Matt Vance (Co-Host): Welcome, everyone. We’ve got a special edition today. We’re actually recording in person with our guest, Zach Christensen, who’s a good friend of ours. He is the co-founder at Lifestyle Medical. And we’re here at the — I’ve got to make sure I get the exact name right — but we’re at the Business and Innovation Hub, is the new name. It’s a center for entrepreneurship here at Bridgerland Technical College in Logan, Utah. And both Mobrium and Lifestyle Medical are companies here.

Zach Christensen (Guest): Happy clients.

Matt Vance (Co-Host): Yep. We’re part of the community here. So yeah, thanks for being here with us, Zach.

Zach Christensen (Guest): Oh, it’s been a moment I’ve been waiting for for a long time.

Crista Vance (Co-Host): Zach is awesome. He has supported our podcast from the beginning. So yeah — you listen to all of them, right?

Zach Christensen (Guest): 69.

Matt Vance (Co-Host): So why have you listened to all of our episodes? I’m curious.

Zach Christensen (Guest): I think the deepest thing is that when I heard what you were trying to do with it, it rang true to me. I mean, I’ve been a people-first person for a long time. And I think that people worry about profit in business a lot, and I think you’ve got to worry about people first, and then the profit takes care of itself. So I’m a firm believer in that. And, you know, I listen to probably nine or 10 podcasts, so you’ve made it in the top 10 of ones that I make sure I don’t miss an episode.

Matt Vance (Co-Host): So you’re a content maven, just absorbing information.

Crista Vance (Co-Host): It’s very impressive.

Zach Christensen (Guest): I love it. I love hearing all the different perspectives. In Crucial Conversations, a book that I love and recommend often, it talks about when you get a bunch of information, a bunch of feedback, you need to pick the things that are gold and which things are crap, and you just get rid of the crap and keep the gold. So I’m hoping that I just keep mining gold, and I’ve got a lot of gold from your podcast over these times you’ve been releasing. So it’s been good.

Crista Vance (Co-Host): No, for sure. And I think you bring up a great point. A lot of companies, they focus on profit first, and that kind of overshadows the people who are supporting those profits. And I think unfortunately, sometimes that focus can affect their profits — they’re trying to fix this, and it actually can have the backwards effect from what they’re hoping for. And so I know we’ll talk more about that today, but I wanted to share a little bit about Zach and why he’s on the podcast today. So Zach Christensen is a co-founder of Lifestyle Medical and an engineer-turned-entrepreneur who helps visionary partners bring innovative medical devices to life, from concept through FDA clearance, scalable manufacturing, and market launch. Guided by Lifestyle’s FIRM GRIP values — family, integrity, respect, mutual success, gratitude, responsibility, intelligence, and perseverance. I love that.

Zach Christensen (Guest): We had to keep something that we would remember. Firm grip on those values.

Crista Vance (Co-Host): I love that. And it has to do with your lifestyle kind of products, too, so it’s great. Zach leads with faith in Jesus Christ and a commitment to building purpose-driven teams. He’s a husband, father of four, keynote speaker, lifelong learner, and unapologetic bookaholic.

Matt Vance (Co-Host): You mentioned one book. Do you have any other genres that you like to tap into?

Zach Christensen (Guest): Oh, we’ll probably hit on plenty today, but there’s a lot. I listen to a lot of books on my runs, so that’s kind of my way of, you know, decompressing, I would say.

Crista Vance (Co-Host): And then you’re a runner. You identify as a runner.

Zach Christensen (Guest): Thanks. I try and follow in Matt’s footsteps. I’m not as fast as Matt was, for sure.

Crista Vance (Co-Host): But treadmill or outdoor?

Zach Christensen (Guest): You know, lately it’s been on the treadmill, because I’ve been going to the gym with my wife in the mornings, but I prefer being outside. Then I can take a different route every single day.

Matt Vance (Co-Host): What kind of distance do you like to do?

Zach Christensen (Guest): I’ve done a few marathons. I like — you know, half marathon is actually a good distance. Marathon’s a long ways.

Matt Vance (Co-Host): Well, you beat me on the quantity. I’ve only done one marathon, so keep it up.

Crista Vance (Co-Host): Yeah, Matt’s got some knee stuff, so he might be tapering this year, but still running.

