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The Trust Equation with Andrew Jackson: How to Build Stronger Business Relationships
00:57:17
What makes people trust you in business—and what breaks that trust without you even realizing it? In this episode of Build Your Business, Matt and Chris Reynolds sit down with Andrew Jackson, COO of TurnKey Coach, to unpack The Trust Equation, a...
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- [00:02]
Matt Reynolds
You're listening to the Build you'd business podcast, powered by Turnkey Coach, where we help business owners find freedom over fear. I'm Matt Reynolds and I'm his brother, Chris Reynolds.
- [00:12]
Chris Reynolds
Join us as we help build your business and move from fear to freedom together. You're listening to the Build you'd business podcast where we take you from fear to freedom. I am your co host, Matt Reynolds. I'm here with my little brother, Chris. Welcome, sir.
- [00:36]
Matt Reynolds
What's up?
- [00:37]
Chris Reynolds
We've got about 20 years of business experience between the two of us, or actually each. So 40 years between the two of us. And we are excited. We don't do a lot of interviews, but we're excited to bring on a special guest today, Andrew Jackson, my COO, somebody that I have worked with for probably 15 years at this point. God, we're getting old.
- [00:57]
Andrew Jackson
Yeah, I met you almost exactly 15 years ago.
- [01:00]
Chris Reynolds
I forget that he's slightly older than me. I always feel like I'm the grandpa in the business. So this is my. My COO and my product manager for Turnkey Coach, and he has. He has really refined a process that he calls the trust equation over the last several years. I think originally you presented it to the staff at Barbelogic several years ago at our Barbelogic kind of yearly conference. But we've since put out a few podcasts on this and on the Marvel Logic podcast, Beast Overburden, things like that. But I'd like to dive in because I think it's imperative for our listeners to understand this. And so, first off, welcome to the show. Glad you're here.
- [01:40]
Andrew Jackson
Thank you. Honored to be here.
- [01:42]
Chris Reynolds
It's your first time. It's kind of funny. We've done tons of podcasts together. I've just never had you on this podcast. So. Andrew and I talk every single day. Chris and Andrew talk all the time. I'm very grateful to Andrew for leading the dev team. As most of you know, I can't write a line of code. Chris has been a great mentor to both Andrew on the tech side and certainly me on the 30,000 foot CEO founder side. And so grateful for both of these guys and excited to do this podcast today. And so we'll dive in as we.
- [02:13]
Andrew Jackson
On the verge of submitting my first PR, 25 years after getting my computer engineering and computer science degree.
- [02:21]
Chris Reynolds
PR in what?
- [02:24]
Matt Reynolds
That is so good. PR in this sense, by the way, does not mean personal record. It means pull request, which is where you make a code change to your repository.
- [02:34]
Andrew Jackson
Yep, yep, I got my Local development set up last week. Ben and I had to hash that out. So I've got VS code set up and starting to tweak prompts for the AI coach.
- [02:49]
Chris Reynolds
Nice.
- [02:49]
Andrew Jackson
So it's, it's still not really code, but it's going to be a pr.
- [02:56]
Chris Reynolds
Chris told me to read a book probably, I don't know, six, seven, eight years ago, early in the business and it was called the Rebel Allocator. Highly recommended book. Won't go into a full book review here, but it's sort of a. It's a fictional story based in historical accuracy of Warren Buffett. Sort of Warren Buffett's idea of the value equation. A lot of people probably heard that term, the value equation. Hormozi talks about it all the time. He's a big fan of Buffett and Munger. And you've got this value equation of price, cost and value or cost, price and value. The value comes between what two straws in that book.
- [03:35]
Andrew Jackson
Value is on the far right, then you have price in the middle and then you have cost on the left.
- [03:41]
Chris Reynolds
So the difference between cost of the company versus price.
- [03:43]
Andrew Jackson
Right, the difference between value and price often referred to as either brand value or goodwill. And what we can talk more about is I added this trust equation into how you can build value essentially. And then the difference between price and cost is going to be your profit, obviously. That's right.
- [04:04]
Chris Reynolds
So the cost is the cost of the business. The price is the price that the consumer pays. The value is the. If they're paying $200 a month, they get $300 a month worth of value. And so what this really is a discussion about is how to bring more value to your clients, whether that's B2C or B2B. We've had some back channel communication there. We think it applies tremendously to both certainly B2C and for 95 plus percent of B2B, I think it applies as well. And so you really dove into how to provide more value to your clients without necessarily a tremendous addition of work to the company or to the founder or to the employee to the staff. And so I'm excited to dive into that, like how do we build value? And that really is what kind of created this trust equation. Let's take a pause really quick and let's do a quick background on your corporate experience because you come out of aerospace engineering and lean manufacturing and things that probably most people wouldn't associate with strength coaching. But I think you've applied it. I know you've applied it incredibly well, and probably we may be the only company that's done this. It's applied lean manufacturing techniques and skills that you learned in your previous career to what we do at Barbell Logic as coaches. There's tremendous carryover, but even if you aren't a coach, I think there's tremendous carryover here for the relationship building aspect, human connection, trust, the things that AI cannot ever do, AI can supplement those things, but it can't ever actually build trust between two humans. And so why don't you take a few minutes and just give us a little bit of background on your previous career and kind of how you got here.
