Are You Future-Proofing Your Business?

Because Loyalty Is Earned Not Purchased.

Your initial reaction might be to say yes. You’ve looked at operational efficiencies. You’re financial modeling forecast is conservative and favorable. You’ve 9-boxed your leadership and have a succession plan.

But let me ask you this, when things get hard—really hard—do your people believe you'll have their back?

Because if the answer is anything less than an unqualified yes, you have a problem that your financial modeling, operational efficiencies, or 9-box isn’t going to fix.

I know this because I lived the alternative. And it changed how I think about business entirely.

What I Saw at Caliber Collision

It was early 2020. COVID-19 had just shut the world down. Businesses everywhere were making the same calculation — cut fast, cut deep, protect the balance sheet. And on the surface, seemed prudent. The financial pressure was enormous and the uncertainty was total. Nobody had a playbook for this.

But our CEO, Steve Grimshaw, made a different call.

He and his leadership team gave up their paychecks. Not symbolically. They actually gave it up. And business leaders down to the senior manager level followed—myself included, voluntarily taking pay cuts. Mine was 10%. We weren’t required to, but we understood what was at stake, and we believed in what we were part of.

At the same time, Grimshaw made the business case to keep our doors open as an essential service. Think about that for a moment. Collision repair. Not a hospital. Not a grocery store. But Grimshaw and his team recognized something important: a nurse whose car gets hit still needs to get to work. A first responder can't serve their community from a broken-down vehicle. We had a role to play, and he fought for the right to play it—so that our frontline teams could keep their jobs when there was no guarantee business would come.

And when the company recovered? They restored every dollar of pay. They followed through completely.

What happened inside that organization after all of this wasn't something you can engineer or manufacture. The level of loyalty, the sense of being genuinely in it together—it was unlike anything I've experienced in my career. People didn't just show up. They showed up for each other. That is the difference between a workforce and a team. Between a company people work for and a company people believe in.

That's the business case. Right there.

The Model That's Breaking Down

Here's the uncomfortable reality for a lot of C-suite leaders right now: the model that got you here may not get you where you need to go.

Business changed after the pandemic. Profitability margins, in general, have been more difficult to achieve and sustain. And that has CEOs, boards, and financial stakeholders scrambling because no one wants a pay cut.

The hard truth is that companies built purely around profitability—where people are a line item to be optimized rather than the actual source of value—are starting to show the cracks. You see it in turnover rates that keep climbing. In the institutional knowledge that walks out the door every time you do a reduction in force. In the customer experience that slowly degrades because the people delivering it are maxed out and don't feel valued, so they stop going the extra mile.

The financial cost of that rarely shows up cleanly on a balance sheet. But it's real, and it compounds.

COVID made this visible in ways that are hard to ignore in hindsight. The companies that protected their people absorbed short-term pain and came out the other side with their cultures intact. The ones that cut fast and deep spent the next two years in hiring chaos, trying to rebuild what they'd destroyed. The "efficient" decision turned out to be anything but.

The New Faces of the Workforce

There’s another new layer to this. Gen Z is already here. Gen Alpha is right behind them.

These generations don’t play by the old rules, and they shouldn't be expected to. They grew up as true digital natives, watching their parents grind through economic instability, job insecurity, and workplaces that didn’t value them. They took notes. They decided they weren’t going to repeat it.

They have an entrepreneurial confidence their predecessors didn’t. They’ve watched peers build social and financial wealth on their own terms. They invented cancel culture and they will apply it to employers just as readily as they apply it to brands. Transparency isn’t a perk to them. It’s a baseline expectation. And when it’s missing, they leave. Even when the money is good.

Which brings me to something I tell my clients: what’s the story your people are sharing at the dinner table? That’s your real culture. Not your values poster or engagement survey results. The dinner table conversation is what drives your NPS, your retention, and yoru ability to attract the next generation of talent. It will make you or break you—and most leaders have no idea what that conversation sounds like.

I don't have a definitive list of companies navigating this space well yet. My instinct is that the ones getting it right are probably not the loudest about it. But the companies that figure it out—that actually close the gap between their stated culture and their real one—are going to have a talent and loyalty advantage that their competitors will spend years trying to understand.

So, What Does This Actually Take?

And yes, I know it’s business. Businesses exist to make money. I’m not asking you to ignore that reality.

But here’s what I’ve come to believe: if you let your foot off the gas long enough to get the people part right, you’ll be able to accelerate faster than if you hadn’t let up at all. The companies winning the long game aren’t choosing between people and profit. They’ve figured out that one drives the other. That’s long-term versus short-term thinking. And right now, too many boardrooms are optimizing for the quarter at the expense of the decade.

It's not softness. It’s not about ping pong tables and pizza parties. Or even asking everyone to share their feelings about where they work. It’s about something harder and more specific: doing what you said you would do, especially when it costs you something.

It means being willing to make the difficult financial decision that protects your people, not just your margins. It means transparency that's actually transparent—sharing the real challenges the business faces and trusting your people to rise to them. It means understanding that the people closest to your customers are the ones creating the experience that drives your value and leading them accordingly.

It means earning the right to ask for loyalty, rather than assuming it comes with the org chart.

Steve Grimshaw earned it. And what he built in return—that sense of shared mission, that culture of genuine trust—that's not just a nice story. That's a competitive advantage. That's organizational resilience. That's what it looks like when business gets the people part right.

The companies that thrive in the next decade won't be the ones that were the most efficient with their people. They'll be the ones that understood something fundamental: