Why Your Best People Quit (and How to Keep Them Loyal)

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Your Best People Don't Quit Because of Money

They quit because your culture is broken.

I see it every week. Contractors offering competitive pay, good benefits, even profit sharing. And their best foreman still leaves for a competitor. Their top salesperson quits with no warning. Their most reliable crew members just stop showing up.

They think it's about money. It's not. It's never about money when you lose your best people.

I know because I lost everything in 2007 learning this lesson the hard way.

I had built a $25 million contracting business. Revenue was strong. We were growing fast. I thought I'd figured it all out. Then within six months, my bookkeeper embezzled $500K, my best friend and business partner wanted out, and my top salesperson left to start a competing company.

I sat on the front steps of my big house, watching everything crumble, trying to figure out what went wrong. In prayer, one word kept repeating: "Serve, serve, serve."

That's when I realized the brutal truth. My culture was successful on paper but miserable to work in. High turnover, constant drama, people who only cared about their commission check. I had built a business that ran like a machine but felt like a prison.

I thought culture was fluffy BS that consultants sold to weak leaders. I was wrong.

After 27 years in contracting and coaching 1,200+ contractors, I can tell you this: culture eats strategy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You can have the best processes, the tightest operations, the strongest sales systems in the world. But if your culture is broken, your best people will leave, your average people will do the minimum, and you'll be stuck doing everything yourself.

This week in Contractor Training Room, we broke down exactly why your best people quit and how to build a culture so powerful they never want to leave. The live session walked through the 5 ingredients of magnetic culture, the 3-part strength test to diagnose what's broken, and how to live your culture at each stage of growth from $250K to $10M+. If you want the full framework with the visual blueprints and stage-specific actions, watch the replay here.

Here's what I covered:

You Have Two Choices: Design Your Culture or Let It Design Itself

Every business has a culture. The question is whether you're building it intentionally or letting it happen by default.

Culture by default creates chaos. People talking behind each other's backs. Constant drama. Finger-pointing. Employees who don't care about quality or customers. High turnover. You wearing all the hats because nobody else will step up.

You'll know you have chaos when people are going in different directions, nobody's aligned, and you're the only one who seems to give a damn.

Culture by design creates order. Everyone aligned. All going after the same thing. Behaving the same way. Hand in hand, moving together toward something bigger than any individual could achieve alone.

You'll know you have order when your team wants to be at the office, hangs out together outside of work, and recruits their talented friends to work with you.

Here's the difference: In chaos, your best people are constantly looking over the wall at other companies, wondering if the grass is greener. In order, other companies' best people are looking over the wall at you, wondering how to get in.

The choice is yours. But you can't avoid making it. Not deciding is deciding. If you don't design your culture, your worst performers will design it for you.

The 5 Ingredients of Magnetic Culture

Think of culture like building a strong column. You start with a foundation and add layers that make it stronger with each stage of growth.

Ingredient 1: The Dream. This is your emotional reason for building the business. It's personal to you as the owner. Where do you ultimately want this to go? Some people want to sell their business. Some want to hand it down to their kids. Some want to build a leadership organization that impacts thousands of lives. There's no right answer, but you need to know yours. Write it down. Make it clear. Because the difference between a dream and reality is whether you wrote it down or just kept it fuzzy in your head.

Ingredient 2: The Vision. This is what your business will look like in three years and how your team benefits from building it with you. Your vision gives everyone sight. It shows them exactly where you're going and why it matters to them. Not just to you. To them. What changes for them if they help you build this? Do they grow? Do they learn skills they didn't have? Does their life change financially? Your vision is your sales pitch that you give constantly, every day, to everyone on your team.

Ingredient 3: The Purpose. This is your why. The reason you do what you do. Your rallying cry that makes people want to jump out of bed and come to work. When I owned my contracting business, our purpose was to make it easy. Everything we did, we asked: How do we make this easier? For our crews, for our customers, for insurance adjusters, for everyone. That purpose guided every decision. And people bought into it because they believed in it. Everybody buys your why. They don't buy your widget.

Ingredient 4: The Core Values. These are your non-negotiable behaviors that define how you operate. They're not words on a wall. They're how you act when nobody's watching. I had "honesty" as a core value. One day, a team member came to me excited because an adjuster had overpaid us by 14 squares. Easy money. I walked her to the wall where our values were posted and asked if she was serious. Then I picked up the phone with her, called the adjuster, and told him he'd overpaid us. He was silent. Then said he'd never had a contractor tell him that before and asked for our name. He sent us 81 jobs that year. That's what living your values looks like.

Ingredient 5: The Mission. This is your target for this year. Not a mission statement. An actual military-style operational mission. "Operation Beachfront." "Operation Takeover." Whatever you want to call it. Something concrete you're rallying the team around, something measurable, something you're all shooting for together. This gives you a target to talk about constantly and measure whether you're on pace.

These five ingredients create the foundation. But having them isn't enough. You have to live them.

The 3-Part Strength Test: Is Your Culture Healthy or Dying?

I'm going to give you a simple test. Three questions that will tell you immediately whether your culture is strong or at risk.

Think of these as the three sides of a triangle. The strongest shape in nature. When all three sides are solid, you have alignment. When any side is weak, the whole structure collapses.

Side 1: Belief. Do your people believe what you believe? This is the first question. If they don't believe in your vision, your purpose, your mission, your culture is at risk. They're just collecting a paycheck until something better comes along. 90% of people who come to work for you quit on day one. They don't tell you. But they've already decided it's a job, not a career. They're still looking. Your job is to make them believers on that first day. Show them something different. Show them there's a purpose, there are values, there's a mission worth being part of.