Matt Vance (Co-Host): It’s okay. Anything to stay active.

Zach Christensen (Guest): We just got to move from thing to thing.

Matt Vance (Co-Host): Yep. Exactly.

Crista Vance (Co-Host): So tell us about the medical engineering background that you have and how that kind of led to what you have with Lifestyle.

Zach Christensen (Guest): Yeah. So I’m a mechanical engineering grad, but between my sophomore and junior year, I went to a STEM job fair at USU, and I was really intimidated by the Procter & Gamble and the Lifetime Products and Walmart. They all had big, you know, over-the-top things, and I was a little nervous to go talk to them. So I found a lady with just a white tablecloth and a little sign that said IMDS, which was for Innovative Medical Device Solutions. I started talking to her. Before I knew it, I was sitting down, and 45 minutes later, I knew that mechanical engineers could work on medical devices. I had no idea. My dad’s a mechanical engineer, but he’s worked in the aerospace industry — actually in facilities for most of his career. So for me it was eye-opening, because I’d always loved doctors and things like that. The human body interests me. So it was like two things just came together right at the right moment. So then I started as an intern here locally at a company, and I actually saw that company grow from a small group here locally to being a corporate company in the US, and then an international corporate company. So that’s where culture comes into this whole thing. I saw a little, small, tight-knit group where there was lots of flexibility — they made sure you didn’t miss a kid’s soccer game or a daddy-daughter lunch — turn into an international corporate company where they didn’t even know what we did day to day. So there was a lot of frustration around that, and that’s kind of what drove our group to come together and make Lifestyle.

Matt Vance (Co-Host): Was it pretty accelerated growth, or — how long were you there?

Zach Christensen (Guest): Yeah. So I was there seven years. I was an intern for like two of those, and then I was an intern an extra year after I graduated while I did my MBA up at Utah State. So the MBA was a great complement to this whole thing, because I learned the language of business. You learn the language of engineering, then I learned the language of business, and that’s really helped push forward what we’ve done at Lifestyle Medical.

Matt Vance (Co-Host): Yeah, for sure. You really need both. Business has to be paired with any industry to make it efficient, right? So you can make a profit — because yeah, that is a critical piece of the recipe, even though obviously we want to prioritize people.

Zach Christensen (Guest): And I think to that point, Matt, it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. If you focus on people first — I would say Lifestyle Medical is a people company that happens to have some expertise in medical devices. We pulled together people with 20-plus years of experience, and now we’re training the next generation of machinists and the next generation of engineers to have that knowledge and just keep this thing rolling.

Crista Vance (Co-Host): Yeah. And you guys are people-first with your customers, too. You have to be, but you guys 100% are. You take care of their needs and are personable to them.

Zach Christensen (Guest): And I figure the better you take care of your team — because we don’t have employees at Lifestyle Medical, we have team members — the better you take care of your team, the better they take care of your clients.

Crista Vance (Co-Host): And I’ve actually experienced that, because you guys did a project for us with our signage.

Matt Vance (Co-Host): Yeah. Our logo in our office. Little 3D printed.

Crista Vance (Co-Host): Yeah, exactly. So I’ve experienced the people-first approach that you guys have, and you definitely stick to it.

Matt Vance (Co-Host): I think that’s very impressive. So one of the questions we had on the list today was: why does an engineering company care about company culture? We’ve touched on this a little bit, but some people listening may say, “Well, you guys just make stuff.” Why? Let’s be honest, engineers are notoriously not people people.

Zach Christensen (Guest): Yeah. And I take that — you know, that stereotype is true. Some engineers like to be in the corner, throw pizza over the wall to them, and just let them churn on the analysis. I think in our field, our engineers have to interact with surgeons, they have to interact with the customer, right? So that’s one of the things we screen for in our hiring process. They have to have some humanness to them, that they can get along.

Crista Vance (Co-Host): Got to have both skills.

