Latest / Beyond the Paycheck / Keith Brown, VPHR, Total Rewards at Tractor Supply Company

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Keith Brown, VPHR, Total Rewards at Tractor Supply Company · Beyond the Paycheck

• Kelsey Willock (00:42) Welcome, Keith Brown. We are so excited to have you on. To kick us off, I would absolutely love for you to introduce yourself to our audience today. Keith Brown (00:51) Great, glad to be here. Yes, my name is Keith Brown. I'm the vice president of Total Rewards at Tracker Supply Company and I'm based out of Tennessee, middle Tennessee, in the Nashville area. Kelsey Willock (01:03) Wonderful. So before we really get into your work at Tractor Supply and your experience, I want to get to know you a little bit better and share your story with our listeners. Before we get into all that amazing work, can you share with our audience your earliest money memory? Keith Brown (01:23) Wow, earliest money memory. So what comes to mind is I was probably elementary school age and I had an uncle, it's actually my great uncle, on my grandmother's side, my maternal grandmother's side. She was the baby of 17. So they were sharecroppers and we had a family farm in South Georgia and he took me with him to go buy a car. It was the first time anyone on that side of the family had ever bought a brand new car. he negotiated with the guy. We went in the car, looked at it, checked it out. And the guy said, okay, how are you going to pay for it? And he reached into his pocket and pulled out cash and paid, it was like maybe $2,500, $2,700 for a brand new car. I had never seen that much cash in my life before. And I just remember that. And my grandmother later told me that because of, because they were born in the late 19 teens and early 1920s, and they had gone through the great depression and they didn't trust banks. And so that's why my uncle carried so much cash and why he paid for the car and cash. Yeah. Kelsey Willock (02:42) Thank you so much for sharing that with me. I think we often think our money stories start with our first experience with it, but what we often don't acknowledge is how the stories and the folks around us also shape our experience with money. And whatever their money stories are often get passed down onto ourselves. How do you write? Keith Brown (03:03) That's exactly right. Kelsey Willock (03:05) How do you think that shaped how you see security, freedom, and even responsibility around money? Keith Brown (03:13) Um, for me, it mainly was around don't buy anything that you can't afford for things that are not long lasting. Pay cash for it. If you can't pay cash for it, maybe you shouldn't have it. And I have kind of followed his example around that. He mentored me all the way through, I guess, my early twenties of my life before he passed on. And that has stuck with me. have passed that on to my kids. I passed it on to close friends. There are certain things that it is okay to finance, but for most things, you've got to pay cash for it. If you don't have the money, save for it. And that's like financing, right? Because you're saving that amount of money and then just go out and pay cash for it. Kelsey Willock (03:59) It's wonderful that you have that person in your life. It makes me think of that person for me as my first boss at work. And not everyone has that person, but it's so wonderful to see that you have that person that you trusted with those conversations and also guided you in the right direction to make good choices with your money. Keith Brown (04:17) Oh, most definitely. remember I'm a veteran and my very first duty station was actually here in Tennessee a long time ago, stationed at Fort Campbell. And when I arrived as a young officer on base, I had lost my wallet. I called back home to tell my family, hey, I lost my wallet. I got to get everything new again, but I don't have any money. And he literally went to Western Union and wired me like, Kelsey Willock (04:20) Mm. Keith Brown (04:44) $600 so I could have something until and again I say I'll pay you back. He's like don't worry about it I did but just that he just did that no questions asked just wire transferred me $600 through Western Union way back then and It was always that kind of person. So it was great example for me and always had a special place Kelsey Willock (05:06) And it also sounds like he passed down such good values to you that he knew you would pay him back. Keith Brown (05:13) Yes, yes, definitely. Yeah, he was, he had a lot of principles that he lived by, lot of good morals and gave me a lot of opportunities, taught me about hard work. He was a veteran as well. Not the only reason, but one of the reasons why I ended up joining the military. But yeah, great role model and great example for my Kelsey Willock (05:21) Right. Well, thank you for sharing that with me. I have so many more questions for you, especially around your experience in the military, but I'll save those for later. I want to know a little bit more about your first paycheck and what your first job was and what you did with that paycheck. Keith Brown (05:49) Okay. You know, I had little businesses as a kid. cut grass and did all those things, but my real first job was at a local grocery store in Savannah, Georgia, which is my hometown. And I worked for a company called Food Town. And my very first paycheck, we had to write down on our card what we got for tips. Cause my job was to bag the groceries and then take them out to the car for customers. And people would give us tips and we had to write down what we got in tips. And on my first paycheck, whatever I had put down for tips, they took out of my paycheck because my tips plus what they paid me made up the amount of money. And I didn't know that was gonna happen. So from then forward, I never told them the entire amount of tips that I got in my paycheck. I mean, I was 15, I think, at that time, because I actually had to get a work permit because you weren't allowed to work under 16 if you didn't have a work permit. But I remember that and I said, I'm not going to tell them my full test because they literally