Greer: It was a great experience. I wasn't sure what to expect going into it. I'd never been before. I tend to avoid going to a lot of conferences where there are a lot of people with the same focus as me. I find it a little bit harder to gain new insights when we're all looking at the same problem from the same angle. My colleague told me that it would benefit him if I were there and he thought I would benefit from it so I went down and gave it a try. 

I was surprised at the number of people that I met that had good connections that would work from a networking standpoint as well as great insights on vendors, products, and even simple problems like dealing with call outs. I thought that was one that stood out to me as something that seems like a real obvious topic but still able to gain a lot of insights from other people. I loved it. Not to mention it was in Hawaii. I try to hit a different peak every day or every other day and then I'd go swim in the others. One of the days, a big old giant sea turtle joined me and swam with me for 30 minutes so that's a fun experience. 

Paul Giannamore: I saw that off the coast of one of the hotels there, this massive sea turtle. They were telling me that if you touch it, it's a $10,000 fine or something like that. Did you hear about this? 

Rob Greer: Yeah, I believe that's correct. I didn't see that particular instance but I know that you're supposed to leave them alone and not mess with them. I didn't ride it or anything, I just swam with it. 

Paul Giannamore: The thing was a 300-pound or 400-pound turtle. This was a massive creature. 

Rob Greer: Yeah. I felt like I could have wrapped my arms around it. Do you know when you have those skydiving buddy systems? That's what it would have been like. It was as big as me. 

Patrick Baldwin: Tell me you surfed because that's what you strike me as. 

Rob Greer: I did. It was cool. By pure serendipity, four of my college roommates were all on the island at the same time. After the conference, we got together, and we met each other's families, kids, hung out, and grilled out with one of the guys that lives on the island. They're cool. They hopped in and taught my kids to surf. We would swim out there and when a wave would come, give them a nice shove. An 8-year-old set the record for the longest wave ridden for the day despite there being a bunch of legit professional surfers there. We spent a whole day doing it. Did you?  

Patrick Baldwin: No, but I don't have the look of a surfer. Don't take that as an insult. You have a lot more hair than us. 

Rob Greer: What about Franco? He definitely has the look.  

Paul Giannamore: He used to be a competitive sailor for the Peruvian national team. 

Rob Greer: That would be a fun topic of conversation. There's got to be some fun stories in that.  

Paul Giannamore: Whenever you bring it up to him, he's short on the topic. I'm not sure how his career there ended. I haven't asked him any questions but we're going to figure this out. 

Rob Greer: Someone's got to get to the bottom of that story if he's not willing to talk about it, it's got to be pretty exciting. 

Paul Giannamore: Rob, I feel like you're just the type of guy to be able to do that. 

Rob Greer: I'll get down to Puerto Rico, spend some time with him, and then I'll squeeze it out somehow. 

Paul Giannamore: My perspective on PestWorld is I've only been to four in 20 years. The Hawaii one was different because everyone always moans, “Hawaii is small and not that many people go out there.” There was a benefit to that. I felt like it was a much more intimate and relaxed PestWorld. Particularly being out in the tropics, people were in a different state of mind than in Baltimore, for example, or Boston. That was a little cozier and I got the opportunity to spend a little bit more time with people on an individual basis, not a ton, but usually better than the shows that are massive where I'm stuck in meetings all the time. I enjoyed it.  

Rob Greer: I got lucky that the smaller one was my first one so I could dip my toe in and get used to it and not get overwhelmed with a giant crowd. 

Patrick Baldwin: You mentioned you went with your buddy and your colleague, Juan. You're also connected to episode nine, Fifty Shades of Grey and McKay. You're the one that does the work around there, the COO. You left Lenny and McKay at home so you and Juan could have a good time out there. 

Rob Greer: They had other interests and other things they needed to focus on. I focus on the pest control side of it. It doesn't make a lot of sense for them to go dive into it, though there still could be a lot of benefit where they're not as focused on the pest side that they'd be able to go in and probably extract different things than would stand out to me. One of the beautiful things about having the three of us is we can all come in from different arenas, take different perspectives, and boost each other along without bugging each other in the same lane. 

Patrick Baldwin: You're the COO of Rove, that's one thing I want to talk with you about. What does the org chart look like over there at Rove?  

Rob Greer: I have a director of operations that interacts with the branch service managers and he meets with the customer service rep manager so he does a lot of that and he's my direct contact. I have two sales department heads that are over different regions in the country and they take care of the full-time sales guys and the sales programs and some of the specialty services that we do. 

McKay is over the financial side of things and he's the CFO. Lenny is always doing a lot of different things so I don't think that guy can ever rest for a second. His hobby is work. When he's working, he's working. When he's hobbying, he's working. He’s pretty much just the white rabbit of the company trying to chase him and keep up with him or remind him to take a break every once in a while. 

Patrick Baldwin: How long have you been with Rove?  

Rob Greer: Since we started. I started with Lenny and McKay back in 2004 when it was Mountain West Pest Control and then Rove Pest Control launched in 2006. I was already with them at that point and have been there since. 

Patrick Baldwin: We had a conversation many years ago and Paul said, “Connect with Rob. Rob knows his stuff. Fat Pat, you don't.” I was like, “Sure, I'll talk to anyone.” 

Rob Greer: Did you gain anything from it? Was I at least some help? 

Patrick Baldwin: I'll just say you don't look like I pictured you. I'm not here to insult you. I didn't picture you like a surfer. I'm just jealous of your hair. Back then, Rove is contracted and expanded. You've had multiple branches. At one point, you might have gone down to one branch or I might be totally off and now you're in a few branches, a few states again. What does that look like as you have grown and decided to do that? 

Rob Greer: When it started, it was Mountain West Pest Control and it was right in all the owner's backyard so you have lots of friends. You're constantly running into customers and there's unique challenges in that. After several years, you have that challenge combined with a lot of people that want a new opportunity, and one of the easiest ways to provide that is to branch out. The original operation sold and that funded opening up several branches across the Midwest, mostly along the warmer front and down below that termite line. 

We built a lot of those up and learned quite a few things along the way and hit a point where it made a lot more sense to allow some of these individuals a good way out and a fresh start. We had figured out where our niche was and where we wanted to focus. We then went back down to one branch at that point as well. We sold off all those Southern branches and kept Minnesota and started from there. A few years later, we started opening up along that Northern front until we added Arizona into the mix to be the odd ball market that we're in. We're from Minnesota to Massachusetts along the Northern front and then down to South and West in Arizona. 

Patrick Baldwin: You've worked in the South of the termite line, North of the termite line, the Arizona side, how would you compare those, and what goes into making that decision to be in those different markets?  

Rob Greer: One of the things that I like about the Northern markets is there are different challenges to deal with and it makes it a lot more fun. You can have more customized service offerings or you have to. In Minnesota, you can maybe see out the window, we had snow for Halloween so we've already got three inches sitting on our deck. Snow finally melted off by mid-May this 2023 so that's only a little over a five month window of non-tundra time. 

There's a lot more to deal with as far as rodents in the home the yard, and a lot of your commercial stuff. With those kinds of pests, it doesn't matter what climate you're in, you're always going to have those issues. It's a little more fun. For a long time, they were very underserved markets because it was a little bit harder. It was fun to come in and educate people on why pest control, what pest control could do for their business, and help them connect the dots on public health. Especially on things like mosquito, there wasn't a ton of education or help up here for them. There are pretty big mosquitoes up in Minnesota, for sure, they're big enough to throw a saddle on a ride sometimes. 

Patrick Baldwin: What does that do as far as conversations you have with your clients or customers or even potential customers? I'm thinking you want to get a customer that's on a subscription billing and finding a way to do that and that has become more and more the norm, at least here in the South. I don't know if you're up there and they're like, “What do you mean you're going to bill my card once a month for pest control when I only have bugs three months out of the year?” How do you educate them and get them on a program that works for you?  

Rob Greer: It isn't all that different. It's just getting past that initial shock and, like any objection, treating it like you've heard it a thousand times, which doesn't take long to do up here when you're out talking to people. You still have the same life cycles. Bugs aren't just spawning out of nowhere in the springtime, they're still going into an overwintering cycle, they have their eggs, and you still have your mosquitoes, especially those floodwater ones that dormant for up to a year, as long as it takes for water to hit them. 

It's slowing it down, having that conversation with them, and helping them understand that that is the issue. Also, helping them connect the dots. If they're thinking pest control is just mice and rats and that's all that comes to their mind, it’s helping them understand, “There's something you can do about those wasps or the ticks that get bad.” It’s helping them connect the dots between the two different worlds and getting those two things to marry helps them see why it's important. It almost makes it easier in some regards where every season, you're focusing on something different entirely, it's a whole different package. 

When you're in a more Southern market, it's more ebbs and flows of the same insect, “Now there's a lot and now there's a fewer.” If you can have a specialized package for each one of those and letting people know how wild it is, that's the easiest thing to reference, you just say, “We might have snow in October. It might wait until January. You never know.” The good thing is whatever pest pressure that's going to cause, we're going to be on top of that so that you can focus on your life and what you want to do. If you need extra service here or there, we still take care of you because you've got that subscription.  

Patrick Baldwin: They’re in the North thriving in where you don't have a lot of competition so why would you choose Arizona of all places where I find it super dense? 

Rob Greer: By the time Arizona came into the picture, that competition thing had changed. It only took a couple of years of us doing well up here for lots and lots of companies to follow suit and come join in the fun. The competitive level up here is like it is in any other market at this point. Arizona is a good example of how we chose any location. 

We have certain demographics that we're going to look at as far as size of market and potential for growth in there but we try and build around people. If we have somebody that has been with us, has proven themselves, and has something to offer, we have the capabilities to make something work anywhere. If we can go build that around that person, we know we have the most important part of that business and it can go there. 

In Arizona, we had a guy that had worked with us in several other of our branches and done tons of good for contribution and hit the threshold and benchmark. We met with him and vetted it heavily because it was going to be such a geographic reach. It’s not just the travel time to get there but also the time zone struggles, they don't even accept the same time that we do. Sometimes we're two hours apart and sometimes one hour. It might seem petty but that's a little bit of a challenge when you're trying to deal with everything from Arizona to Massachusetts. We felt like it was a good fit and started building. 

Patrick Baldwin: I was wondering and I thought maybe there was the right person for Arizona. I thought that drew you into Arizona, that was my assumption. I probably prefer that model now knowing more about it than I did years ago. When you and I first spoke, I was probably in the middle of franchising of all things. When I think about door to door, I'm throwing out this number, 12.5% equity is typically where you're going to stand someone up and say, “Go start the branch and you have equity in the business.” Is your model similar or different to that?  

Rob Greer: Very similar. We have a stair step model where an individual can build it up so it's not an automatic set equity level, it depends on how big their branch gets, and how much they're contributing along the way to that. That's a similar model. 

Patrick Baldwin: We don't need to put his PayPal in out here on The Buzz. How did you vet him? You talked about how he performed but you made it sound like there's a real process there.

Rob Greer: In order for us to want to build something around someone, there are few key elements that we need to have there. First of all, it's just a good cultural fit, and that's pretty easy to observe after a couple of years of working with someone if their values are aligned with ours. After that, it comes down to the ability to perform. 

We want individuals who can perform on their own if they have to. If everything collapses, their team falls apart, and they can still make the boat go, that's a good individual. We also want to see success in that team realm and, ideally, we don't want to see it crash and burn and have them carry it all on their own shoulders. Somebody able to do both sides of that gives us enough flexibility to be able to be confident in a successful plan.  

Patrick Baldwin: Are you looking at performance on both sales and service for someone like that?  

Rob Greer: No. For the most part, if we're opening a new place, it's all about them being able to supply the growth so whether that's a door-to-door team and that's their strength or they're good with running a commercial sales team, those are the main pieces we look at. We know that we have that just as a small section of our marketing. We know as long as that piece is going, we can definitely supplement with our organic marketing and everything else we have going there. 

Our operations, we have set turnkey style where we can plug it into anywhere and need a little bit of a runway to get the right people hired and trained. Every state is a little bit different on how much of a runway that is, whether it's 2 weeks, a month, or 6 weeks, but we do all that digging ahead of time. If that was a case, Arizona has some interesting elements starting up a business so we had to have a pretty long runway to get operations ready but that wasn't too big of a deal. It's easy to say, “This is going to be your start point and we'll have everything ready to go by then.” 

Patrick Baldwin: Rob, run me through your markets because I know you talked about North and South but I'm guessing you're in Phoenix. 

Rob Greer: Phoenix. We're in Minneapolis, St. Paul. We have a satellite branch down in Rochester, Minnesota. Go play with Mayo down there. We've got Novi, Michigan, suburb of Detroit. We have Madison, Wisconsin, and then Boston, Massachusetts. 

Patrick Baldwin: Did you happen to say go play with Mayo? 

Rob Greer: Yeah. 

Patrick Baldwin: What is that? 

Rob Greer: The Mayo Clinic down in Rochester. That's kind of the central hub of that economy. 

Patrick Baldwin: I was thinking mayonnaise in the bowl and this was disgusting. 

Rob Greer: As much as we love food, it makes sense to start with mayonnaise first. It would be cool to have a market completely based around mayonnaise. You have the big mayonnaise factory and the label producer.

Patrick Baldwin: It's disgusting you've thought about this.  

Rob Greer: Thanks to you. I never thought about it before but now I'm rolling through how many chicken coops you'd have to have to get enough eggs. It could be a full economy just on mayonnaise.

Paul Giannamore: You're talking to Fat Pat. 

Patrick Baldwin: Thank you. I did have mayonnaise with my truffle fries. 

Rob Greer: I was surprised when I saw you, I was expecting somebody a lot bigger with how many times I heard Fat pat. I was thinking, “Either this guy is going to be like the blueberry girl out of Willy Wonka or he's going to be the skinniest rail where it's the ironic nickname.” You’re just a good healthy guy.

Patrick Baldwin: Sorry to disappoint. 

Paul Giannamore: It’s like when you called the seven-foot-tall guy tiny. 

Rob Greer: Yeah. 

Paul Giannamore: Fat Pat, did you lose weight because we called you Fat Pat? Did we fat shame you? 

Patrick Baldwin: Would you feel bad if that was the case? 

Paul Giannamore: No, I wouldn't care. 

Patrick Baldwin: Starting with episode 96. 

Paul Giannamore: I'd feel good about it. I'd feel like we created some value in the world.

Patrick Baldwin: It's motivating, Paul. 

Paul Giannamore: Was it motivating? 

Patrick Baldwin: It is motivating. 

Paul Giannamore: Fat shaming does work to everyone out there. The Mexican has a nickname for everyone and a lot of them are lazy, he just throws the word fat like fat Jim would be Jim McHale. Jim McHale is not fat. Did you get a chance to meet Jim when you were in Hawaii?

Rob Greer: No, I did not. 

Paul Giannamore: Jim, as you and I discussed when we were out there, when I connected Jim to McKay many moons ago, he went out there, talked about door-to-door, and then Jim McHale's son went and sold for you guys one summer in Boston. From what I understand, he did a kick-ass job. Back to the point, the Mexican would be like, “Fat Jim, Fat Tim, and Fat Kyle.” It was just really easy. We know so many people named Jim and so many people named Kyle and then you can't have two Fat Kyles. What do you do? Now you have to create a new moniker. There you go. 

Rob Greer: I heard some interesting monikers from him when we were meeting with him. 

Paul Giannamore: I could only imagine.

Rob Greer: I appreciate now knowing that they don't have to make sense and that makes me feel a little bit better. 

Paul Giannamore: Yes.  

Patrick Baldwin: There is one rule, though, that you gave the Mexican because he did take it too far.  You told him you can't call any women fat.  

Paul Giannamore: I did say that. Yes, that is very true. I did say a man can be called Fat Pat, Fat Jim, it's funny, or Fat Jeff. It can't be Fat Jen.  

Rob Greer: It's good that you gave him that guidance. We were talking and wondering how a company would look if he was in charge of HR. 