- [05:51]
Andrew Jackson
Yeah, the thread of my professional experience is essentially leadership in highly technical, high intensity, high competitive environments that started initially in the Navy and specifically as a nuclear engineering officer in the Navy. So I was required to know the level of the same level of detail of all the specialists that are operating the nuclear reactor. The chemistry, the mechanics, how the the reactor power is managed. Still having to go through an engineering level of detail and leading teams within that type of environment to perform under in many cases high pressure situations. You know, most of the time we were intentionally essentially voluntary hardship where you run drills all the time because it's pretty rare that the reactor actually goes into some sort of actual problem state. So you have to voluntarily submit yourself to pretending like you had some sort of, some sort of damage to the plant. So after the Navy, six years in the Navy went into high reliability electronics. So a lot of aerospace, military and medical implantable device where similarly I was in leadership position managing factories essentially where you know, you've got everything from operations to engineering to supply chain to quality management, delivering products that have a very high standard of value and quality. Because some of the electronics we were literally implanting into people's heads, the cochlear ear implant or they were going on the Mars rover or the Hubble spacecraft where it's a one way mission. And so these things have to be built correctly and they have to last forever essentially in an environment where they're being irradiated in space often or in really high temperature commercial applications that progressed into increasing levels of experience where I was managing teams multi site international and finished at an aerospace company where I was building the nacelle for the 787. So the nacelle is the nose that bolts onto the front of the engine and directs the airflow into the engine. Again, very high reliability basically has to be built perfectly with multiple levels of engineering safety built into, into the product and along the Way as I had supply chain roles, product management roles, but generally speaking, leading technical organizations in high pressure environments where value has to be high. And what was going on during that era that I was there in aerospace and military was a lot of the tools that were developed and applied to US manufacturing in the 80s and 90s in the automotive industry were being brought into the aerospace and electronics industry throughout the 2000s. So basically after the 2001 crash, the Aerospace industry went through this existential crisis where they had to figure out how to get cost controls in place while still delivering high value. Which is why I got my experience in using versions of the Toyota production system. It all kind of traces back to the Toyota production system, which interestingly side note, a lot of the concepts did come from Japan and the Toyota company, but many of them were also US engineers, industrial engineers that went over to Japan post World War II and kind of helped them rebuild the their industrial systems. So Deming is one of the more popular guys there. But with respect to what we're talking about today and the trust equation that came from a leadership workshop, I guess you'd call it, that I got sent to as part of what is now Raytheon. Four or five acquisitions later, it's now all rolled up under Raytheon. But they had a facilitator come in and was talking about different strategies and techniques and things that you can take that intent, ideally you could take back to your teams. And one of the lines that for whatever reason I was just in the place to hear it was this quote which she attributed to Colin Powell. I have never been able to actually find this quote. I've looked many times. So if somebody out there can find it, I look love to see it or hear it. But he, according to her, said the foundation of all relationships is trust. And to. And the assignment essentially out of the workshop was to start paying attention to trust, to start paying attention to it. No definition, just like, pay attention. And interestingly, she. I had lunch with her during that conference and we got talking about strength coaching. And that was sort of like my passion project at the time, the side hustle. And she put her fork down in the middle of this lunch at one point was like, well, how come you're not doing that full time? About two years later, that's what I was doing full time. But so she, she was insightful and left an impact. And I went back home after that and just started going down this rabbit hole. This is like 10 years ago now. Like, what is trust? What's going on I started paying attention to it. We would do these morning walkthroughs every, every hour at the factory. And I would basically be leading these as the general manager. People are reporting to me their performance. And you know, when you have that kind of tight tolerance in your manufacturing, your operations, basically the system is designed to show you problems constantly. It can be really depressing if, if you don't have good leadership or a good trust based team because you're intentionally finding down to the second, if you're off schedule. Like we would literally have this progress bar for every single operator on the floor and we would check in with them every single hour to see where they were in their standard work. And if they were off by more than 15, 20 seconds, something was wrong that we needed to go solve. And you're doing that every day, every hour.
- [12:21]
Matt Reynolds
Such a wild environment by comparison to what you see in most software shops, right? It's like the, you just don't see that level of check in. And part of it I suppose is also the how critical the systems were that you were building.
- [12:33]
Andrew Jackson
So that, and you know, it's highly repetitive. You know, it's the same product every single time. It's the same rivet you're shooting, it's the same hole you're drilling over and over and over again. There's tiny little variations here and there, but the repeatability is why you're able to do that and have that expectation. The same principles you can take into an engineering environment. But there's all kinds of. I mean, we could spend a lot of time talking about what can and can't apply. But what was relevant to this conversation is I noticed that the team didn't trust me. I couldn't tell why, but I could feel it. And that was kind of her coaching at the time was just like, see if you can feel it, if you notice it. She was kind of thinking of it as this intuitive thing, this kind of. I don't know if hippie's the right word, but it was just like, pay attention, see if you feel it, man. And my engineering brain can't handle that. I'm just like, okay, what the hell is this? Sure, I have to understand this time.
- [13:30]
Matt Reynolds
To break it down.
- [13:31]
Andrew Jackson
So I just went down this rabbit hole of trying to find everything I could on trust, reading articles, studies. Funny enough, I ended up stumbling across this TED Talk where a guy was talking about this equation of trust. And I, generally speaking, have gotten pretty burned out on TED talks. But this one stood out to me because there was A published paper behind it. He was one of the authors, James Davis. And so I went and pulled the actual study, which was from the 90s, and read the paper and what I liked about the paper was that it was a meta analysis of all of the studies done on trust up until that point. I think the paper was 98 or something like that. Basically they did this sort of keyword analysis of all the things that came up in all these different papers and they distilled it down into a very concrete definition, first of trust, which my brain was just like, oh, thank God. Okay, we have a definition which is in their paper based again on all the studies that they could find on trust. The willingness and it's an action which I like. It was the willingness and the choice to be vulnerable with another. In the absence of being able to monitor whether they're actually going to do what they say they're going to do. It's good.
- [14:59]
Matt Reynolds
Yeah, that's pretty much spot on and.
