Travis Klassen 0:00
Travis,

welcome to the value Creators Podcast, the exclusive Insider PodCast for the Klassen group. This is where we talk about how we create value, how we work lead and grow together and real stories from across the Klassen tree. I'm your host, Travis Klassen, whether you're in a machine at a desk or on the move, we're glad to have you on the Klassen crew.

In our last episode, we introduced the idea of value creation, why it matters and how it shows up at Klassen. But strategy alone doesn't build great companies. What really shapes a business is how people behave day in and day out. It's about how we treat each other, how we build trust, how we take ownership, grow through feedback, and show up for the team when it counts. This four part series is about the principles that guide those behaviors, the ones that hold us together when things are moving fast, and the ones that help us build something that lasts. Today, I'm sitting down with our CEO, John Mark Ferguson, as we take a deeper look into what we call the Klassen code,

John-Mark 1:06
we had this idea. Friend of ours, a colleague of ours, a good business partner of ours, has a van at our New Westminster office, and it's a Westphalia van. And so a van down by the river is where we're actually recording this.

Travis Klassen 1:21
There's a good SNL skit like that. You're gonna live down in a van down by the river. Here we are. We've come this far.

John-Mark 1:29
We even have things to block the sound and make this a perfect recording space for you our listeners. So hope you enjoy this. I wish you could see these silver, insulated paneling on all the walls. We don't know what other people are thinking outside of the van looking

Travis Klassen 1:44
at us. We definitely should film these podcasts, because it looks like the Klassen group has gone slightly sideways. But things are good, all right. So seriously today we're talking about the code, the Klassen code, something that's a work in progress. What made us realize that we need to sort of name and define behaviors that we wanted to protect? I mean, I know historically here at the company, we have had some values defined. They hang in the boardroom wall, classic, most people's most companies values hang in the wall, and that's, that's where they are. And then we added some sentences, you know, historically. And now we've taken all of the things that we've kind of created over time, and then some new ones have come. They've evolved once or twice already, and now we've, we've narrowed them down to to four. So what would, in your sense? John Mark, what is it that that caused this to still be a thing? These values,

John-Mark 2:46
I think the specific, specificity of where we've landed today is, is kind of what we were intending. I think when we started, the values on the walls are wonderful. These, I would say that all those values that were carved in the wood are in these four and this is just an evolution of that with higher specificity of what we're looking like. We are looking to emulate these values, and I think it was helpful to continue to evolve and refine them to where they are today.

Travis Klassen 3:19
Yeah, and yeah, you mentioned in our boardroom there, they're carved in wood. We've had them, I don't know. Maybe those are up there since 2014 2015 and I know that you and a few people took lots of those, integrated them into this new set of values. And I mean, okay, second question then, why is it important to be intentional about culture specifically now, as we're scaling,

John-Mark 3:45
yeah, so when you're when you're scaling a business, you really have to get your your culture right. And you everybody has a culture, even if you don't have something written on the wall, you have a culture. And culture is all about how you act and how you function. And we're trying to own the story, take ownership and responsibility for this, not let it be whatever it is, and trying to refine it to be what we want it to be in the future. This is aspirational. We have many we're not perfect at all. When we look at this, we look at this, and there's a lot of places where we are, we have gaps and we're missing the mark, and we will continue to get better.

Travis Klassen 4:26
Yeah. I mean, you're right. Culture is culture, whether it's good or bad, it just is. I read a quote the other day that said your culture is how your people feel on Sunday night, right before you go to work, you know, is it something you're looking forward to, or is it something you dread and something you dread? And I mean, you and I both don't want to work somewhere we would dread totally showing up.

John-Mark 4:48
That's like, Ben. Ben told me he's like, these weekends are getting in the way of working. No, no, the weekends are really important. Like, I like playing, so, yes, yeah, giving the weekend, and I'm thrilled to get back to work.

Travis Klassen 5:00
Yeah. I mean, I think that's in one of our, one of our four Ps, if you can't find a way to create value, then then go and play exactly, I mean. And even though you could find a way to create value on the weekends, we need people that can come back fresh. And I think

John-Mark 5:11
you actually do a better job if you take time off in the weekends. Anyways, here my but that'll for a different podcast later. That's

Travis Klassen 5:17
right, we'll do a whole thing on that. That's awesome. So our first value is, and hang on, before I jump into the values, we talk a little bit about the structure of our company, and the values effectively become the foundation, right? And so maybe speak a little bit more on like, what we're how we envision the structural, sort of cultural foundation, or structure for the business.