Paul Giannamore: He is in charge of HR. 

Rob Greer: That's amazing.  

Paul Giannamore: He's in charge of HR from an administrative perspective here and that's one of his purviews here in Puerto Rico. We live in a world down here, which is different than the United States. Now you can't say anything in the US. If you were to criticize the secular state of Israel, you're automatically an anti-Semite. Anything that you say now you get canceled for. Down here in Puerto Rico and a lot of places around the world, people still accept differing opinions and it doesn't turn into a life-or-death canceling situation. One of the things that I liked about being down here is that people can still speak their mind without retribution. It doesn't mean we should call women fat. 

Rob Greer: There are some obvious lines you don't want to cross. The ability to be able to have opposing opinions and have healthy competition, that's what you want. A lot of the cancel culture like you're referencing is like watching a football game where they have a pro team against a grade school team and there's not any competition occurring, it's super boring and nonproductive. 

Paul Giannamore: 100%. Rob, one of the things that we talked about down at PestWorld was your new book coming out. I would like to talk a little bit about that. I would first like to begin with how on earth did you become a budding author here?  

Rob Greer: Pure luck would probably be the best answer to that. I'm constantly looking at different arenas where I can glean information from. Going back to our talking about PestWorld, if I'm in the room with a lot of like minds, I can feel good but I don't necessarily grow or get challenged. Years ago, I read Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss and I liked the simplicity of the material in there and his perspective on empathy and how that can tie into the negotiation and communication process. 

I don't agree with everything in the book, it is what it is, and he has his perspective from the FBI background that he has. I liked his presentation style. I feel like most books I read are either bullet point things so it's like reading a PowerPoint presentation or the person is just touting their successes. He stood out to me because he mostly teaches through failures so you're expecting to hear all these people he saved and you're more likely to read about something he tried and he messed up and someone died. It can be a little bit dark for someone if they're not ready for that but I like that perspective. 

I followed his Black Swan Group, which is his consulting thing. From the cheap free standpoint, I'd hop into the free seminars and read the newsletters they put out. In one of those webinars, he presented the idea that he had where he wanted to do a book on empathy and business. Considering the nature of the topic, it would make sense to do it from multiple perspectives. He doesn't necessarily have a business background. 

Obviously, he has the FBI hostage negotiator thing and he's been an author so he had that to bring to the table but he wanted some people with business experience from a lot of different realms so he opened that up to people to apply. Without opportunity, that was one of those where it's like, “What can it hurt?” I'm not a previous author and I didn't think that I had any shot at it but I like to challenge myself to try new opportunities and see what happens. 

In fact, my kids and I have a few books we go through every night to remind us of things and one of them is Hard Things. I thought this would be a good challenge to show them that it’s like, “It's not in my wheelhouse but I'll give it a try and see how it goes.” I applied, expected that to be the end of it, and then got back that I got accepted. I was mostly like background to make sure I'm not wanted for anything legally or don't want any pedophiles writing about empathy or anything like that. I got through that and then the next step was to submit writing. It then was a little bit of a scramble grabbing some articles that I had written for some of the industry magazines. 

Paul Giannamore: Your high school yearbook?

Rob Greer: Pretty much. Mostly race reports, that's what I put in there, which I do for fun. At that point, I thought it was laughable, like, “No way.” I then heard back that I was in and so then it was getting to work and getting things put together. It’s one of those things, the right place at the right time with the right background leading up to it and the stars aligned. It's a cool opportunity not just for me but for the industry too. It’ll be cool to have pest control out there in this world. Hopefully, I imagine looking at the authors contributing, it's going to do really well. 

Paul Giannamore: It appears to me that you've got multiple authors. Are you each writing a chapter? Is that how this works? 

Rob Greer: Correct.

Paul Giannamore: Did Voss give you each, like, “Rob, you're writing the chapter on this,” or was it more like, “Here's the general theme, what do you have to say about it?” 

Rob Greer: It was very broad and we stayed isolated from each other so that we wouldn't contaminate each other's thoughts and direction. Theoretically, you could end up with twelve chapters of the exact same thing but that's just not how people work. All we got was the title, Empathy and Understanding in Business, go, and you've got this word minimum and this word maximum and that's all the guidance we got. 

Paul Giannamore: Rob, how did you determine the content or the subject matter then for your chapter? Was it something that you labored over, you walked around at night, and you're like, “What should I write about?” Did you have a pretty good idea?  

Rob Greer: Unfortunately, I had too many ideas. I had about 40 things where I was like, “I could write about this. This would be super awesome.” By the time you even put bullet points together, you're over the word max so I had to start chopping things down. What I did is I reached out to a gal who lives across the river. She's an author and she does editing and that type of stuff. It was helpful to sit down and talk through things with her. Things that I thought were interesting, I'd share, and she would be like, “Yeah, sure. You could if you wanted.” 

Other things where I was like, “I pretty much am ready to throw this away.” She'd be like, “Wait. What about this?” She would ask a few questions. Quite a few things got turned upside down by expressing those ideas to an outside party that had no idea of what we were doing. It was a matter of ending up with 5 or 6 stories and then how to loop all of those together. Where it was most difficult is finding that common thread and making it flow in the space constraints that I had. It came together nicely or probably if I would have had more time, I'm sure I could do a lot better but I the message that I want to get across is going to hit like it should. 

Paul Giannamore: If you had more time, would it have been shorter? 

Rob Greer: That's the famous quote, right? 

Paul Giannamore: Yeah. I can't remember who said that, was it Ben Franklin or one of those guys? 

Rob Greer: That sounds right. 

Patrick Baldwin: I was thinking you would go to Lenny, “Instead of the woman across the river,” which is creepy when you say that out loud. 

Rob Greer: Only when you put it in that framework. 

Patrick Baldwin: You said it. 

Rob Greer: You twisted it. 

Patrick Baldwin: Lenny has put out two books now. I figured you would have camped out with Lenny for a minute and said, “Lenny, how do I do this?” 

Rob Greer: That would have been a good resource. He has a lot of background in that game. That goes back to my general guiding principle of not having somebody from the same perspective. Since he's in the same industry, we work together all the time. It had a far higher chance of being an echo chamber rather than somebody who has never worked in pest control or never had a pest control service. When you're talking about personal stories, it can be a little bit offensive when someone's like, “That sucks,” or, “That's boring,” or, “That doesn't do it for me.” She wouldn't know that so it was a lot easier for her to be completely transparent and not sugarcoat things. 

Paul Giannamore: Like your own Mexican. 

Rob Greer: Exactly right. 

Patrick Baldwin: That's what I was thinking. 

Paul Giannamore: We're all thinking it. Whether it's great or not so great, he'll tell you it sucks. When do we expect this to hit the shelf? 

Rob Greer: Pretty soon. I'm expecting early 2024. We just barely got the opportunity to pre-order. Our copies that we're going to have, I would assume that maybe mid to late January, it'll be on shelves or at least available for pre-order, but pretty close.  

Paul Giannamore: How do we get an autographed copy?  

Rob Greer: You just shoot me an email and I'll send you an autographed copy. I'm not sure what you'll do with it but I'm more than happy to oblige on that.  

Paul Giannamore: I always giggle about that old quote. I remember the movie Notting Hill where Hugh Grant was talking about a book and he said, “If you can find one of these copies that's not autographed, it'll be worth a mint.”  

Rob Greer: That sounds about right. You may be able to take it to PestWorld and have everybody else autograph it for me. 

Paul Giannamore: We're excited to see it and I'm assuming it will be available on Amazon.  

Rob Greer: Yeah.

Patrick Baldwin: Getting into the empathy aspect of the book, are there certain roles in which you might want to unemploy that doesn't really have empathy? 

Rob Greer: I can't foresee one. It depends a lot on how you define empathy. 

Patrick Baldwin: Define it for us in the context of your 40-chapter book. 

Rob Greer: That is helpful. The perspective that I'm taking on it is being able to understand the perspective as someone else and be willing and able to provide them with what they need. It's not sitting there and saying, “My kid wants a candy bar so I give them a candy bar for breakfast.” That's not what they need. It's understanding that that's what they think they need and then being able to have the conversation with them to help them discover their own truth. 