- [15:01]
Andrew Jackson
That it's outside the scope of this. But there's also some component that they found that the choice is influenced by a propensity to trust. Like some people are more willing or able to trust than others, but that there are three common factors that go into this decision, conscious or subconscious. That is the perceived ability of the trustee to do what they say they're going to do, the perceived integrity of the trustee, will they do what they say they're going to do, and perceived benevolence of the trustee, do they care? And that those perceptions are context dependent. So for example, I don't trust you, Matt, to be my skydive instructor.
- [15:48]
Chris Reynolds
Probably good idea.
- [15:50]
Andrew Jackson
But I trust you to be the CEO of our company. So what I really liked about it was again a concrete definition that made sense. That was based on a study of a broad set of data which again, you can go find lots of different definitions of what people think is trust. And I, you know, I read the Speed of Trust by Stephen Covey, not the OG but the sun. And you can find those three elements in all of these different definitions of trust. That that was one of the things that I liked about it is it felt universal and kind of like a base truth. It helped me understand that it was a subjective perception of the other person, not necessarily actually who I am, and that it was a recursive process. So thing happens, the trustor chooses to trust the trustee or not, an outcome occurs and the cycle repeats. So that also was really powerful for me because up until that point I had always kind of Thought of trust as being this like binary on off switch. But I started to see it from that framework as more of a cumulative line that sums those three perceptions.
- [17:07]
Chris Reynolds
Ability, integrity and benevolence make up ultimately the level of trust that someone has.
- [17:14]
Andrew Jackson
With someone else and that it can go kind of up and down over time. They talk about it in the paper and in the TED talk that you can either be building, cashing in on or eroding trust. So you know your actions day to day or whatever experience to experience will be doing one of those three things. And so it gave me sort of a again from my engineering brain the sort of aha moment I had sitting on my couch at 2 in the morning in my underwear just like you know, racking my brain trying to figure this out was like, then I started wondering like well I wonder why am I experiencing. People aren't don't trust me, like why do I have that feeling? And I'm just like, I feel like I'm doing all the things. And there was this moment and literally at 2 o' clock in the morning I just not able to sleep and it was that I don't trust myself. So the, the interesting thing that I've found is that yes there are things you can do to hold yourself accountable to somebody else. You know, if you say you're going to do something, pretty good idea to do the thing, you know, build your skill set because people will see that. But there is something I think again maybe this sounds hippie, but I think we can pick up on whether somebody else has that trust themselves. What you do behind closed doors, you might think you're nobody knows. I think people can pick up on it. And I think if you can invest in building trust with yourself first it will build on, it will expand out into the people around you, which is also something from the speed of trust. Steve McColvey, he talks about that as well.
- [19:02]
Matt Reynolds
There's so many good things that come out of that. Right off my brain starts thinking about the part of that I think is perceived by others is the ability part. So like when you think about hyper charismatic people can get to trust a little faster if their integrity and benevolence seem particularly high. And there's a couple of, of probably tricks for that being the case or even I would just say like maybe the way people naturally are. There's weird stuff about like I've read articles before about how integrity and benevolence can almost be read through someone's facial features and eyes and stuff. You have nothing you can't change that stuff. Right. Like you're born with. But when it comes to ability, think about the value of trust is at the center of sales, for sure. Like, that's a. So just for our audience thinking about, like, founders and what they're doing, there's this whole thing where no one buys from somebody else that they don't trust, but they just don't. The more you project your own ability to understand what's going on in their world or the thing that you're trying to solve or whatever, the. That definitely has a big influence on how long it takes to establish trust. But the other part of it is, and I've been doing this for many, many years, it takes time to develop trust. It's the whole thing you were saying before. Right. It's not, it's not a binary switch. You're doing this stuff over and over again. This works for your relationship with customers for sales. This also works with your relationship for employees and your ability as a founder to trust them to do stuff that you need them to do. It takes time to develop that from a sales perspective when you're going down that path. It's why you want to start by providing value first and not asking for value in return. Because what you're looking to get from them is not initially dollars, it's trust. That trust turns into dollars over time.
- [21:02]
Chris Reynolds
Right.
- [21:03]
Matt Reynolds
But you have to be willing to lay out the value first, and then they lay out the value over time. You're paying essentially a compounding fee to be able to get to that, that point where those dollars compound. And now we're going to get more and more and more because we've developed trust. But it's so, so good. I, I could take these ideas and apply it to almost every aspect of business. It feels like the trust is so critical to every aspect of, of business. I think it's just.
- [21:30]
Chris Reynolds
Well, and we've said it's excellent. People don't put their trust in brands. They put their trust in people. They put their trust in founders. They put their, you know, and so the, the reality is, is that you can build a reputation of having the ability to get people to their goal or, or to achieve what they want to achieve. And that might be the reason they reach out to you. But the integrity and benevolence piece, like, do, like, will you do the same? The things you say you're going to do and do you actually care? They have to experience that in real time, over a period of time to begin to build trust. And just Andrew, like you said, some people are more willing to extend trust earlier. Some are kind of guarded and they have the walls up. And so really quick, before we dive deeper into the trust equation, I think for people that are listening, I would love to understand the bridge of how one, when people think of things like big aerospace engineering, like companies like a Raytheon or a Boeing or whatever, the first thing they go to is probably not trust outside of safety. So I don't like Boeing obviously has lost some trust over the last several years because of problems with the planes and crashes and things like that. But outside of safety, the benevolence piece is not really there. In lean manufacturing, aerospace engineering, we were talking about places like finance or military contracts, which is what these companies do. A lot of how did you understand that trust is still very important in that world? And the flip side of that question is how then did you take the learnings of lean manufacturing from that world and take it into the service world of when you did make the change to strength coaching to actually working with end user clients? Because those I think for listeners are going to be like, I can see why trust is important for a strength coach, but I don't see how lean manufacturing is important for a strength coach. I can see how lean manufacturing is important for aerospace engineering, but I don't really understand how personal relationship and trust, like, yes, I trust that the thing isn't going to crash, but outside of that, that's not inherently in us to trust other people as part of these giant multinational corporations. So how did you make that connection both ways?
