Intentional Community Building

The Third Growth Option with Benno Duenkelsbuehler and Guests

My guest on this episode is Tom Ungrodt, a Gift & Home Industry Community Builder and sometime (re)ALIGN Sherpa. If you’re interested in growing by joining or intentionally building industry groups, this episode is for you. Tom shares his experience as a former Vistage Chair and current Community Builder of the Mission Possible group, what it takes, why industry executives want to get together 3-5 times a year to share best practices and to move the industry forward.

2:23 - “The purpose of this was…(to) address serious situations, good or bad in our industry.”

4:21 - “The mission is to unite gift and home leaders, (it) makes for better decisions, creates a much wider perspective and builds a strong, trusted network.”

5:23 - “I introduce the subject, a lot of them come from the group, I moderate and facilitate the conversation and steer it in a direction that again, would be useful for the people in the room.”

6:34 - “We talk about ways that you could retain your employees… talk about some of their programs and…how they go about keeping these employees.”

8:17 - “You have people knocking on your door wanting to join, you have CEO’s, owners, executives…that don’t want to leave and they keep showing up.”

9:07 - “Every business large or small, certainly needs to have some sort of value statement, mission statement… it was fun to sit down and discuss this, bouncing ideas around...it’s just a matter of putting it on paper and I never did that before.”

10:05 - “You can’t read the label on the wine bottle if you’re sitting inside the bottle.”

10:53 - “You have one good meeting, the next meeting has to be better than that one.”

13:05 - “It takes probably 2, 3, 4 meetings, for someone to really become comfortable with sharing… and if they don’t share, I pick on them, I pull them out of the crowd… no one’s there to collect dust…you’re all going to participate.”

14:29 - “How have you built trust? Being very honest… trust isn’t something that you just turn on a light bulb and it’s there. It’s taken many years to get that together.”