Far too often, it's easy for us to look into somebody else's life and think that we know what they need. It's a whole other thing to be able to help them find it on their own. If we find our truth, then we're going to pursue that on our own, we're intrinsically motivated, and you don't have to worry as much about external incentives. 

Whether you're talking about that from the finance perspective, it's huge in the technician perspective because they're not only needing to be able to take the role of empathy going for that customer and saying, “You have this issue and you're contributing to it.” There's a difficult conversation they need to have here that shows you how to help yourself so that our treatment will be effective. 

You also have to have this empathy for an insect and understand where it's coming from and take that perspective. Whether that's being able to look at a rodent and be able to see it from their level and where they're trying to gain entry and what they're shooting for or what environmental factors need to change to help redirect that cockroach or mosquito to where it's going to naturally be in balance with the rest of the environment. That's the epitome of what IPM is going for, though it's maybe not so easily defined in most of the state manuals that you look at. 

Patrick Baldwin: Personally, going into the book, and writing about empathy, on a deep level or thorough level, how did you transform as far as how you view empathy or what you know about empathy or how you express empathy now coming out of writing it? 

Rob Greer: That's a constantly evolving process and that perspective on empathy, which I gained from reading Chris Voss's book, started from that read where I was like, “It's different than just compassion or pity. It's a very active process.” Starting from that point, it was a journey of experimenting with things. The more I try and teach it to someone else, the more familiar I get with it, and I'm able to gain new perspectives. 

I've had a lot of failures along the way where I think I know what someone wants or I think I've listened long enough and then I jump the gun and end up where I don't want to go. Most of the best lessons are learned at home with kids or with wives where there's a lot more openness and you know their baseline a lot more to know when you've crossed the line. As I put it together, it gave me a lot of time. When you read through something that you've written and you change it 200 or 300 times, it's a lot different than just a thought floating through the head. The more I learned, the more I realized I have a long way to go and I'm just realizing the direction I need to go rather than feeling like I've mastered anything. 

Patrick Baldwin: Would you call it a skill, characteristic, trade, or habit? How would you put empathy into a context of hiring someone who’s like, “They need to have empathy.” 

Rob Greer: I like that question. I do think that it is a skill that can be developed and it's not something that either somebody has or does not have. I glommed on to that skill element but then you said habit and that's an interesting play on it where you do have to develop the habit of looking for it and realizing that in the simplest interactions, there's an opportunity for it and you have to habitually and intentionally practice to do it. 

Whether that's just seeing how many cookies you can get on the Delta flight from the flight attendant as you go and doing little elements where you can say, “Can I get this person to collaborate with me or join my cause and do it willingly and have fun?” When they come in and they sneak you a cookie and they have the smirk on their faces and they put it on your thing underneath the napkin where they're playing along, then you hit it on the head and you did it right. 

Taking that a little bit further, if it becomes a piece where it's habitual and that you don't think about it and it's mindless, then it's going to lose its impact and it stops becoming what it is and it becomes inauthentic, false, or misguided. Back to your original question of how to hire that in an individual, more than looking for that skill or process, it's looking for the values that underlie it, and seeing if they have an inclination to towards it. 

I could take someone who comes across as completely lacking empathy but if I give them a scenario and say, “What do you think about this? Which is more important to you?” You lay that scenario out. If they choose the empathetic one, then they're teachable, and they've got that value in there that you can build on. 

The most important thing for me in looking for other individuals is what are their core values? Do they have enough alignment with my core values or the company core values that we can build and work together on that? Sometimes where it seems like the case, you only get a short time with someone when you're interviewing them, and you're going to find out what their true values are along the way. Looking for that possibility in the starting point would be where I would look, personally. 

Paul Giannamore: Can you give us an example of empathy perhaps used in your portion of the book?

Rob Greer: A good one that may be a lot of readers would be able to relate to is that situation of an upset customer over something. We had a customer who had continuous flies and beetles that were coming out. It didn't matter how we treated and where we treated, they were just there. We had a service manager go out there and we had lots of conversations. English wasn't their first language so that was another hurdle and there were some natural cultural barriers there. 

The technicians and service manager, everybody was struggling with it, the customer service staff. I had an opportunity to fly out there to try and resolve it. They were threatening legal proceedings, which we did not want to get into. I went out there, met with them, and went over there. It was relatively simple, I looked at one of the flies and it was a blow fly so I said, “We got blow flies inside. For this amount of time that has been going on, it can't be something that died under a bush. We probably have something in here.” 

It took a little bit to have a conversation with them because there was that language barrier and to help them understand that I was there to make them feel understood that I was there to help them feel safe and secure and not there to challenge them and that I can be on their side. When I felt like we could have a real conversation back and forth, I started with some simple questions or leading statements and was able to uncover that they had hired another company to do some wildlife removal. They had a woodpecker that had gone to town on their home and drilled a hole in the front of it. 

They hired that company to have that woodpecker trapped. That company did a little bit of a shortcut job and never figured out that woodpecker was creating a nest and had some babies in there. In the time it took for those to hatch and then the flies to catch the whiff of corpses in the wall, there was a pretty big logical distance between that happening that would be hard for them to recall or for them to even make that connection. How would they know? They hadn't been trained in that. 

That was the ticket. Once we knew that, we could explain to them what happened and why it happened. It was such a close call. We could have been legally attacked for what another company did had we not taken the time to uncover what happened, what they needed to hear, and what needed to happen to solve it. It was resolved within days after figuring that out and they're super happy. 

That pretty well encapsulates some of the near misses that we encounter every day in pest control. It's super easy to get in a hurry and not take the time to figure out what that underlying cause or causes are. Sometimes we'll find the first one and stop and think we found it. Being patient and knowing when to dive in a little bit more, that's the skill and practice that takes probably a lifetime of learning to get down. 

Patrick Baldwin: Can I go back to something you said about inauthentic empathy? 

Rob Greer: Is that even a real word? I make up words as we go. 

Patrick Baldwin: I like it. I want to go back to it. You are watching for someone to be inauthentic with their empathy, maybe that's during an interview, or maybe once they're on staff. How could you detect or what are you looking for to make sure that they are not in that camp? 

Rob Greer: There are two ways and one of them is despite people having to learn and practice a lot on acting and executing empathy well, we're good at detecting the lack of authenticity in those attempts. When somebody comes up to you and says something like, “Pat, I love your shirt. That's great. Would you help me out?” 

Patrick Baldwin: It’s Fat Pat. 

Rob Greer: Sorry. I didn’t even get your name right. Those are the things you pick up on. 

Patrick Baldwin: That's inauthentic. 

Rob Greer: Exactly, and you can call it out right away. Your brain isn't even listening to what I'm saying. It's like, “You got my name wrong. You don't even care enough for that.” Those things are probably the easiest to pick out for most people. 

Patrick Baldwin: You were doing it to trigger me. You were showing me an example of inauthentic empathy. Thank you. 

Rob Greer: I'm naturally good at it. 

Patrick Baldwin: Good job. 

Rob Greer: We learn best from mistakes. 

Patrick Baldwin: From Rob's mistakes. 

Rob Greer: My mistakes in particular. If you can learn from my mistakes, that saves you the trouble of having to make them yourself. The other thing is to give them obvious scenarios where you paint a picture of something that they know and ask them what they would do and see if they can pick out the issue and point out where the empathy is lacking in there. It's surprising. 

Patrick Baldwin: You're walking a back-through scenario in which you've witnessed maybe a situation that didn't show empathy that they could have and you're walking back through and saying, “Where could you have handled this differently?” Is that what you’re saying?

Rob Greer: Exactly right, especially if you can get an emotional situation. There was one guy I was interviewing where when we got to the question, “Is it okay if we run a background check if we were to offer you the position?” He says, “There'll be one thing to pop up on there but don't worry about it.” It's like, “Tell me more.” He's like, “I had this incident with my wife.” 