- [23:38]
Andrew Jackson
I would honestly say that was a huge blind spot and lack of understanding that I had that this going down this rabbit hole helped me with because my brain and the things that I valued placed very little on benevolence or care. I was again kind of engineering and very military and manufacturing was just like very deliver results, do what you're going to do, do what you say you're going to do. Very high ability and high integrity. But in business everything comes down to a relationship. And that took me, that took me so long to figure out, like, why would some people do the thing that was very clearly what we said we were going to do and we all were all aligned on the mission and we all had the ability to do it. And these are very high integrity people. But sometimes things were just really easy to get done and sometimes they weren't. And I think a lot of them came down to unhealthy relationships.
- [24:39]
Chris Reynolds
Sure.
- [24:40]
Andrew Jackson
And relationships that had a lot of trust. And generally the care piece was in there. That doesn't mean we're walking around giving each other hugs and you know, oh man, I love you all the time, but it's like, do you care about the work? Do you care about me as a human, as an individual? That I think was a huge factor in that world. And again, not because I made the connection, it was really thinking about it from this framework. I was like, man, I really need to start paying attention to that. And it helped me recognize why so many projects that we worked on in manufacturing failed, honestly, because especially when trying to apply lean manufacturing, these are really great tools on paper. But then when you get down to it, you know, people like to think that electronics manufacturing, aerospace manufacturing is this like bunch of robots and it lights out factory making things perfectly with software, you know, perfect. It's, it's so many people literally turning the screwdriver, drilling the hole, you know, smashing the rivet.
- [25:46]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah.
- [25:46]
Andrew Jackson
You know, doing the quality inspection. It's people still doing the work. Now I'm sure that's going to evolve over time and that might not always be true and there's lots of lights out factories out there now, but eventually it's going to come down to a relationship piece. And where that, where that really came into the. When you brought the Rebel Allocator book to our mission control meeting and we read that and it started to kind of come together where I merged those two ideas because I was struggling with our coaches in trying to talk about some of these principles because it didn't feel right to them to be what they perceived focused on just trying to go faster, which is a common problem with lean manufacturing application, is that it feels like you're just trying to go fat, you're trying to do more in less time, and that's it. And if you go back to the source material in the Toyota production system, it's actually about value creation. First, you always start with the customer, you always start with the requirements. And that is kind of your North Star. Yes, eliminating waste is a big part of it, but it's not the goal to just try to do it faster at all costs. You have to keep that value part continually going up. Yes. And that was kind of the light bulb moment for me in relation to barbalogic was that what we're really trying to do is drive the value equation up because when somebody quits because they say cost too much, we really, what we should be reframing that as is that they no longer perceive the value. This Is another reason that it connected with the trust value is that value straw in that Rebel allocator book is not set by what I think the value is as the business owner or the product owner. It's what the customer needs the value to be. And that's also dynamic. You know, in strength coaching, what somebody values as my from my coaching at the on day one is very different than day 300.
- [27:54]
Chris Reynolds
Sure.
- [27:55]
Andrew Jackson
And I have to be constantly looking for ways to add more value in a way that they can perceive and continue to perceive as being greater than the price. And of course the lean manufacturing tools are, are super powerful at driving the cost down as well. That's obviously a huge component of it because ultimately we have to be making a profit. But I thought it worked better at communicating with our coaches and better at communicating what I was really trying to do as an operations leader on the team when I framed it as trying to add as much value per unit time as possible. That's where the cost piece comes in is that you're trying to do as much that you're trying to increase the value density of your operations. Yep. And that's how you make more money.
- [28:41]
Matt Reynolds
I think it's super, super frustrating to a lot of founders that when they come to the realization that what have you done for me lately is just applies to every aspect of your life and it does in business. The customer continues to pay. If you got a good business anyway and it's not a one time outlay. Right. They're just going to continue to pay and you have to continue to provide marginally more value over time. Which is super hard to do. But you have a customer leave or you have, you know, some type of, of situation that fails on you and, and usually what it is is that you didn't, you weren't paying attention to that part. They were perceiving the value as dropping and you were not paying attention to it in that, in that process on.
- [29:27]
Andrew Jackson
Day one becomes table stakes on day 200 or 300. That's just like.
- [29:31]
Matt Reynolds
That's exactly right. Yep.
- [29:34]
Andrew Jackson
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- [30:27]
Chris Reynolds
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- [31:44]
Andrew Jackson
In the coaching application. And this is actually one of the things I wanted to ask you guys, we were kind of chatting about it this morning in the coaching presentation I gave my thesis was that I think over time the benevolence piece actually becomes a higher weighted component of the perception of trust in that with a strength training client, they initially come in the door because I can get them stronger. I can add a hundred pounds to their squat.
- [32:12]
Chris Reynolds
They believe you have the ability, I.
- [32:13]
Andrew Jackson
Have the ability to do it and I do. And then, you know, we do, we add a bunch of weight. But then, you know, I've had clients now I'm going on pushing a decade on some of our clients, which is crazy to me. But they are not adding 100 pounds to their squat anymore. Sure, you know, they're staying strong, which as some of these clients are now getting into their late 40s and 50s is that's like the equivalent of putting on 100 pounds to your squat in your 20s and 30s. But they continue to pay for my programming and my guidance. I think, you know, some of that because it's the ability I continue to build my skills skills. Different events come up where they need, different sets of my skills, whether it's an injury or a life circumstance that I can program for them, I can customize the program for them. I continue to demonstrate integrity, you know, and that's something Matt, you built into the product from very early on, this 24 hour feedback, this kind of very high touch white glove experience. But then the things that I can do along the way that show that I still care about their training and probably maybe the only person on earth.