would take that amount out of my check. But that was the first time I actually had a job where I had to go to it, clock in, work, got paid for it, you know, at the end of the week. And that was my initial experience. Kelsey Willock (06:47) Mm. And how do you think your money story influenced how you think about pay and benefits for employees? Keith Brown (07:10) Wow. Yeah. So, you know, I've been there on that end and that environment, you know, starting out and as low a level as you can go, like in a grocery store, right? And I eventually ended up working my way up a little bit in that store, you know, even as a teenager. But it helps me empathize with folks and see things from a different perspective and just understand that it's important for your paycheck, it's your livelihood, it's how you Kelsey Willock (07:31) Mm. Keith Brown (07:38) you know, take care of your family, take care of yourself. And it's important to people. So you got to make sure it's right. You got to make sure it's fair and consistent and folks going to never rely on that. ⁓ so that's, I always carry that with me. No matter what level I get to, what, you know, role I play and being able to understand. Kelsey Willock (07:58) So kind of digging a little bit deeper there, where do you think compensation and benefits break down most often today? Whether it's pay equity, transparency, understanding total rewards from the perspective of an employee. Keith Brown (08:11) Yeah, I think two things. One is I don't think generally people have a firm knowledge and awareness of the other part of their rewards, especially on the benefits side. Most people get a lot thrown at them when they first started an organization, when they move into a new role. And until they need it, they don't remember all of those details around what went with that and how you access that and where it is. That's a challenge. you know, as organizations, we got to do a better job of communicating that. and allowing people to understand that and helping them understand that and constantly bringing it up so that they're aware. And then on the pay side, I think people have very different expectations depending on the level of the role. They tend to hear things through social media or just kind of traditional media and have very different expectations on what their roles compensation ought to be and don't really dig deep and understand that and educate that. So they don't they don't have the correct amount of expectation. I think most companies Want to attract talent and they want to keep talent so they tend to be in the ballpark But that ballpark is not a set number. It's a range and people need to understand that that is it's a it's a range So there is a minimum and there's a maximum that they have to stay within their guidelines and they try to do that, but I don't think the actual prospective employee or actual employee understands that and how that works. Kelsey Willock (09:43) That's a really good point. I want to double click on the first part of the answer that you gave around making employees aware of their existing benefits. Have you seen any creative ways in which vendors, partners, existing benefits have achieved higher levels of success at the company in terms of making employees aware of them? Keith Brown (10:04) Yeah, I think involving families more than just the employee themselves because typically if the employee has a family, the family's probably used the benefits more than the employee does. And so getting communications to go home in multiple ways so that if the employee is too tired or has other things going on and they don't communicate how they should and pass that along. that you can get that information to the rest of the family so that they understand those things and they can bring it back up to the employee. Second thing is regular updates around benefits and then using vendors who have a lot of expertise and background and they know what other companies do to be able to come in and talk to employees. That's one of the ways that we've tried to do here at Tractor is partner with our vendors more. We bring people on site. We allow people to schedule one-on-one sessions. have group sessions. We do events throughout the year where it's like Wellness Week. And Wellness Week is not just for medical health wellness. There is financial wellness as well. And try to throw those things in so that people can really get a feel for what they have and be able to dig in a little bit deeper. And also to do things around events that happen. For example, when it's the holidays. What's important for people on the holiday? They're trying to save, they're buying to spend, they're buying to shop. So why not do some kind of an educational, informative thing around that timeframe? When it's time for open enrollment, then do a session around these kinds of things you should be thinking about. When it's tax time, when it's bonus time, when it's all these things, you can do events, you can put out communication, you can put out different types of educational opportunities in those areas. And we do things throughout the year as well around like Women's History Month, so we try and focus on what are things that women are concerned about when it comes to saving, investing, retiring, and focus on those events so that it's heightened awareness for particular groups during those times is what we do. Kelsey Willock (12:10) It's such a good point and when you think about the psychology of marketing, I think it's something like you have to hear about something seven times for it to be meaningful and what a great way to hear about something over and over if not the month that's dedicated to bringing awareness to it. So definitely a lot of really good learnings I want to talk about leadership and action. Can you share one change you've seen that moved from Keith Brown (12:26) that way. Kelsey Willock (12:36) attracting talent to really transforming individuals lives. And you've kind of hinted at it in the sense of you're bringing families even into these benefits. But can you talk a little bit more about that? Keith Brown (12:48) Yeah, one