Every time we got him to go a little bit more, he kept getting more and more riled up. It came to him explaining that she said something to him and he got mad, he grabbed her by the throat, and he picked her up and slammed her to the ground. I was like, “We're done here. Thank you.” Clearly, he fails the empathy test. That's not what she needed in that situation. That's probably the super extreme example. It's surprising how many people are unaware of it that they'll uncover their own things by a little bit of digging. 

I find it most helpful if it's their scenario or their story and you can dig a little bit in there and see how they interact with people. Sometimes it can be as simple as starting a story where you have something in common and saying, “I had this situation where I dropped something on my toe.” They’re like, “I smashed my toe once, let me tell you about it.” “I'm going to grab this and run in my own direction with it and totally forget about you.” 

Patrick Baldwin: It's like one-upping on a story. Is that a lack of empathy? 

Rob Greer: I think so, yeah. The one-up or the switch control, for sure. 

Patrick Baldwin: The other thing I was thinking about was that it's selfish or selfless. If I go to you, like, “Rob, I see a need that you have and I'm doing it to help you fulfill the need,” what's best for you versus I'm going to go help you take whatever that is and help you out so I can pat myself on the back or say, “I helped Rob.” You write your book and I'm like, “I helped that guy.” Is there a big selfish factor that kills empathy? 

Rob Greer: I think so. You totally remind me of every networking event that you go to where someone is like, “Let me help you.” Especially the stereotypical, consultant where he wants to tout his own knowledge and offers to help you so that he can get his client base up. There’s are a lot of those where somebody is trying but enough so that they can have this front of wanting to help you and do something for you. Thinking about that, I think about both of you. I've had interactions with both Paul and Pat. 

Patrick Baldwin: Stop calling me Pat. Because your parents shortened your name to Rob, it doesn't mean you can short mine to Pat. 

Rob Greer: It's the two syllables. I'm too lazy to have that long of a name. 

Patrick Baldwin: It's hard. Two syllables are hard. 

Rob Greer: It's hard for me. When I've met with you guys, there's a sincere willingness to help out. It's not just with me, it's with other people. If you go in helping first, it creates that real connection and there's no immediate reward from it. It’s like, “I'm going to provide this chart of accounts to you and I expect you to pay me $75.” It's like, “No.” It’s like, “here's a good guide. Here's something for you to look at and consider.” It's genuinely wanting to help someone out in the right situation. It's not something where we should go do free pest control for everyone because we want everyone to have the best lives. 

There are situations where it makes sense to go in and say, “Let me take care of this for you quickly. This is a super simple fix.” Go back and meet with them later and it's a whole different ballgame. There is a huge difference between being willing and caring about other people that makes that difference. If you have a true compassion and care for other people, you're willing to do small acts of service and try and help them out. With karma or whatever you believe in, those things revolve back around to you and then you have the opportunity to receive at some point. 

Patrick Baldwin: Rob, if you're looking at hiring someone, where does empathy fall into, like, “This is the most important. This is the first thing I need to be looking for.” Is it tenth on the list or is it just encompass everything that you hear from them? Do you have this empathy filter through everything now?

Rob Greer: I do have a lot more focus on it than I did before. Personally, there's a big filter in there. When it comes down to day-to-day business, I'm not actually doing all of the hiring, I have lots of other people that are doing that. I try and set up the questions where it's going to show that depending on how they respond. 

At the end of the day, it's more important to have somebody that can do the basic skills of that job first. It's helpful if empathy is there to begin with. The more empathy they have, the better your launching point. Since it is a skill that can be acquired and can be taught, if they can perform at a level that's going to connect with customers, if they can show that basic level of understanding and compassion, if they have the values of self-education, the ability to explain something to someone else, and they value investigation, that's probably the core value that will highlight it. 

If they see the value in looking a little bit deeper in a situation before reacting, there's enough there to build on. It has to come down to, first, are they an able body willing and able to do the basic job as set out? Depending on how many candidates you have, you can start getting more complex with the whittling down characteristics from there. 

Patrick Baldwin: Let me take us back out to the field. A salesperson, high sales, door-to-door, and direct sales, or a technician, is there a downside of having too much empathy or a weakness or blind side in which if they're an empathetic person, it’s going to cause a problem? 

Rob Greer: There are elements they get confused with empathy that would be the too much piece. Somebody can appear empathetic if they're a good conversationalist. If they're good at conversation and then he has a sales rep, they could burn tons of time chatting with people and making everybody feel good. They're missing part of the key definition of empathy, which is understanding and being able to identify what that other person needs. 

If you're going and you're talking to a restaurant owner, they don't need someone to chat with them for three hours in the middle of their day. They need somebody to build a connection with them, find how they can improve their situation in that business, and make their business and offering to their customer better as efficiently as possible. That would be probably a good example. As you have a sales rep who can do that, it takes them three hours to make that connection versus somebody who can get that wrapped up in 10 or 15 minutes. 

The 10 or 15-minute guy has a stronger empathy skill level than the three-hour guy. I don't think you can get to where you have too much empathy because if you're combining that with the understanding of what is needed, that takes everybody into the equation, including themself. A key piece is it's not just empathy for other people. The more you have empathy for other people, the more I can have empathy for myself. 

Talking about people that want to transform their lives, you have to understand how your future self relates to your present self. In that same vein, that sales rep who blows three hours getting nowhere with someone definitely is not helping his future self because then that future self has to deal with less clients contacted, fewer closed deals, less money to play with, etc. 

Patrick Baldwin: This might be a stretch but I'm thinking about a technician that has the skillset, of course, that goes to a client, sees that they have a real need, and then he's giving away free service or including additional service at no charge or even knowing he has a minimum price and he's probably falling more in line with the minimum price to make sure that he solves that client's problem because empathy is way up there. That's my perspective where I think too much empathy might need some extra barriers or guidelines to help. 

Rob Greer: That sounds a lot more like pity, lack of confidence, or too much compassion rather than empathy. If you go in to a customer and they've got a situation that needs dealt with, they need your service if they need your service to continue. I see this a lot with one man shows as they go out and they're like, “I want any money for me.” They're lacking empathy for themselves but they're also lacking empathy for that customer because they're not seeing that, down the road, customer needs them to stay in business. 

They need them to have a flourishing business that can grow. If you build something where your margins are so small that you can never hire another technician and never pass your knowledge and expertise on to someone else, then your reach is inherently limited. You can only help 750 people a year. If you can help double or triple or ten times that by being able to provide enough margin to be able to build that business and help their neighbors, you're going to improve that individual customer's quality of service. 

You'll be able to help the neighbors around them, which will provide a better balance in the environment so there are fewer pests putting pressure on their home. It continues to branch out from there. If you have empathy but you have a myopic perspective and you can only see one angle on it or you can only see two hours into the future and you can't balance the needs for a longer game, it's pity, compassion, or something else.  

Patrick Baldwin: I should read your book so I understand empathy. 

Rob Greer: Definitely. You can then reach out to me and tell me what I missed and help me improve too.  

Paul Giannamore: We're going to let the Mexican read your book. Will there be a Spanish edition shortly thereafter? 

Rob Greer: I will write one for him. I want somebody to have a tape recorder and have him spout out whatever pops into his mind as he goes and then that could be the audiobook version, the B-side. That would be the best seller right there. 

Paul Giannamore: At times, he may need some empathy training. 

Rob Greer: That could very well be. I can't say that I know enough about him to be able to say much there but I haven't met anybody that could not use more empathy training and empathy practice. Sometimes It's fun to look at it from a team perspective where maybe you don't have to have everybody have that as their number one skill but you can strategically place people on your team that have the element that's lacking that's going to help the group progress as a single unit. That only takes one person. A good manager or leader is to be able to build an empathetic unit rather than try and force every person in that unit to have a perfect level of empathy. 

Patrick Baldwin: You're both generous. Paul, you said sometimes, the Mexican, somewhere in there, there's a nice person.  

Paul Giannamore: Indeed. 

Rob Greer: He walked by and said hi to me at PestWorld. He patted me on the back and he probably called me something.

Patrick Baldwin: Did you check your pocket? 