- [33:12]
Chris Reynolds
Actually Cares about care way more than their spouse does. Like they care and you care.
- [33:17]
Andrew Jackson
I know there's a kids names by this point. I know their spouse's name, I know their job, I know how many times they've moved. I know what their interests are over time. And I continue to invest in building that part of the relationship and that's why they continue to stake. And yes, the ability and the integrity is table stakes that it's very easy to lose a client. I think in particular, integrity is the one that almost becomes binary. Like you have very thin ice that you're skating on if you start to break integrity.
- [33:46]
Chris Reynolds
Hard to build and easy to lose.
- [33:47]
Andrew Jackson
Right. But you can. There's little versions of that. Like I. Here's a small example that I think of. If I'm late to a meeting, I think of that now. I used to just have this general. I feel bad about this response now I know, oh, I just cashed in some trust.
- [34:01]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah.
- [34:02]
Andrew Jackson
Because I was five minutes late to the.
- [34:03]
Chris Reynolds
It's like that bank account. Like you're trying to make deposits all the time in the trust equation.
- [34:07]
Andrew Jackson
Exactly.
- [34:08]
Chris Reynolds
And that's good. And occasionally life happens and you make a withdrawal. Hopefully it's a small withdrawal out of it. But if you've built enough trust, a small withdrawal is okay. But if you have not built a trust and you make a withdrawal that's immediately, it takes the client or the employee or whoever you're dealing with and they go, oh, this isn't the value that this company or this person is providing is not worth the cost, not worth my price. And so it's easily eroded. And so that's kind of the ultimate point of this whole thing is building trust with clients or other companies in B2B, B2C investors, all of those things. It's all about the human relationship. And this is, you know, we've done so much, so much conversation, we've had so many conversations about AI. AI continues to build the ability and can be automated to even automate integrity on some level for the provider of the service. But the thing that it can never do is benevolence. I know when I go on to ChatGPT or Claude or Cursor, whatever it is, a disinterested third party.
- [35:18]
Matt Reynolds
It does not.
- [35:18]
Chris Reynolds
And there is an advantage there because it doesn't see through the lens of emotion. And so I've been in the same situation where I have clients that, you know a guy like Brett McKay from Art of Alienist, I've coached him for 11 years that guy didn't need me as a coach. His form's perfect on everything. He knows how to program. Why does he stay?
- [35:36]
Andrew Jackson
It's so funny you mentioned that, because this pr, this first one that I'm going to release is kind of around that exact problem. Because we're starting to incorporate AI into this, what we're calling assistant coach position. And it can write the programs, it can write us, plan, it can even give. It can answer technical questions, but it can't care. It just sounds like an a hole, like half the time. And it's one of those funny things. I can't quite put my finger on it. I'm having to like deconstruct what it is that I do when I respond to a client. Because sometimes I'll be snarky, sometimes I'll be a hard ass, sometimes I'll give. Be sympathetic. Like it's all around benevolence and being. Figuring out how to communicate in a way based on my relationship with that client at that time. Because sometimes it's different on day one versus day 10 or versus day workout 1000. And getting. Figuring out how to coach an LLM to respond that way is an interesting challenge.
- [36:37]
Matt Reynolds
There's a phrase for that in computer engineering called the uncanny valley. And if you haven't heard of it, it's this thing where early on whenever they were making 3D kind of visual versions of movies, I think about this a lot. Like Polar Express, I think is a good example of this where you watch it and you're like, something's eerie about what I'm seeing here, right? So these people, don't they. They almost look like people, but they don't really look like people. And that's the. That's the uncanny valley. I think in AI, you get that a lot where it's. It feels almost human, but not enough. And it goes to creepy real fast. You're like, whoa, something creepy going on here. Right?
- [37:17]
Andrew Jackson
It's getting to a point now with the. What is it, VO3. Visually, I can't actually put my finger on it anymore.
- [37:24]
Chris Reynolds
No.
- [37:25]
Andrew Jackson
But you can still tell by a.
- [37:27]
Chris Reynolds
Thing that's not human.
- [37:27]
Andrew Jackson
But I can tell it's not.
- [37:29]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah, super weird.
- [37:30]
Matt Reynolds
It's really weird.
- [37:32]
Andrew Jackson
So you guys see that in the 1. My questions to you guys, because I don't operate at the CEO level, was whether you actually see the same kind of approach or model as leaders at that level, working CEO to CEO and CEO to investor, like that's still applicable, you think?
- [37:52]
Matt Reynolds
I can't tell you how Frequently a business relationship is. And when I say business relationship, I'm talking about like let's say a contract. Okay, so like a, a long term contract with a customer. How frequently that is saved by something bad happens. CEO to CEO, a conversation goes down and it's saved. And it's saved because of a per. Essentially a personal guarantee that says I'm going to step in and make sure that this thing gets done or I'm going to make you whole financially or I'm going to do whatever like bad things happen in every business that you can think of. And that part is critical. The other one is the one with the employees, I think for early founders especially. And Matt and I have done a ton of conversations over the last, whatever it's been three, four weeks about how do you hire, how do you fire, how do you, how do you ultimately get other people to do the stuff so that you're not the only person bottleneck in the company. As a founder, the trust equation is so critical for you to hand anything off ever. And what's happening with the employees is they're going through this, this loop. I actually think it would be a really useful conversation for a founder to have. I've never had it with anybody, so it's. The reason I'm sort of thinking about this is I would love to have that with early employees and say, listen, do you want to make more money and do better at this company overall? Uhhuh.