Zach Christensen (Guest): Yeah. Right. But I think back to your question, Matt, about why engineers would care — this is the thought that came to mind: once you taste a good culture, you can’t untaste it. And so when I first started at that previous company, I felt like there was a great culture. I had great mentors, I had great people surrounding me, and in the two years I was there before they got acquired, it was like no one ever left. And for me, yeah, you know, turnover is a thing — now that I’ve learned that in business, that happens. But when you have a great culture, people don’t want to leave. You train them so well that they could leave; you treat them so well that they don’t want to. And I felt that. But then as it got acquired and became corporate America, and then acquired again, it started becoming a quarterly thing — monthly was important. And in product development, we have to take the bigger view. You’re developing something so there’s something great later down the road. And so we have a lot of those projects all going at once, so hopefully there’s always something hitting, but you’ve got to have a longer-term vision. And for me, you’ve got to get out of the quarterly numbers idea, and focusing on people helps you stay out of that.

Crista Vance (Co-Host): Yeah. I think one thing with engineers is the ones who don’t have the people skills, they’re engineer-to-product, and the ones who do see that vision of the people tie-in, they see the end result, which is a person using the device or the product, right? And so if they can tap into both those skills, it’s huge — and huge for business, too.

Zach Christensen (Guest): And I want to highlight something there, though, Crista. I don’t think you want to use a crutch of saying some people can and some people can’t. Culture can be taught, because culture for me is three simple things: it’s how we think, how we act, how we interact. And if you talk about those things enough inside your company, then people can get on the bandwagon. And if they’re not going to get on the bandwagon, there’s probably another place they should work, right?

Crista Vance (Co-Host): Yeah.

Zach Christensen (Guest): So for me, it’s find the people that are willing to get on that bandwagon and believe that it’s important that we have a similar way of thinking, a similar way of acting — like, what do we do — and then how do we interact with others and our clients, and this culture.

Crista Vance (Co-Host): So the piece you’d have to have when you’re hiring somebody is that open-mindedness. Maybe they don’t already have those people skills, but they’re hungry to learn, they’re open-minded, and they’re ready to learn it.

Zach Christensen (Guest): Yeah, definitely.

Matt Vance (Co-Host): I love that. So let’s go a little deeper on how you guys engineer your culture. Talk to us a little bit about some of the initiatives that you have to foster this culture at Lifestyle Medical.

Zach Christensen (Guest): Great question. We’re really intentional about it, and maybe that’s the engineer in me, right? I have to have processes in place to make sure that it’s going to happen, and then stick with those processes, trust the process, and be willing to change it as you go. So at Lifestyle, we really have daily, weekly, and quarterly things that we do to be intentional. And sharing with the audience here, I think these are the things I want you to take away. These are things that you could apply.

So as far as daily goes, we actually have a huddle every morning. I’ve taken this from other learnings — it’s important to have a short huddle where the team comes together. And in that huddle we say, what is our A1 priority today, and what was it yesterday? And if you got that, then you actually get a point, and after you get 25 points, you get a gift card. And so that’s the A1 priority, because of all your priorities, you’ve got A, B, C. You need to know what your A’s are, and then you need to say that one thing that I’m going to for sure get done today. And my thought is, if I have a team of 16 engineers and they all get one thing done a day, times 300 days a year, that’s a lot of stuff we’re getting done, right? We’re moving the needle at that point. So the culture part of that is that we’re holding each other accountable. And then once a week, one of the team members shares on one of those eight values that we talked about earlier. They share just a brief thought, like two minutes, and you’d be amazed at the insights we’ve got. You’d think with eight values that you’d run out of things to talk about. We’ve been doing that for two years, and we haven’t run out of things.

Crista Vance (Co-Host): That’s so cool.

Zach Christensen (Guest): It’s amazing. So that’s the daily thing. The weekly thing is we have a book club we call Lunch of Tears. We’ve studied nine books over the last two years, and we’re just entering the 10th — we start this Thursday with the 10th book. And when I started, I thought it would be a way to just learn some good principles, but it’s turned into leadership training in disguise. It’s a book club.

Matt Vance (Co-Host): It’s leadership training disguised as a book club.

Crista Vance (Co-Host): Not disguised anymore.

Matt Vance (Co-Host): Not disguised anymore. The secret’s out.

Zach Christensen (Guest): No, I openly tell our team that’s what we do it for. And it’s been amazing just to see the growth in our team, and for me that’s important. There’s the skills aspect, but there’s the people-growth aspect that’s critical.