Rob Greer: They were empty anyway. He wouldn't have anything to gain out of there. That made me feel good. Regardless, he at least has one under his belt.

Paul Giannamore: Was he wearing sunglasses and using the cane?

Rob Greer: No, he didn't have that at the time. That would have been spectacular to see. 

Paul Giannamore: In most of PestWorld, he was walking with a cane and had sunglasses on. He looked blind. They were nice to him because they assumed he was blind. He had hurt his leg and he always wore sunglasses indoors. 

Patrick Baldwin: I saw how he used the cane. Sometimes it hit the ground. Sometimes he might have put a little weight on it. It was a prop. Let's practice empathy. Rob, how can we help you? 

Rob Greer: That's a good example of false empathy right there. 

Paul Giannamore: I was waiting for that. 

Rob Greer: That is great. I honestly think that just being able to be on here and chat about it is about as good as I could ask for. As an industry as a whole, we have a lot to offer the business world and the world in general with the bridges that we're able to create in between different cultures and different situations where people are completely removed from the natural environment and want no connection to some of this wildlife that's out around their home, whether it's a wasp or a raccoon. 

We're going into what is uncharted territory for probably 90% of the world here where it's urbanized. It's cool for us to realize that we have that as an industry to offer to others. If that can help inspire some others within the industry to reach out and keep spreading that and then improve on our own sales and our own offerings, that's going to improve our businesses. It'll make our customers or clients much better tended to and have much better experiences. This will start to bleed over into all the other realms that we're involved in. 

We'll have better relationships at home and we'll have better interactions with our friends and our community. It's an upward spiral if we can get everybody moving in the right direction. It'd be super fun if everybody read my book, bought it, and shared their ideas with me. It's a jumping off point meant to be maybe a platform where a new conversation can start that's been on the fringe but could take a deeper dive and higher involvement. I'm excited to see where it could go with all that.  

Paul Giannamore: Rob, in closing, I have a question for you. Like you, I desperately try to surround myself with people that think differently than me. I spend a lot of time in pest and lawn circles and so on and so forth but I do try hard to go to different countries and spend time with folks in businesses and different areas of life, very different from my own. I appreciate that about you. My question for you, in closing, is now that you're an author, can we talk about maybe the top three books that you've read that have had a profound impact on you or even a moderate impact? 

Rob Greer: That's a good question. How many books do you go through in a given month or year? Do you have ebbs and flows? 

Paul Giannamore: I probably have about 10,000 volumes between my library here in Puerto Rico and the one in Switzerland. For me, it's more of a reference library. I can't tell you how many books that I have that are 1/3 read or 1/2 read. I tend to read multiple books at the same time, which is probably not a good philosophy. I will tell you that I have, over the years though, zeroed in on a smaller number of books that I read over and over as opposed to reading new things. I probably go through about 130 or 140 a year. 

Rob Greer: That's impressive. 

Paul Giannamore: It's less now that I'm in Puerto Rico, Rob. When I used to do 50 or 60 trans-Atlantic flights per year, over time, I made the decision that unless I had to, I was going to no longer work on a plane. I used to take a twelve-hour flight and work the whole time. I said, “I'm not going to work on a plane anymore” I can't watch a movie on a plane, I'm just not that type of guy. What else can I do? I read. On my way to and from PestWorld, Puerto Rico to Hawaii was a long journey, I finished four books.  

Rob Greer: Very nice. That's inspiring. The other thing that stood out to me about your books too is I feel like I read a lot. I look at my book collection and then I look at yours and it's laughable the difference there. I probably get through close to the hundred mark per year so I'm trailing you quite a ways. Would it be cheating if I did 4 books instead of 3? 

Paul Giannamore: That would be better. 

Rob Greer: I like to rotate through different disciplines so that I'm constantly getting a new perspective and not just all business or all selling or anything like that. Four that have had a big impact on me are Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke, taking a poker perspective on things, How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett, a good not overly deep dive into the psychology world, but a cool takeaway there. I love The Go-Giver by Bob Burg. 

Paul Giannamore: He's written a few of them now. There's a little series there. 

Rob Greer: Go-Giver for sellers and Go-Giver for managers or something like that. Also, Behave by Robert Sapolsky.  

Paul Giannamore: Those are all on the shelf. 

Rob Greer: That's awesome. 

Paul Giannamore: I did like Duke's Thinking in Bets. She created a term resulting in that book, didn't she use that term? It's a great book that gets you focused on process as opposed to results in a lot of ways.  

Rob Greer: It's super easy to do. I see it in a lot of business books in particularly where somebody is writing about their experience of N-of-1 or even if you're talking 10 or 100 people but you're picking these people that had good results and then they're recreating the narrative of how they got there with no real substance or study. Because you found 100 other people that did that same thing, it doesn't mean it contributed to what you're doing or that it was necessary or that it would even be right for somebody in a completely different situation. It's a tough thing to remember but it is a good principle. 

Paul Giannamore: Trying to deconstruct the causality of any unique situation is what it comes down to. 

Rob Greer: Along those lines, have you read Think Again by Adam Grant? 

Paul Giannamore: Somebody sent me that book because Fat Pat and I once did a podcast on the Dunning-Kruger effect and we had David Dunning. I was originally involved in that Cornell study and Grant talks a lot about the Dunning-Kruger effect in that book. Somebody had listened to that episode, somebody not in the pest control industry, believe it or not. When we have somebody like Dunning on the show, people search for it, and listen to it. Somebody did send me that book and I perused it. I haven't read it yet. That's on my list. 

Rob Greer: The coolest thing about that book is how it's written. It's definitely one where you would totally miss out if you did the audio book. He makes his edits and leaves them in so you can see what he strikes through and what he rewrites. Part of the fun in that was seeing the process that somebody like that is going through mentally and being able to take that journey through their mind with them. I found that more fascinating than any of the content necessarily itself. How was it meeting Dunning? 

Paul Giannamore: He's a dynamic individual. He's a great speaker. He's quite a bit older now than I remember him from 1999. 

Rob Greer: That'll happen in twenty years.  

Paul Giannamore: I used to read a lot of business books when I was younger. I would read business biographies and all these books and strategy and this side or the other. If you look at the books I'm reading right now, I'm reading a book on calculus, for example. I'm reading a book on physics. I tend to read a lot of books on psychology. For me, that was fascinating. Where I wanted to take The Boardroom Buzz going forward is spend less time with guys like you, Rob, in the pest control industry and Spend a lot more time with guys and gals. 

Rob Greer: I could see wisdom in that. 

Paul Giannamore: I asked Jessica to reach out to the author. I have this book here by Carol Dweck called Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. I had her reach out to try to get her on the show. I also asked her to reach out to Patty McCord, who was at Netflix when they did that whole Culture Deck back in 2009, which I've been particularly intrigued by the Netflix crew back in the early days. I tried to codify their culture of accountability and freedom and so on and so forth. 

They put together this 130-page deck that's available online and we can download it. She was part of the team that put that together and she wrote a book on it called Powerful, which is a business book so I'm now getting off the topic. I've been trying to round myself out and get books on things I know absolutely nothing about. I find that, over time, if you become a specialist in something, it's also better to take a broader perspective and look at other areas of whether it be nature, history, philosophy, geography, or physics, you name it. 

Your brain is a big spatial map of nodes and there's a lot of interplay between, for example, geometry and the financial markets, and philosophy and language. The more of a broad-based knowledge that you have, it helps you from a decision-making perspective, not only relating with other humans but also thinking intertemporally. I've tried to broaden my perspective. I'm reading less business stuff now. 

Rob Greer: That is absolutely wonderful. Out of the more recent books that you've read for somebody wanting to branch out and push themselves in a new area, I'd love to do this, but maybe somebody who's not been on board with this for a while, what have been the 3 or 4 more recent experiences outside of business and maybe outside of psychology that you would recommend other people dive into that were beneficial to you? 