- [39:16]
Chris Reynolds
You do.
- [39:17]
Matt Reynolds
Okay, here's how you get there, because I nothing. I will give you nothing to do at all. And eventually I'll have to let you go if I don't trust you. And here's what the trust is composed of, you know what I mean?
- [39:26]
Andrew Jackson
Like it's been helpful. Matt and I have actually had a conversation where it's helped me take intuition, which. One of my favorite definitions of intuition is prior experience you don't yet recognize. So I'll get this feeling which especially analytical people like us, we want to kind of dismiss feelings. Be like, okay, feelings don't matter, facts matter facts don't care about your feelings kind of a thing. But what this has actually helped me do is I get that intuition and instead of just reacting, I step back and think, okay, which what is it here that's leading me down this path? And I've, Matt and I have had this conversation before. I'm like, I don't trust this person. And I think it's because I don't perceive that they care. Right. I know they're excellent And I know they'll do what they say they do, but something doesn't, something that they've done. I don't know, maybe it's. And again, what's cool about is I can own it as my perception. It doesn't have to be reality. I can say that without feeling. I mean you still have to be careful, but like, sure, I can say that and own it. That I don't know if it's true or not. It's just I have this feeling this is my perception. And then you can focus on that rather than I feel bad. You're the, you're the reason I'm feeling bad. You can own the perception.
- [40:36]
Matt Reynolds
Go qualify your perception.
- [40:38]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah. And so, you know, I think that you started to articulate as well that the, the ability, it seems like the ability has a high importance early on. And so one of the first things that happens when we hire an employee or somebody hires a coach or you know, we hire like we were talking about this in backstory. We hired Chris's company certain. We've used another third party dev team before them that we don't really know what their ability is. Like kind of can see their promises and their pitch deck and all that sort of stuff. We're like, I don't really know how good you are at, at dev, like how efficient you are, like how clean you can write code, is there a bunch of tech debt and that sort of stuff. That the ability is really important early on. And as time goes on, once they've established okay these guys are really good at what they do, the integrity becomes really important. Will they continue to do what they say they're going to do. But beyond that, the thing that really drives trust building over years and decades is the do they care for sure. And ultimately we looked back at the companies comparing Chrysler's company certain with the other third party service we used and it was like, do they have the ability? I don't know. I don't know.
- [41:47]
Andrew Jackson
And on paper versus I could argue the competitor was the perception was maybe better. You could argue perceived as a non technical person. I can't go in and look at the actual code but I look at their pedigree, I look at the size of the company, I look at the size of the team, the, you know, the breadth of the team and I'm like, damn, they got a lot of firepower over there. Seems like they should be better, but I don't think.
- [42:13]
Chris Reynolds
But then you also have. I think that hurts them in both the integrity and the Benevolence piece. When you see a giant company, third party, okay, maybe they're really good at what they do. Chris is the founder's brother, right. He's on the board. He has actual like skin in the game in this business. So there is some perceived integrity from the very beginning with Chris's company. Because you're like, Matt and Chris are really close. They're basically best friends. They co host the podcast together, all these sort of things. And then over time you're like, well, and because of that and they're intertwined, Certain actually cares. Whereas this other third party company, because they're so big and because everything is transactional, you recognize it's just transaction.
- [42:58]
Andrew Jackson
Yeah.
- [42:58]
Chris Reynolds
They don't actually care. Like they can. Even if the ability is great, that ability is important early on. But over time the ability is like, well, there's other people that are capable of this. I want somebody that's not just able. I want somebody that has the integrity and has the benevolence as well. And so I think that's why, that's why certain has been a good fit for us. And I think you can do that. But likewise, Chris, you were saying? I mean, I think every investor we've ever, we've ever had in the business invested because they trusted, you know, this is not self aggrandizing, but because they trusted me, not because they were investing in the business or the, or the, you know, going to the back page and look at what the projections were like. Certainly that is a supplement to what they're doing. But ultimately they go, do I trust the founder. Yeah. To never give up in the midst of hardship. Okay. I can see this guy went through, you know, a lawsuit and all sorts of other. He had this I'm never going to let the company die attitude. Therefore, because he has that attitude, I'm investing in him. And as a supplement of that, I'm investing in the business. But ultimately I'm investing in this founder. And so it's still relationship to relationship.
- [44:03]
Matt Reynolds
I've seen this, by the way, on almost every side of it. I've seen it with angel style investors where I think in angel style investors it's really very tightly related to the human on the other end. But man, I've seen this on the private equity side too, all the way there where in board meetings, I've heard people talk about these big corporate investors talk about, you know, these people that we've put in, in charge are, are going to go as hard as they can at this until they're either going to die trying or they're going to get it done. And there's that aspect of it that you realize like along the way like this never changes. This is, this is true at any scale. It is just a basic human equation of, of the way that two humans can learn to how you can get something done without it being you. Right. As an investor, you're putting money to work and you have to trust that this team is going to get it done and they're going to raise the value of your investment. That's the whole idea. And the same is true for a founder with employees. And the same is true for CEO to CEO with your partners. All of that is always at play.
- [45:10]
Andrew Jackson
That was one of the things that we were talking about last month at Chicago that was kind of a new addition to how I perceive this as. Well, I think Stephen Covey talks about it a lot in speed of trust. His principal thesis there is trust is going to enable you to move faster at less cost. But what you mentioned was that it's also in the absence of communication, actual communication, trust is sort of this proxy that's there. It's the voice in your head when the other person isn't there.