Matt Vance (Co-Host): We’re taking a quick break from our conversation to deliver a special message to the Lifestyle Medical team. Rather than use this time to highlight the company’s amazing products and services, Zach Christensen wanted to give a shout-out to each of you. So to the Lifestyle Medical team: thank you. Thank you to each of you for your dedication to building an incredible culture. Whether you’re living out those FIRM GRIP values or diving into the latest book with Lunch of Tears, your contributions are what make Lifestyle Medical world-class. Now, back to the episode.

Zach Christensen (Guest): And so the first year, we studied communication. We did four books on communication. The second year, we did four books on responsibility, because that’s one of our values. And now we’ve moved to another value, which is gratitude. So our first book this year was on gratitude, and the next three are already planned out for gratitude. And then probably next year it’ll be mutual success. So we move through our values that way. And if you’re interested, I can give the list of those books that we’ve studied.

Crista Vance (Co-Host): Yeah, we can put those on the highlight article for sure. I’m sure there’s lots of people who would be interested in that list and maybe starting their own book club for leadership development.

Zach Christensen (Guest): And really, it’s been powerful, because we started — and this comes back to the principle that you start with why, right? This is a Simon Sinek masterpiece: you always put a why to it. And when we started Lunch of Tears, we started with a why, and it’s an acronym for RISE. It’s Reinforce our chosen culture, having Idioms — like shared, meaningful sayings together — we Synergize, and then we’re focused on Expanding, growing. That’s the first slide that I throw up every single Lunch of Tears, and as we’ve had team members step up and run it, they start with that first slide, the same one every single time. And it never gets old. And I think this might play to your last question you’re going to pose, but it never gets old. You can never talk about culture enough, and I like that.

Matt Vance (Co-Host): Yeah. And your why — it wasn’t just that you’re a bookaholic. You have a whole host of other reasons, but it just coincidentally worked out for you.

Zach Christensen (Guest): And we’ve made our team — I mean, some of our team members, they’re like, “The only book I read was Where the Red Fern Grows, back in elementary school.” And now that team member has been with us for two years, and he’s read nine books completely with us.

Matt Vance (Co-Host): That’s awesome. And I need to read more, too. So Crista’s been getting—

Crista Vance (Co-Host): I was going to say, Matt has recently — like within the last year, okay, two years — decided to be a reader. Because for a large portion of our marriage — I’m a huge reader, always have been — and he has—

Matt Vance (Co-Host): Same thing — shorter stuff growing up, and yeah, for learning. And I wrote a book, but not a huge reader. But yeah, I read a Brandon Sanderson book this year, and now I’m on The Hobbit. So I’m trying to be okay reading things that are—

Zach Christensen (Guest): One thing I love about a book is somebody took 30 years of their life and they have to condense it down to 300 pages. For me, that’s powerful, because you can take deep insights from that. And that’s what I call time travel, right? Time travel is not actually getting into a DeLorean and going back to ’76 or whatever the movie is — it’s actually talking to somebody that’s already been there and learning from them. So some of my best mentors are the ones from the pages of a book, right?

Crista Vance (Co-Host): Yeah. And I loved your first point, which was about doing your two minutes of talking about the values in your huddles. I think so many companies have values and they’re just tucked away somewhere — maybe on the website, maybe somewhere — but they never talk about them. And so they don’t really get ingrained into the people supporting the company. So I think that’s such a good way to make sure that you, as team members, are reflecting those values that you profess to believe, right?

Zach Christensen (Guest): I mean, that’s my philosophy: you can paste them on the wall, but if nobody ever talks about them, they’re not going to know them. And I think that’s where I get the pushback sometimes, like, “Eight values is a lot, Zach.” But for me, when we talk about it once a week in that daily huddle, we only cover each value once a week, so it takes two months to get through the cycle. So that’s enough that you get some turnover in that and get some new ideas flowing. So I don’t take that criticism, you know, that it’s too many values or whatever.