John-Mark 5:39
Yeah, I guess we have the, we see the code is the foundation on top of what everything else is built. Then we have the four Ps. We have these four pillars. And then we have the kind of the value creation roof, if you could imagine, with a customer, is kind of as a keystone, holding the whole thing together. And so this is the image that we want to convey to people. But it all starts with this, the foundation. You can't, you can't build a very strong, enduring structure with not a strong foundation. So the code is, we're really excited about refining and recruiting and training in this new this new direction.

Travis Klassen 6:15
Okay, so you're saying that, that the culture, which is, is so, so important, because it becomes the foundation, and the whole thing either stands or falls based on Exactly, yeah, that culture. All right. What do you think? Should I read one of these values and we chat about it? Yeah, I think that'd be great. Okay, so the first value is we value people, and we respect and value every human, and I'll just read our description here. A little bit more color to what that value means. We treat others the way we'd want to be treated, and aspire to help each team member become a top performer. We make decisions with a team in mind. Act with selflessness and assume good intentions. We eliminate drama, avoid blame, and pursue solutions together, we work safely, supportively and for the good of the team. So aspirational, yes, absolutely. What do you think that looks like here at Klassen?

John-Mark 7:18
Think, if you think about it, we have a, we have a team of, say, about around 200 people today. It's everywhere from running into a colleague making cup of coffee. It's helping someone else, someone else fix something on the side of a road. Mechanic comes out to meet you somewhere, right? But then it's also how they were. Like, we want to be held accountable to this. We also are saying these things so that when we don't do them, we want people to say, Hey, you're you're not doing the the code, the Klassen code, Hey, you said you trained me. And I haven't been trained. I've been sent to some mill, and I've never, I've never been shown how to do it. I'm doing it for my first time, flying blind, right? We don't want that, and we have done that in the past, and we, we're striving to get better.

Travis Klassen 8:12
Yeah, that's a, that's a great point. You wouldn't want to if you were that driver to be sent somewhere with you'd feel in inadequately trained or ill equipped, right? And nobody wants to show up and have that stress and angst about, where am I supposed to be so, so really, what you're saying then is to value people, is to invest in the structure, the the support for those people. Yeah, so to be accountable to this, and I think we'll talk about each value fairly in depth here. I mean, I scan through this now and and we'll, we'll include the the values in the show notes of the podcast, so you can kind of go back and read the whole thing while we're talking about it. But one of the lines is, we eliminate drama, which I get to say, I put that one in there, mostly as a personal thing, because, as a younger man, now that I'm going to be a grandpa, I can say that, okay, a lot of congratulations, by the way, that's coming up. But as a younger man, I had a lot of angst about this business. I mean, we've been in this for a long time, and, and I used to, you know, experience a little bit of like FOMO, like fear of missing out. As our team has grown, we have this large support team and an even larger leadership team, and then managers everywhere. You can't know everything anymore. So so much of valuing people and respecting and value every human means to trust each other and to look across the table at your at your your business partners and your team and say, I I have to believe that you have the same set of values that we're sharing.

John-Mark 9:55
Yeah, I think that's incredibly important. It just you. The speed. You can do things faster when you trust somebody right, and if everyone is aligned and has the same values, you don't, you don't have to spend any time worrying about what they're doing, what they're thinking. They have your back. Even like, there's no like, we will all like, I will make. I've made more mistakes than most people and but like the team, the team doesn't parade me for that. They say, hey, like, how can we, what can we learn from it, and how can we do it better next time? And that's the part of that's the culture I would like to be a part of, and I'd be proud to continue to build. So

Travis Klassen 10:37
that's, that's awesome. But you just said something that got my attention. If someone was to call you out, what's the way? What's the Klassen code? Way to say, Hey, man, you're you're not following our code. What do you expect?

John-Mark 10:50
Yeah, like that should be met with excitement and joy that someone is willing to take to have courage to say, Hey, you're not, you're not aligning with the thing we said we were supposed to align to. And I think we should be met with EX that should be met with excitement. And you want to own it right. You own it, you take it and you try to changing yourself is probably one of the hardest things you can do. And this is this incredible feedback loop of how we can incrementally improve ourselves and become those top performers we all ought to be.

Travis Klassen 11:27
You said, excitement and courage to be called out on something with excitement and courage. I mean, as the receiver of that feedback that gave me goose bumps, because that's an exciting culture to be a part of, if it's like if you come up to me and say, Hey, Travis, you're doing good, and some, some of these areas. I mean, I always, I'm always a big advocate of finding the positive the negative. But also, there's this one thing that it's not aligning with the code to be in that place. I can, I can meet you there. I mean, yeah, I would like to be call me out, call me say that something needs to be better, because we're going to all grow if we have a culture like that. Yeah, totally.