Paul Giannamore: A book that was a quick and easy book, and I thought it was very well done, is called The Art of Clear Thinking: A Stealth Fighter Pilot's Timeless Rules for Making Tough Decisions. The author's name is Hasard Lee. He was just a great storyteller and he did a great job of weaving together interesting insight and solving complex. One of my main areas that I tend to focus on is decision-making under uncertainty. This is with all the cognitive biases and the heuristics involved in all of this. This is one of my personal areas of interest. 

I'm interested in decision-making under uncertainty, particularly within the realm of M&A. This was a great book in my opinion. This is one that I like. I read this on the plane on the way home. Fat Pat was on that plane and I didn't sleep a wink. I saw him over there with a donut around his neck and sitting close to the Mexican. I'm reading another one called Culture Rules: The Leader's Guide to Creating the Ultimate Competitive Advantage written by a fellow who's been at Chick-fil-A for some 40 years. 

I've taken a particular interest in the last year or so with regard to culture and the impact on an organization. First off, how do you define a culture? How do you create it? I like to think about culture from not only an anthropological perspective within society like the Russian culture and path dependence of communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall and all that sort of jazz. Culture defines and impacts the path of a nation but it also does that of an organization. 

A culture will exist whether we create it or not. You can be very active in posing design on culture or you could just do nothing as a business manager and it will exist. It's not necessarily always what you had hoped for. I've struggled over the years with things like values, mission statements, and all these things. I think about something like Ford Motor Company, I don't think Mr. Ford was particularly concerned with mission statements, core values, and all those sorts of things. He built this massive organization. He had a couple of core values. He wanted to create a car that every man can effectively afford. 

Sometimes we go too far on these sorts of things. I started to check myself and I'm like, “Is this a gut reaction to something? Let me not only dip into the popular literature.” If you look on my book over here, I have serious academic books on culture. I've also dipped into a book called The Culture Code. I'm thinking through culture when you have a business that is rapidly scaling. 

What is the role of the founder? What is the role of senior executives? How do they model culture? How do they establish it? How do they impose it? At what point should other team members influence culture? How do we define what's acceptable behavior and what's not? It's funny, I've got the Mexican running around telling everyone he sucks at life. It's funny that a guy like me is exploring culture but that is what I'm doing. A big project for me this 2023 is corporate culture.

Rob Greer: That's awesome. Are you prepping to write a book on it? 

Paul Giannamore: I don't know that I'm prepping to write a book on it per se. I am trying to establish a variety of different hypotheses. I like to use everything that I do as a living laboratory. When we have clients, if I get some sort of a slipshod hairbrained idea about a customer retention metric, I like to figure out, how do we form a hypothesis and then go out and test it? Let's try to prove this. My big goal here is, at the end of November, I will be having a huge meeting with my team and we're going to be focusing on culture. I'm creating some hypotheses that we're going to test within the organization. 

Rob Greer: If more people did that testing aspect, it would be a different game all the way around in every arena. It's easy to trust your gut and trust something that makes sense to you when you've maybe made 2 or 3 connections rather than 200 to cross-pollinate and cross-breed. With your recent dive into culture, how do you define culture for someone? 

Paul Giannamore: This can get pretty complex but I'll try to keep it as simple as I can. From a corporate perspective, because a lot of these folks out here reading are business people, it's a set of behaviors and ways of interacting norms and expectations within an organization. In basic terms, how do we interact with each other? What language do we use? What expectations do we have? What are things that we do not tolerate? It gets a little bit more complicated than that. 

Rob Greer: You've got your overarching cultures, which can be human culture, which has evolved over the years, and you've got country, state, and region. You've got all these cultures within cultures and then the intersection of cultures. If you're looking at any given employee, they could be from a different national background, a different part of the country, they have their family, and they have their education, all these different cultures that you're then meshing into your culture. The complexity of it is as infinite as you want to make it. I also love the struggle of trying to define it in simple terms as well. 

Paul Giannamore: For example, you compare Asian culture with US culture, I'm not even talking about from a business perspective, there are a lot of concepts that are entirely foreign. I watched this whole Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I've spent a tremendous amount of time in the Middle East. I lived for eighteen months in Saudi Arabia. I have a home in Doha and I have one in Egypt. I'm there all the time. I see the West struggling with this because a lot of people don't understand basic cultural notions of what it is that Hamas is even attempting to do there. 

You can watch a K-drama and see how people communicate with each other are different than how we communicate with each other in the West. There's the concept of shame in Asia. Could you imagine talking to any of your technicians about honor and shame that doesn't exist? Within every single discourse I have in a lot of places in Asia, it's all about honor and shame and so on and so forth. It’s understanding these things. 

Rob Greer: Imagine how different some decisions would have been made in World War II if some of those concepts that you mentioned, it's fresh on my mind because of being at Pearl Harbor during PestWorld and seeing that, those different cultural pieces are huge components in how that battle was fought. One of my favorite definitions of culture is how we do what we do. Going back to that war thing, there is a culture of that war and it's this confusion of how we're fighting the way we fight because of these intersecting cultures that is that World War II culture that was occurring. 

Paul Giannamore: A couple other things that I've been perusing lately is I'm reading the Architect of Prosperity, which is the making of Hong Kong, and From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000, which is quite a massive book. How these plays into culture for me is Puerto Rico has established tax incentives and there are folks that say Puerto Rico is going to be the Singapore of the Caribbean. For a lot of reasons, that could potentially be true. It has the same institutions and rule of law as the United States. 

It has a tremendous amount of economic freedom now compared to the United States in a lot of ways, at least on the tax side. There are movements to liberalize things down here. There's a government that talks about, “We should turn this into the Singapore of the Caribbean.” The question is, is it laws and institutions that drive that economic growth or is it the culture? Is it both? What comes first? Does the culture come first? 

Could Gaza Strip become the Singapore or the Mediterranean? Culture has a huge impact on this. You could pretty much, tomorrow, entirely get rid of the tax system. You could get rid of every economic impediment here in Puerto Rico. Next year, this place isn't going to be Hong Kong. What impact does a culture and how do you change that culture and that path dependence? 

I'm enjoying the book From Third World to First, the Singapore experience. The Asian culture is different from the Caribbean culture, which is derived from the Spanish culture. It's different from the Asian culture, whereas here we have a culture of dependency. I would say that the Asian cultures are different. A lot of this has been created by the United States. We're getting way off topic but these are the questions that pop through my mind, Rob, and these are the types of things I attempt to explore. 

Rob Greer: I love it. It's cool. 

Paul Giannamore: What I ultimately want to do with Potomac TV is I'd like to do these interviews with folks in the industry. Where I'm ultimately going to go with this and why I'm going to ask Chris Voss to try to sit down with me when he's down here in Puerto Rico if he has time is I'm going to use The Buzz and Potomac TV to explore topics that are extremely interesting to me from a learning perspective. I do think that there are a lot of business owners out there who would be interested in that stuff as well. 

Rob Greer: You would be a good person to be able to help people make those connections. There's a lot in the industry, especially with some of the advice they've gained over listening to experts like you guys and some of these podcasts that have started to branch out and prepare that intellectual foundation to be able to patch some of these pieces in and have them benefit them. Your experience and you combined with Fat Pat can take those pieces, and learn something yourself. When you do your recap portion at the end of your episodes, you'll be able to help other people that wouldn't necessarily see that connection right off, see where to start to plug that in, or at least know where to dive in a little bit deeper. 

Paul Giannamore: That's what we're hoping to do. 

Rob Greer: That's exciting. 

Paul Giannamore: Rob, it's always great chatting with you. We've known each other for a long time and we just got to meet in person for the first time in Hawaii. I was excited to be able to do that. I only wish I had an opportunity to spend more time with you out there. 

Rob Greer: I was grateful for the time that I had with the both of you. It is such a difference to be in person with someone. Even if it is just the short time that we got together in Hawaii, I feel like it has a major impact on our interactions now where we've had that personal interaction. It changes it. I'm grateful for that. Thanks for spending that time with me and for this opportunity to chat for a bit. 

Paul Giannamore: Rob, we'll look forward to having you back on after this has been published for a while because I'm going to be excited to hear what you learned from this as well as I'll be excited to hear about what it's like to finally be able to meet your co-authors and discuss this.

Rob Greer: I look forward to it. 