of the ways that our senior leadership really wants to get our folks engaged, especially from a financial wellness standpoint, is in ownership. Tractor is a growing company. We got a lot going on and we recently made a big move when it comes to our equity. We did a five for one split. I can tell you, our CEO stated, told us as we were planning it, told the public when we launched it, told the street, analysts, everybody. The main reason we're doing this is so that our team members can afford to buy one share. Because of our success, our stock price had appreciated so high that when you participated in our employee stock purchase plan, you got a micro share, especially if you were on the lower end of income and didn't make that much that you could throw into an ESPP plan, even with the discount. It took a while for you could accumulate one share. And so we did that stock split and then how we communicated was if you just put $9 per paycheck, you can earn a share. And that really resonated with people. We saw an increase in engagement and involvement. And when people are a part of something, then they treat it differently. And if they are treating it differently, then they serve customers differently. And that's successful for us as a company, right? We want engaged employees. And one of our values is just being able to know, value and take care of that team member because we know the team member is going to take care of the customer. So if they're happy and they feel like they're getting value, they're going to turn around and do the same thing for our customers. And that's what we want. So everybody wins in that case. Kelsey Willock (14:25) So it's clear you saw really true and meaningful measurable impact, which I think is something that benefits leaders are always seeking. And you saw that immediate boost of engagement, I'm sure, are keeping folks for longer at the company. And also, clearly, the quality of their work is even going up. So it's such an interesting and creative way to really impact more folks at the company that may have not been able to engage in that program in the first place. Keith Brown (14:54) Exactly right. Yes. Kelsey Willock (14:56) So kind of looking ahead, what comps and benefits trends do you think will shape the employee experience in the next one to two years? Keith Brown (15:06) Yeah, we've done some listening on two sides. One is we recently took some time and listened to our team members. We did a full transformational survey where it's kind of like going to the eye doctor where you ask an employee, the eye doctor asks you, is A or B better when they're doing your prescription? So we did that kind of a survey around our benefits to find out what's most important to people, what people like, what they don't like. And so we did listening on that side. We also did some listening out in the benefits world to see what's coming, what's around the corner as far as future things, what kind of offerings we need to be thinking about, what's it going to look like in five, 10 years from now. And one of the big themes that has popped out on both sides is choice. Employees want choice. So how do you deliver choice instead of having more kind of one size fits all, everybody get the same thing. How can you take your dollars and be able to spend the same amount, but let people decide what's most important to them and how that looks? So I think that's the future, you know, because in the old days, companies wouldn't, didn't want to do that because that required a lot of behind the scenes administrative, but with the technology now, we can handle that. We can use technology through AI as well as, you know, train bots and agents to go out and do things. Kelsey Willock (16:22) Mm-hmm. Keith Brown (16:34) behind the scenes to be able to make it feel seamless to employees and for us, our team members. So that it's not complicated for them. It's really simple. The other thing is not having so many points of contact to be able to engage with your reward programs. How can you have fun place that people go and engage and enter? Kelsey Willock (16:50) Mm. Keith Brown (17:00) and do things without having to remember passwords and logins and have ID cards and all this other kind of stuff that you have to have today to engage with it. I foresee in the very near future that you're going to just be able to talk to a device, ask a question, and it will go out and do all the searching and gathering and bring back to you the answer that you seek specifically about your question that you asked. That's coming here very soon. And can really see that with the way how smart and useful AI is becoming and how people are getting more comfortable with it. And then the agent side on those tasks being handled behind the scenes where an agent goes out and gathers everything you need. And you don't have to log in or do anything. You're just going to ask the question and get the answer right to you. Kelsey Willock (17:47) Right. So it sounds like the company is pretty AI forward right now. That's exciting. Keith Brown (17:53) Yes, definitely. We, everyone at our corporate headquarters has an account. We've been trained, we've been educated. We talk about it in quarterly meetings. Got a lot of excitement in using it. We track how people are using so we can get, you know, more and more enhancements, make sure we stay up with the latest versions. And then that is starting to go out into the field as well. We already have it for some of our actual operations in the field and with our store team members and even for with our customers. And that's just going to grow more and more as we start to roll this out. I think that'll help with the comfort level and then as we can make it as easy to use as possible and engaging and simple. I think that's really where we're going to be able to top the list. Kelsey Willock (18:36) So leads me to my next question, which is all about tools and innovation. So I think it's the perfect bridge. What tools or data are you using to particularly help measure and improve pay equity or well-being? Keith Brown (18:52) Yeah. So a couple tools. We