John-Mark 12:00
And I think, I think the Klassen throughout generations were sometimes really good at providing feedback, like my father in law gives critiques out of a very much a place of love, like he he's doing it so that everyone can be better. And not everyone sees it that way. But when you talk to him, he's he's like, I'm only telling you this because I actually care so much and we can all get better. And I said, Yeah, I thank you so much. I always try to ask my father in law, is Dennis Klassen generation two member, and yeah, but he's he just, he gives these critiques, and it generally, it's really good. And you're like, Yeah, I have to own that. I did. I didn't do that thing I said I was gonna do when I when I wanted to. I'm so sorry they didn't let you know, and I will, I'll do better next time, for example. And it's just, it's, it's really good, and that's the culture you want, right? Sometimes people take offense to feedback, and that offense can be so crippling for the person who is getting offended, right? Like, if we're in a culture where everyone is excited to give and take feedback, it is, it is an amazing place to work, and we can all really thrive.

Travis Klassen 13:09
Yeah, I mean, again, speaking to my age, at 42 I'm the age uncle Dennis was when I first came to the business, and he was my boss, and I did not understand it back then, because it it just, you just don't understand how invested people can be. After several generations, several several decades of work, and now I look back and like, man, he must have really cared about the way I sweep this yard.

John-Mark 13:34
Oh, yeah, totally. And he does. And he also has a very high standard, which is also very good, but some kind can be challenging for someone like myself, who is is okay with a little bit more mess than he would be okay with. For example, yeah. But again, I didn't. I did not spend three hours sweeping the yard. I spent an hour and a half and I thought it was 95% done. It wasn't perfect. It was good, right? I can do it better. I can sweep the yard

Travis Klassen 13:59
absolutely granted. I think at the time, I made $2.50 an hour. So I think it was a you can do it again. It's not gonna cost. I believe Kim only made $1 Oh, well, she's female. Yeah, that's a whole other thing, but it evolved a long way. The

Unknown Speaker 14:13
record show

Travis Klassen 14:15
exactly. We will probably break this series up into several conversations, one on each value, but because you just mentioned and in our next value, we talk about giving and receiving feedback, but just as to sort of stay in this people one we value, people, looking at how we make decisions, acting with selflessness, assuming good intentions like each of these, I'm sure we could all be called out on them. So how do you think that open feedback loop exists today for somebody listening to this podcast saying, I want to talk to talk to some people about two ways we could improve?

John-Mark 14:56
Yeah, and I don't. I think hopefully this podcast. JS will encourage people to have courage, to continue to say things. If the team doesn't hear about things, it's hard to make changes, and there are 1000s of things to be working on, but just even even our like, we want our systems, our software solutions, our processes to actually be people centric. And sometimes I think they're not. They're there to serve other parts of the business, or just the system itself, for example. And if there's this, Hey, I'm doing this, this task, this rote task, over and over again, we should put your hand, you should put your hand up and say, Hey, I think this could be automated, and I could do better things with my time, right? We want to hear that feedback, and especially as we're just, yeah, we're always trying to improve it. But so we want, from the systems point of view, we really want to be people centric. We want to celebrate wins. We want to celebrate people. We have a lot of people that have long tenure with the company that's actually so so cool, and generally, there will be a survey going out soon, but we're excited to hear the results of that feedback. Would people want their friends to work here? So we're going out there, seeing what you say and looking to improve it in the future, but we'll see what you guys have to say. So

Travis Klassen 16:19
that's really good, and we want to get even better at that in formal and informal ways. Hearing from all of us at Klassen, yeah, there's so much value in the people that have been here that have just they're just new to the company, because they're coming in with new perspective, and people who have been here for a while, who can kind of see how things have evolved and

John-Mark 16:38
shifted. And there's some people in the company that run we've done events for people. We've gone to hockey games, had barbecues, had dinners, just like we are trying to really value humans, human interactions, where we are assembly of people working together. And so wherever we can, we try to live that in the company. So you

Travis Klassen 17:04
Travis, that's it for this episode of the value Creators Podcast. If this is your first time tuning in, make sure to check out previous episodes. Each one offers a unique look at how we create value together, one conversation at a time. On behalf of the support team, I'm Travis Klassen. Thanks for listening. We'll talk soon.