And so that’s the daily, that’s the weekly with Lunch of Tears. And then quarterly, we do an all-hands meeting called the Pulse meeting, and the purpose of that is twofold. Number one is that we talk about new initiatives, and we’ll actually have team members — the pieces that are critical to that initiative — present their new initiatives, so everybody’s on the same page and everybody’s excited about them and they feel the energy from those. And then the other thing is an open Q&A. That’s a time when the leadership team will take any question from anybody. And I claim to not always have the right answers, but if you ask a good question, we’ll get you an answer. And we’ve just seen so much movement. We’re now on the fifth or sixth of those quarterly meetings, and it’s been powerful to see our team be able to come together. And we start out by talking about the values and everything at those meetings, so it’s a time that everybody’s reflecting.

Crista Vance (Co-Host): I think because you have a good culture at Lifestyle, I’m guessing you get some questions each time. Because if you don’t — saying, “Okay, it’s open Q&A, feel free to ask your questions” — you’re probably not going to get those questions if that trust isn’t there. And so developing that foundationally can make something like that really work for you.

Zach Christensen (Guest): But I’m good at making people uncomfortable, too. I’ll sit in silence until somebody asks a question. I know that if I sit long enough, they’ll go.

Crista Vance (Co-Host): That’s a great tip.

Matt Vance (Co-Host): That’s really cool. So Zach, you’re somebody that has — I’m sure this is a compliment — but you have a ton of energy. It’s obvious you have tons of energy.

Zach Christensen (Guest): I take three pills in the morning. Don’t worry.

Matt Vance (Co-Host): There you go. But so maybe not everybody that you work with has as much energy as you — I don’t know. And you mentioned you can’t get tired of culture, you can’t get tired of systemizing it and engineering it in this way. But what do you do to help other people who maybe don’t have as much energy as you to get excited again and again about, you know, kind of the same motions and routines, and balancing everything?

Zach Christensen (Guest): Yeah. I think at this point it’s kind of like a snowball down the hill, right? At this point, it’s gathered enough. We have enough team members that are excited about it. And I guess that’s how we built the core originally — I picked people that I had worked with before, and we brought them together and convinced them to come and give Lifestyle Medical a try. And I think it just rubs off on people. But you’ve got to talk — I think the theory is you’ve got to say something 27 times before your team hears it. They may hear it, but they don’t really understand it until they process it a few times. And that’s why Lunch of Tears is so powerful. We’ve actually talked about a lot of the same principles over and over and over, but it hits differently every single time, and we get deeper as we go and our situations change. So I think just not being afraid. I think leaders sometimes get a little tired of saying the same thing. You think you’re a broken record. But I just want to encourage people in all leadership capacities that you’re not. By repeating the same principle or the same vision over and over, it actually hits home more often.

Crista Vance (Co-Host): That makes sense.

Matt Vance (Co-Host): Yeah. And I think repetition is critically important for learning and retention and the implementation of the things that you’re learning. So one follow-up question that I have as we’ve been talking here: I believe that culture, and values specifically, are behavioral guideposts. They’re there to help guide behaviors and decision-making in an org. And when you have a company made up of people, things get messy sometimes. We have emotions, we have feelings, we have life outside of work. Things can be hard sometimes. There are ebbs and flows of mental health and all sorts of different things. What do you do when an employee isn’t behaving in a way that’s aligned with those values?

Zach Christensen (Guest): Well, this goes back to communication. This is why we study those communication books and how to have hard conversations — because you need to. For me, if you’ve found great people, they’re going to step up to the challenge. And if they show that they can’t live the values, then it’s actually freeing to your team and to them to have them move on, right? Find a place. And once somebody’s worked for me, I’m going to do everything I can — if they’re not the right fit at Lifestyle, I’m going to do everything I can to find the next home for them. But you know, your team watches leadership more than you think. And when they know that somebody’s not acting in accordance with that, they’re just waiting to see what leadership’s going to do. So it puts a lot of pressure on leadership, but you need to follow your values.

And to your point, the way I like to say it is that values make your decisions easy. Because when we sit down as a leadership team to make decisions for Lifestyle, and we start hearing everybody’s input on what we should do on a big decision, sometimes we’ll pause and say, how does that align with our values? Is that mutual success, or are we taking advantage of somebody? Are we acting responsibly in this? Are we being grateful in this situation for what we do have, versus what we want to have? So those things make the decisions much easier.

But back to your question — I think you give people lots of chances. But you’ve got to be clear with them. If they’re not meeting the expectations, there has to be a conversation about it.