use a vendor partner that kind of helps us with that. But we have an app called TSCME that we engage with our employees. It started out as an HR app. It's self-made. We created it ourselves. And now it's become an enterprise app that we use for our employees to be able to reach out and seek and look at anything from a personal standpoint. It can switch from personal mode to work mode. So, you know, the little devices that you go to retail store. you see people with, that's a Honeywell device that they can look up inventory and find something. They can take that device and switch it to personal mode and be able to go on our TSC and Me app and see all of their, where's my retirement? Where's all my stuff? Right? And be able to engage in that. Well, as you do those things, you know, we capture data and we have all the data now of how people are interacting, how people are doing things. They can go check their paycheck. They can clock in and clock out of work. They do all of that stuff, you know, on the app. So we get that information, we have that data, and we can measure that. And we provide that to a third party so they don't any skin in the game to be able to measure and make sure that through all groups that we are making sure that we are equitable throughout our organization up and down the ladder as well as crossroads to make sure that we stay tight and we stay engaged. Kelsey Willock (20:11) It's incredible that you built that in-house. Not every company has the bandwidth to do that, but it's certainly a tool I'd be interested to learning more about. So one of the last things I'd love for you to leave our readers and listeners with is what's one 30-day experiment listeners could try to boost financial wellness and engagement at the company? Keith Brown (20:31) Yeah, so there's a phrase and I didn't create this phrase, it's by somebody that I listened to on the radio. But it's like, give every dollar a purpose. So if you just take 30 days, so I did this from, was working on my physical wellness, right? And my trainer told me for 30 days, write down everything you eat. Just write it all down. Everything you eat for every meal. And I think that can also translate over to financial wealth. That really helped me see where I was going with my meals. And it was very surprising to see kind of what I ate, when I ate it, how I ate it. And he was able to then design a nutrition program for me to go along with my physical exercise and working out and cadence of that. Just me writing that down. And I think you can do the same thing from a financial wellness standpoint. If you would just take and just give every dollar a purpose, that's the phrase that I... heard from this individual on the radio. Every dollar has a purpose. So if you just write it down and just track what you do with your money, you can do it on your phone and your notes or on a piece of paper if that's better for you and just do that for 30 days, it will be eye opening to you on how you're spending what you currently have. Because I feel like how you master what you have is going to determine how you master what you're going to get in the future. So if you can get discipline, and understanding how you're using your dollars today, tomorrow is gonna make a huge difference for you in the future. And I've done that with, I have four children. I did that with all of them and they now see and understand, because they're all grown. They're 23, 25, 27, and 29. My 29 year old actually just bought a house with his family and he was able to do that and accomplish that and he said, I don't know how they accomplished that. I said, because you did it small steps. You knew what you had, you knew where it went. and what you could afford because you had it documented and you had it set. And you were able to save and do those things on automatic basis based on the information that you had about yourself. You ask most people about their money and they don't know. They don't know the details. They know high level but they don't know the details. But that documentation for 30 days will really be informative. Kelsey Willock (22:47) So one of the things I love about that and it makes me think of the quote, you can't get to where you want to go without knowing where you are. And what you're describing is exactly that. And it might seem small writing down the small dollars you spend every day, but themes start to evolve from that. And you can learn so much about yourself by that reflection period. So really appreciate you sharing that, Keith. Keith Brown (23:10) You're welcome. You're welcome. It's work for me. Kelsey Willock (23:14) So Keith, I just want to say thank you so, so much for being here today. I've learned a whole lot and I particularly loved learning about all the different AI tools, whether built in-house or partnering with other companies that you shared with us today. I also loved learning about your earliest funny memories and how your early childhood has really affected and impacted how you show up at work today. And it's so true how much you deeply care about your workforce. Thank you so, much for being here. I wanna give you an opportunity to share with our guests where they can connect with you, whether it's online or listening to your podcasts. Please let us know. Keith Brown (23:52) Sure, so yeah, I'm on LinkedIn, Keith E Brown, because there's multiple Keith Browns on Attractor Supply, so you can do that. I don't actually spend a lot of time on social media, but I do have an Instagram page, Keith underscore E underscore Brown, so you can look there, and ⁓ you'll see me contributing quite frequently on LinkedIn. That's pretty much the only social media that I use currently. Kelsey Willock (23:58) Okay Wonderful. Well, I can't wait to follow along and learn so much more from you as I did already today. As a quick reminder, this podcast is presented by Aura Finance, a psychology-based financial wellness employee benefit that combines coaching and financial management. Thank you all so much for joining us today and we look forward to having you join next time. Keith Brown (24:38) Thank you, bye bye.