Welcome back to my podcast, Phil, where I shared lessons that I've learned in scaling big businesses and helping our portfolio companies do the same.

In this episode, I want to speak to something I'm really passionate about, which is building a culture of positive reinforcement and why it's something you can't keep ignoring in your company.

If I were starting a company in 2024, the first thing I would do is create an environment

where people wanted to work more, not less.

88% of employees believe that strong company culture is vital to the success of the business.

Companies that prioritize having a strong culture have 33% higher revenue than companies that don't.

A study done in 202323 revealed that only 15 percent

of employees actually even feel engaged in the workplace. Building a strong company culture is no

longer a luxury. It is a necessity to survive. If you overindex on rewarding what you want more of,

eventually those negative behaviors for the most part will extinguish themselves.

Whereas punishment would be essentially somebody does something that you don't want to have

happen, you negatively reinforce it. So it would be like if a dog jumps up on the couch,

and you see a jump on the couch and you hit the dog. And so the dog has been punished for jumping

on the couch. Now what happens in those instances is that the dog will continue to jump on the couch just while you're not looking.

And in my opinion culture is what people do when a leader's not present.

And so if you want a positive culture that can continue to work in your favor when you're not there,

then I don't think that punishment works for you there. We see it's the same with humans and

animals, is that if you're punished for something, when the punisher is absent, the person does the

activity they've been punished for. Whereas with positive reinforcement, they genuinely develop an

intrinsic desire to do that activity because it's been rewarded. So positive reinforcement is essentially rewarding

behaviors that you want more of, whereas I think a lot of traditional management teaches you to punish

behaviors you want less of. So if I'm going to decide which of these two things do I implement into my

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