- [45:43]
Chris Reynolds
Yep.
- [45:44]
Andrew Jackson
You don't trust somebody, that voice is going to be negative and it's going to be counterproductive and it's going to slow you down because you're going to start having to put. Because trust is in the absence of monitoring. So I think what happens if there is no trust? You start creating these mental loops where it's trying to monitor the situation. Like is, am I okay? Is this still a good decision? You start allocating a bunch of resources to re evaluating those, you know, ability, integrity and benevolence. Whereas if you've got a high trust environment, it just goes right through. You don't even have to talk. You just trust that the other person is on their end doing what they're. They're supposed to do.
- [46:25]
Chris Reynolds
Yep.
- [46:26]
Matt Reynolds
This is one of the reasons you also see that as a company grows, you know, we talk a lot about, you know, there's early stage founders and there's companies as they, as they get bigger and bigger. As companies grow, that CEO role tends to only be a big trust building, relationship management role. You're doing things. Yes. You're setting vision for the company. Yes, you are, you know, validating that you got the right people in the seats. But as the company grows, your second in command start being the people who can take care of the day to day to get Stuff done, you're not doing that as much of that stuff. What really happens is when bad things occur and you know, something goes off the rails, you're going to have a relationship conversation with either a partner or a, you know, it may be one of your top people in the organization. Whatever it is, you're constantly playing that role. And I think it becomes people who are, who are stellar at this can get a lot more done. Because at the end of the day that's really what you're doing. You're, you're trying to proxy getting stuff done with trust. Right? That's what's, that's what's happening. And the sooner you understand it and the sooner you can see it, the more effective it is for you as a, as a founder.
- [47:40]
Andrew Jackson
Curious if you've done something intentional or intuitive as you've been building certain along these lines because I've, I mean when we first started working together, it was me and you and maybe Ben or maybe Damon one, one on one on a lot of calls. Now it's maybe, maybe we talk about the business relationship specifically once a quarter if that I don't know. But like, but I still have day to day conversation with your team and I still trust the team as if it were you. Do you feel like you do something as a leader or as a CEO as you're building the team?
- [48:14]
Matt Reynolds
I do. I think this is a really difficult thing to do well and I think people that don't understand it will fail at it by default. So here's what I do. And I know this not only from my work at Certain, but I know it from my previous company at Brightcore. And I know it because I am a fractional CTO at a couple of companies as well where I do the exact same thing day one that I go into any of these organizations. I do an enormous amount to show that I care about what's going on and that my quality bar is higher than all of theirs. Right. I want them to see very early that like, hey, this is the kind of standard we want to set at this company. And I'm not going to be off playing golf and I'm not going to be out going on vacations and stuff like you will not work harder than me. And what starts happening with that role is people start going, oh, if this guy cares that much, like maybe I should care that much. So it's in many ways it is a leading by example. I think you got that never stops. I think leading by example becomes really, really critical within the Organization all the time. It does change a bit. Like one of the things that's hard as certain grows and it will continue to be hard is I don't have enough attention, like I don't have enough attention space to be in every customer's thing all the time. Right. So I end up having to shift my attention and I have to be very laser focused on the attention with them in the timeframe that they get me to think about their problems, to help solution issues or whatever needs to be done. But mostly it's not about the issue that I'm solving. It's about the Chris cares and he's gonna make sure this thing gets done. That's what's really being communicated in that process. But that only goes so that only scales so far. So you have to start building a culture in your company that has that same feeling because you need the number two at the office, you need the number three at the office to have that same thing. So that over time, that's the relationship that you have. And you know, that person has power and has the ability to get stuff done and that they also still care. Right. I think that's. That's the way you do it.
- [50:18]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah. So the. As we close the loop on this and kind of close out the show, I think the takeaways, it's important to kind of walk through these takeaways again. This thing that builds trust is this culmination of ability, integrity and benevolence. And so I think the first thing that's really important, we've identified why caring is probably the most important for the long term. And it is. Let's go back for a second to ability. I think that it's imperative whatever you do in life. And I've said this many times, I've used the example of like if I were a trash man. And I'm not knocking that. There's probably guys that make lots of money as a trashman. I've got to try to be the best trash man in the world.
- [50:58]
Matt Reynolds
Absolutely.
- [50:58]
Chris Reynolds
I've got to try to separate myself with ability. I have to try to be the best strength coach in the world or the best developer in the world. The best trash man in the world. So the ability is a thing that you must work on even before the relationship occurs. I can't start the relationship and then try to prove my ability. The ability is the thing that often sells the customer in the beginning is that they perceive that you have better ability than the others. You've risen above. You have a higher standard My message.
- [51:26]
Andrew Jackson
Tends to be biased more on the benevolence because I think a lot of our culture, our people is like default ability is the most important thing in the world. Correct.
- [51:38]
Chris Reynolds
It is not.
- [51:38]
Andrew Jackson
I certainly don't want to take away from it. It is absolutely critical and it is, I agree, the thing that you got to start with as well individually as you know, are you pursuing the best set of skills that you can for the environment you're trying to be in.
- [51:51]
Chris Reynolds
Even then, it's just like you said, it's still perception. Does the client perceive that I have tremendous ability to get that they are going to get me to my goal as effectively and efficiently as possible? That ability is extremely important.
- [52:04]
Andrew Jackson
I always used to think that if I just delivered the results, people would notice. But I think from a career development standpoint, and this is probably also true with customers, they got to see that you did the thing. They have to know what your skills are. And it goes against my nature because I don't like to, I don't know, I sometimes think of that as like bragging. But there, I think there's professional ways to do it where you can make.
