Latest / The Talent Brief / What Changed Me
Transcript
- Jeff Ganter: Welcome back to the talent brief. There are moments in your life that don't feel significant while you're living them. Years later, you realize they quietly changed the person you became. For me, one of those moments started with a few unpaid invoices. When I launched 11th hour, my philosophy was simple. Take care of the client, take care of your employees. Work hard, do the right thing. I believed if you treated people well, everything else would eventually fall into place. Then one of our largest entertainment clients stopped paying us. At first I wasn't concerned. Late payments happen. Because as the weeks turned into months, nearly three. thirty thousand dollars sat unpaid. Oddly enough, it wasn't the money that bothered me most. It was the silence. No return phone calls, no explanations, no acknowledgement that the invoices even existed. Something didn't feel right. I couldn't explain why. I just knew something was off. So instead of continuing to chase payments, I started asking questions. What I uncovered completely changed the situation. RHR contact had been sharing our invoices with another staffing agency. The invoices were being duplicated, and that company was getting paid instead of us. I remember sitting there trying to process what I just learned. This wasn't an accounting mistake. It was a breach of trust. And suddenly I had to make a decision. Do I stay quiet because this is a powerful company? Or do I speak up? I'll admit, I was nervous calling the CEO of a major entertainment company wasn't exactly. exactly something you do casually, especially as a young business owner trying to establish yourself. But I also realized something. If I stayed silent, I wasn't protecting my business. I was abandoning it. So I made the call. I introduced myself and said, You don't know me and I appreciate you taking my call, but I need to give you a heads up. The department responsible for your company's moral and ethical decisions is doing the exact opposite. You have a snake in the grass. Then I shared everything we had uncovered. It wasn't an easy conversation, but it was the right one. Looking back, that experience taught me something I've carried with me ever since. Integrity isn't revealed once everything is working. It's revealed when doing the right thing becomes uncomfortable. That moment changed the way I led my company. Not because it made me suspicious. It made me protective. Protective of my employees, protective of my clients, protective of the trust we've spent years earning. Because I realized something that I've never forgotten. Culture isn't built by the values printed on a wall. It's built on the moments when those values are tested. When I think about that experience today, I barely remember the unpaid in voices. I remember the choice the choice to speak up, the choice to protect what mattered. The choice to let my values become louder than my fear. What's interesting is that years later, after cum creating signals versus scripts, I realized something. That day I was following a signal. I just didn't have a name for it yet. The signal wasn't the unpaid invoices. The signal was the silence. It was the quiet feeling that something wasn't adding up. The script would have been much easier. They'll eventually pay. Don't make waves. Leave it alone. Instead I listened. And I am grateful for it. Thanks for letting me share another chapter of my journey. I've come to realize that the experiences shaping my career weren't really about recruiting or running a business. They were about learning to trust what I was noticing before I could explain it. Maybe that's why this framework means so much to me today. Until next time, trust the signal. Question the script. See you soon.