Patrick Baldwin: Awesome, Rob. Thanks for joining us. I didn't know that you were going to start interviewing Paul about culture. Thanks for that.  

Paul Giannamore: It was great having you on here, Rob. 

---

Paul Giannamore: It was a great discussion with Rob. We were talking about this at PestWorld, when he first told me empathy in business, I scratched my head. I'm like, “How is this a book?” I probably confused the term empathy and sympathy over the years. I get sympathetic and empathetic, I'm not sure. Maybe I'm both. Maybe I'm neither. I was a little bit confused. Out at PestWorld, I had a drink and he did not, and we got an opportunity to chat about the book and I thought it was interesting. 

It's a complicated book because, as he said, there are a bunch of coauthors who are all writing different things. It's probably more of a compilation of a variety of different short stories and interesting anecdotes from different offers with different writing styles, which will be interesting. I'm going to definitely pick that up. I do have a lot of respect for Rob. He's a deep thinker and he thinks a lot about the business. I like the fact that he thinks about a lot more things other than pest control. 

Patrick Baldwin: I'm always taking things back like thinking about your world of M&A. Sympathy is a word that gets thrown around at all. Thinking about building this team and this branch manager that you're going to have left behind who’s big on empathy. 

Paul Giannamore: Sometimes we tend to cloakly define empathy. We’re using other terminology. It's common to say, “He's a real people person.” What does that mean? Does that mean that he can empathize with the situation that somebody is in an attempt to figure out what that person wants and therefor, he becomes a great leader or a great manager? To be honest with you, I'm not sure when the last time I used the word empathy in a sentence outside of my discussions with Rob. I don't know if I've used it in the year 2023 outside of these discussions. Have you?  

Patrick Baldwin: It's not a word I think a lot. There was an episode, Seth was on it, that we did talk about empathy. I'm wondering if it's Don't Say Sorry? 

Paul Giannamore: I don't think I was on that one. As you know, I do not listen to these after they get recorded. I probably should. Maybe I would learn something. 

Patrick Baldwin: No. There are secrets back there.  

Paul Giannamore: When I was in PestWorld, somebody said, “Your voice is far deeper in real life.” He listens to The Buzz at 2.5x. 

Patrick Baldwin: What about the negotiating side? Did you leverage empathy in that? 

Paul Giannamore: We've talked about this. There is a different aspect between what Chris Voss says in his treaties versus what we do. Hostage negotiations are different than selling a financial asset. I do remember him talking about building a rapport. I remember him talking about mirroring. I remember him talking about the word fine. 

Patrick Baldwin: That's right. You're right. 

Paul Giannamore: I remember him bringing all those sorts of things up that I don't concern myself with those sorts of things. He and I have exact different opinions on the uses of deadlines. I believe a deadline that affects one party and that does not affect the other party provides some asymmetry and negotiations, which can be extremely effective. 

He thinks that they're counterproductive and, in fact, can be potentially dangerous. I can understand that in the terms of a hostage negotiation. In a hostage negotiation, you're trying to have a hostage released. You're not effectively trying to buy the hostage’s release. You have to do it through different mechanisms than you do when you're selling an asset. Different negotiations, depending upon what you're negotiating, can be different. When I read it, there were certain things that I did agree with but for the most part, it was different.  

Patrick Baldwin: I understand different types of negotiating in either way. If you crossed over, there could be some catastrophe. 

Paul Giannamore: When you think about the negotiation of a transaction, some of the same characteristics of a hostage negotiation makes sense when you're thinking about selling an asset become somewhat of a sales process. You’re selling, so to speak, if you’re on the sell-sed. Some of those skill overlap. 

When you’re selling an asset and3 there’s one unique asset and you have 20, 30, 5, 10, or what have you potential buyers, it’s just a different process. When you think about leverage, you think about competition, and you think about all of the levers within a financial transaction that provide leverage, they don’t often exist in hostage negotiations. If I used Chris Voss's methodology, I would be doing myself and the clients a disservice. If he used our methodology, he would probably end up killing a lot of people. 

Patrick Baldwin: Do you know what's funny as you're talking through all this? You have empathy with your clients because there are all sorts of complexities, partnerships, families, and making sure everything goes into place with their best interest in mind. Saying all that, I don't see the selfishness again because I see you putting them first. 

Paul Giannamore: One of the core overarching aspects of our business and one thing that Bernard Baruch said a long time ago, a reporter asked him how he's been phenomenally successful, and he said, “I find out what people want and I showed them how to get it.” At the end of the day, there requires some empathy for that because you have to understand what people want. 

In my line of business, there's what comes out on the surface, number one, what they believe they should want, and then when you dig deeper, that's what they want. Sometimes those are in conflict and more times than I would like they're in conflict. To understand what people want and then show them how to get it is the core of the business. 

Patrick Baldwin: Is there a methodology that you use to get from what they think they want to what they want? 

Paul Giannamore: I ask a lot of questions. The Mexican always cringes as well as some of the folks on my team because they say I am silent too much, meaning I'll ask a question and then I will sit there until somebody answers it. The Mexican likes to fill the air so that makes him uncomfortable. I do think one of the skillsets that I've attempted to work on over the course of my life is becoming an active listener in high-stakes situations, which is what I deal with all day. 

That's not something I was born with whatsoever. It has been a very painful process for me. When I used to go to meetings, I used to talk a lot when I was younger. Now, when I'm at meetings, I've rarely said more than a few sentences because I can gain far more by actively listening to other folks than hearing myself talk. Quite frankly, I just talk on The Buzz and that's it. 

Patrick Baldwin: I love to listen, that's how I learn. 

Paul Giannamore: It's a great way to do it. 

Patrick Baldwin: Rob, we wish you the best of luck with the book. Paul, you said it, he's coming back once his book is out and has learned some lessons. 

Paul Giannamore: We'll certainly get Rob back on it. You're down in Tampa. How's that going down there? 

Patrick Baldwin: It's great. We're shooting content for Pest Daily. I'm here with Cameron. He's on the other side of this wall in the studio going through some accounting and finance courses that are going to be phenomenal. We’re doing some more. We've got a lot of work cut out for us in FRAXN. A lot of things are coming. We're going to be putting our heads together with Seth, Cameron, and the team. We're at over sixteen employees. It's taking off.  

Paul Giannamore: I will say that, while you're down there with Seth, he invited me to speak at his conference coming up in the spring. 

Patrick Baldwin: February 1st and 2nd 2024 here in Tampa. That'll be fun. This will be exciting. We got Energy coming. 

Paul Giannamore: All right, Fat Pat, enjoy yourself down there. We'll catch up soon enough. Have fun on your travels. 

Patrick Baldwin: Awesome. 

---

Dylan Seals: Thank you so much as always for supporting us at The Boardroom Buzz. We know your time is valuable and the fact that you spend 45 minutes or an hour with us means the world. All the media that we put out from Potomac is meant to honor and celebrate you, the service industry owner. As Paul would say, “Yee who toil in the pest control vineyards.”

As part of giving back, we have this podcast, but more than that, Paul and I have been working our tails off over at POTOMAC TV. We've spent a tremendous amount of time, energy, and resources to build out that platform to bring you market updates, to bring you visual breakdowns of the merger acquisition process, and to tell stories and present information in ways that, frankly, it's not possible for us to do on The Boardroom Buzz.

Adding the visual element takes it to the next level. I want to invite you to go to YouTube and find us, it's POTOMAC TV. Potomac.tv will get you there. Go there and subscribe. Check out some videos and leave some comments. Let us know what you like and let us know what you don't like. Let us know what you want to see more of and we'll see you over there.

Never Split the Difference

Fifty Shades of Gray and McKay

Rove

Thinking in Bets 

How Emotions Are Made

The Go-Giver

Behave

Think Again 

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

Powerful

The Art of Clear Thinking: A Stealth Fighter Pilot's Timeless Rules for Making Tough Decisions

Culture Rules: The Leader's Guide to Creating the Ultimate Competitive Advantage

The Culture Code

Architect of Prosperity

From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000

Don't Say Sorry? 

Potomac.tv