Side 2: Behavior. Do people behave the way you behave when nobody's watching? This one will sting if you're honest. If you're acting out of character from what you expect, everyone else is too. The second you let something slide, you've told everyone it doesn't matter. If honesty is a core value and you're dishonest, it's just a word on the wall. If innovation is a core value and you're not innovating, it's meaningless. Your team models you. Always. Culture is defined by what you do when you're not in the room, but it's modeled by what you do when you are.

Side 3: Belonging. Do they belong or are they just collecting a check? Are they doing the minimum or pushing to reach their potential? Here's how you know if belonging is working: your team wants to be at the office. They want to be in community with each other. Outside of work, they hang out together. That camaraderie is what people are starving for. They're in their own little silos of technology and isolation. They're missing something. They want to belong to something that on their own they could never achieve, but together they can accomplish greatness. If you have that, they'll never want to leave.

Belief. Behavior. Belonging. If all three are strong, you have a healthy culture that will scale like crazy. If any one is weak, you're at risk.

How to Live Your Culture at Each Stage of Growth

Having the five ingredients isn't enough. You have to live them differently depending on where your business is.

Solo/Tech Stage ($0-$250K). Your focus is to model the culture. You literally are the culture. There's only you. So you have to be consistent and you have to care. This is based on your guiding principles. Who are you? What do you stand for? That's your culture foundation.

Operator Stage ($250K-$1M). Your focus is clarity. You've created your dream and vision. Now communicate it daily. Get in the habit of engaging everyone with where you're going and why it matters to them. You might start working on purpose with the team. Involve them. Ask them what words define you. Build the culture together.

Entrepreneur Stage ($1M-$5M). Your focus is alignment. Drive home the purpose, core values, and mission. Get your values in place so you can hire toward them. Make people feel like they belong. This is critical. If someone doesn't feel like they belong in the first 90 days, they're already mentally gone. Create that first-day experience that shows them this is different, this is special, this is worth being part of.

Business Stage ($5M-$10M). Your focus is to codify and reinforce. Get everything documented. Talk about it all the time. Recognize people for living the values. Recognize people for helping achieve the mission. This is where you train to it, measure it, and celebrate it. Make culture a profit driver, not just words.

Owner Stage ($10M+). Your focus is to delegate it. If you've done everything right up to this point, you've empowered people and built leaders. Now find your culture champions. Let them lead the culture. Trust but verify. Don't walk away completely. But let your leaders own it and reinforce it without you being the answer to everything.

Expansion Stage (Beyond $10M). Your focus is to export it. Scale that culture to every division, every trade, every location. Keep it alive across silos. Trust but verify at scale.

The Moment Everything Changed for Me

Let me take you back to 2007. Sitting on the front steps of my big house. Everything crumbling around me.

I had built what looked like a successful business. $25 million in revenue. Big house. Nice trucks. All the external markers of success. But inside the business, it was miserable.

High turnover. Constant drama. People who only cared about their commission check. I thought culture was fluffy BS. I thought real leaders focused on results, not feelings.

Then my bookkeeper embezzled $500K. My best friend and business partner wanted out. My top salesperson left to start a competing company. All within six months.

I was sitting there, trying to figure out what went wrong. In prayer, one word kept repeating: "Serve, serve, serve."

That's when it hit me. Leadership, and culture, isn't about me. It's about them. It's about creating an environment where people can do their best work, achieve their goals, and be part of something meaningful.

I had built a business that was successful on paper but empty in reality. And it nearly destroyed me.

I rebuilt from the ground up. I created the Culture Blueprint Framework specifically for contractors. This is Chapter 2 of The Contractor's Blueprint. And it's helped hundreds of contractors build cultures so powerful that A-players recruit other A-players and nobody wants to leave.

The contractors who implement this framework typically see 70-80% reduction in turnover and 40-50% improvement in productivity within 6-12 months. Not because they're working harder. Because they finally built a culture that people want to be part of.

What's Killing Your Culture Right Now

Let me tell you the most common mistakes I see:

Mistake 1: You didn't involve the team in creating it. Top-down culture dies fast. If you came up with your values in a room by yourself and posted them on the wall, nobody believes them. Involve your team. Ask them what words define you. Build it together.

Mistake 2: Your Core Values are generic corporate BS. "Integrity. Excellence. Innovation." Every company has these. They mean nothing. What makes YOUR culture unique and impossible to copy? Find that. Own that.

Mistake 3: You say one thing but do another. Especially when it's expensive or inconvenient. This kills culture faster than anything. If you say honesty matters but you're dishonest when it costs you money, it's just a word on a wall.

Mistake 4: You hired for skill but ignored culture fit. One bad hire ruins everything. I don't care how talented someone is. If they don't fit your culture, they'll poison it. Hire slow. Fire fast.

Mistake 5: You've never fired anyone for violating a Core Value. So nobody believes they matter. If honesty is a core value and someone is dishonest and you keep them because they're a top producer, you just told everyone that money matters more than values. Your culture just died.

Your best people don't quit because of money. They quit because your culture told them they don't belong.

Now you know the five ingredients. You know the three-part strength test. You know how to live your culture at each stage of growth.

The question is: are you willing to do the hard work of building a culture intentionally?

Start with the strength test. Ask yourself: Do my people believe what I believe? Do they behave the way I behave when nobody's watching? Do they belong or are they just collecting a check?

If any answer is no, you know where to start.

One ingredient. One behavior. One week. That's how you build a culture so powerful your competitors can't steal your team.