- [52:30]
Chris Reynolds
Sure your work is seen in the beginning. Again, the ability is the primary thing that you're selling yourself on. And so it's very hard to build integrity or benevolence before the relationship has started. And so as the relationship then starts as you get a new client or you hire a new employee or whatever that is then the next thing that comes into play, they're both the integrity and the benevolence, but the integrity then, okay, so I trust that this person can get me to the end goal. But will they actually do the thing they say they're going to do? And that's actually not that difficult. And in a post Covid world where service has absolutely dropped through the floor, it is, it is an incredible separator to just provide excellent service. Whether you're truly a service company or a SaaS or even an aerospace engineering company, if you provide fantastic service, it's the cream rises to the top much better than it did in 2019, 2025. It's much easier to rise to the top there. So you, you follow through with the things you say you're going to do and that, and that builds the integrity piece of the trust.
- [53:32]
Matt Reynolds
This is the reason that when, when we've talked about the founder brand concept, you're getting your own message and personality out there into the ether is, is so effective because people will eventually it will attract the People that, that you want it to attract and they will come to trust you even though you don't know them and haven't done anything for them. Because ultimately there is just this whole proxy concept there now that even goes further. I think the idea behind the node is I trust people more that my. That people I already trust. Trust. Right. It's a, it's a trust chain that goes in there that came up at.
- [54:11]
Andrew Jackson
Saster that in this AI information even more overload than we've been in being a trusted curator is the new value is or is like, like hyper value in this market right now? Yep.
- [54:25]
Chris Reynolds
And finally, the benevolence piece we've talked a lot about on the show today, the thing that we haven't mentioned, and maybe it should just be known, is it must be authentic because they're gonna see right through you if it's not. So you can fake benevolence for a short period of time, but not for very long. Do you actually care? Not. And certainly the perception the client has that you care is the primary thing, but they will see through it if you don't actually care. Like you can play the game for a little while, but you can't play the game long term. And if benevolence is the thing that keeps trust building over the long term, it must be truly authentic. I actually care as much about my clients performance in strength coaching as they do. And no one else cares as much as I do. And them, their spouse doesn't, their family doesn't, their boss doesn't, their neighbors don't, people they go to church with don't. So they know that they have this person that that is just as excited about them setting PRs as they are. And you can take that to your industry, but the reality is that that has to be authentic. And so what has happened for me, because I've been able to keep my clients for so long, I don't know what the average age of client that I coach is, but it's probably six or seven years plus at this point. If I go down through the list, I've got a few newer ones, but I've got some that I've coached for 10 or 11, 12 years is that we have built over time this level of authenticity that I actually care. And I'm just as excited as they are about what they're doing in the gym or performing. And of course you can take that to your industry, it cannot be faked.
- [55:58]
Andrew Jackson
To connect that back to the story I was telling on the factory floor. Where I was picking up on that discomfort or that lack of trust was. I think it was exactly that, in a little bit of a roundabout way, that what I ended up recognizing was that I was being. I was inconsistent.
- [56:14]
Chris Reynolds
Yeah.
- [56:14]
Andrew Jackson
Some days I would show up hyped up on coffee and I'd be super jazzed and excited. Other days I was completely exhausted. And things that I would do that I thought was communicating, that I cared, they couldn't trust because I wasn't consistent. Yep. And. And so that eroded trust in it. It's sort of. I mean, it's basically integrity is what it kind of cycles back to. It's like if you're not genuine, that's not authentic. And you just. One day you're doing it because you feel better. Another day you're doing it because you're happy. It'll just blast right through and people will know you're faking it. The only way to be consistent is if it's real, because you can have bad days and good days and high energy and low.
- [56:55]
Chris Reynolds
Do the thing and you still care.
- [56:56]
Andrew Jackson
But if it's actually coming from a place that's real, it. That'll still come through. Even when you're having a sure. Different think about your kids.
- [57:02]
Chris Reynolds
I mean, everybody should love their kids. Good day, bad day, whatever. I love my kids no matter what.
- [57:08]
Andrew Jackson
Right.
- [57:08]
Chris Reynolds
Whether their behavior is great or terrible. Like, it doesn't change how much I love them, how tired I am or how motivated I am to, like, it doesn't change that. And so figuring out how to take that sort of thing, that consistency of benevolence, and take it to your clients or to your staff, to your employees, to the investors, to whoever. This is super important. So, hey, man, thanks for sharing the story again. That's the trust equation. We'll put some show notes, some links in the show notes. Andrew's talked about this. He's got a few talks and other podcasts about it, a presentation that he shared. We'll try to link all those in the show notes. But again, you've got to pursue high ability, high integrity, high benevolence consistently for years and decades over a long period of time to build trust. Trust is hard to gain and easy to lose. And so you have to understand that those you're trying to constantly make those deposits and very rare, seven to one. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right.
- [58:02]
Matt Reynolds
That's right.
- [58:03]
Chris Reynolds
Thanks for listening to the podcast today. Thanks for giving us your Friday. Hope you guys have a great weekend. It's been another episode of the Build you'd Business Podcast if this has brought you value, we'd love to have a five star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you're a coach. We've talked a lot about coaching and building integrity and ability and benevolence. Andrew has been a tremendous we didn't even get into it this much but Turnkey Coach Turnkey Coach is our platform, our software that has really manifested itself as the primary and we believe the best way to do this in the fitness industry. If you're looking for a high ability integrity benevolence company that that does engineering and computer dev work certain.com it's s u r t o n right.com it is a company and so would always love to have some feedback either on the podcast or if you're interested or just want to talk about how we run the business, whether that's in the fitness industry or dev industry or whatever it is. We would love to have that conversation with you and thanks so much for listening. We'll see you guys next Friday. Have a good one.
- [59:06]
Matt Reynolds
Sa.