Crista Vance (Co-Host): Yeah. And the other team members who are watching you, they’re expecting that, too, for their own quality working there, right?

Zach Christensen (Guest): Well, and here’s the beauty of it. Now that we’ve had these Lunch of Tears for so long, I feel like we’re creating — you know, as a leader, you want your team to start thinking the way that you think, right? And acting the way you would act. So I took a vacation last week for spring break. I was gone the whole week, and things ran just as well as if I was here. But I know that’s because my team, they’ve heard enough from me, and they’ve shared enough with each other, that they’re all buying into the values and making the decisions that I would make if I was here, right? That’s the power of empowering leaders. The power of giving away power is real, because once you can trust somebody and they know what the standard is, you can get way more done than if you just try and do it yourself.

Crista Vance (Co-Host): Yeah. You mentioned the way that the leaders and team members at Lifestyle act this way and exemplify the values, and it rubs off on other people. And you said something earlier that I thought was so good — maybe you can help me. “Once you taste a good culture, you can’t untaste it.”

Zach Christensen (Guest): Untaste it. Yeah.

Crista Vance (Co-Host): And I think that’s such a good way to—

Zach Christensen (Guest): It’s like a good French fry. Once you have a good French fry, you want to go back there. I’ve tasted some pretty bad French fries, but when you find a good place, you just want to go back.

Crista Vance (Co-Host): For sure. And I think that’s kind of the key here, from what I’m hearing — your team members have now tasted it, and that gives them the energy.

Matt Vance (Co-Host): They’re eating the French fries, and then they have energy.

Zach Christensen (Guest): Well, I’ll give you an example. We have some team members that have worked a lot of different places, and we have a few team members that started as interns with us that have never worked anywhere else. And both of them are thriving in our situation, because the ones that have been a lot of different places, they’re the ones telling—

Crista Vance (Co-Host): “So much better here.”

Zach Christensen (Guest): Well, that’s what they’re saying. They’re saying, “Look, I worked at a gas station. I worked at a Hobby Lobby. I worked in other retail places, and it was all about the numbers. It was the quarterly numbers — that’s all that matters.” And so when you find a place that cares about the people, you need to cherish it. So they’re helping the younger team members who have never worked anywhere else realize that we have something special that we’re growing. And I think that that’s possible. I’m learning from mentors that have great cultures in other places here in the valley as well. I’ve sat down and bought lunch for one of my mentors here locally. That’s how the whole thing started — I saw him on a panel, and I said, “Hey, could I buy you lunch?” And now we’ve met six or seven times. He focuses on culture. He sends out a weekly email on Mondays, and now I’m included, so I’m on that company’s email list to get his weekly email on culture.

Matt Vance (Co-Host): That’s really cool. You know, in my mind, you are an exceptional practitioner of company culture, and you’ve applied it in the industry of engineering where you do business. Now, I like to be the antagonist sometimes and build some hard questions. So here’s another question. You’ve attached so much to values. Decision-making becomes easier when you see things through the lens of the values. Behaviors become easier — it’s easier to see what you want and what you don’t want. But are there situations where your values should change?

Zach Christensen (Guest): That’s a good question, Matt. I don’t know if I’m fully prepared to answer it, but I’ll do my best. I think there are situations where you’ve got to be creative, and I think this is where grace plays into this whole thing. We haven’t done everything right at Lifestyle Medical in the four years since we started it. We’ve made lots of mistakes. We paint this picture — this is the ideal, with our values — and we have to make sure that we’re okay with people making mistakes and giving them grace. Because if you look down on that kind of thing, all of a sudden people become private. They can’t trust you anymore. But when I’m open and vulnerable with my mistakes, and they see that, then they’re able to be vulnerable with their mistakes, and then we move forward. That’s the whole thing about engineering that I love, is problem solving, right? Not living up to your values is a problem to be solved. What do we do next? What’s our next right step?

But back to your question on values — do they change? When we set up the company, we picked eight values, and we actually had two of the values change as we went, because they felt more true. But at this point, with the eight values that they are, I feel like we’re there. I haven’t seen a reason to change one of them, but I’d be open to changing one if I felt like there was something better. But I’d only change to something that I felt was more true, or more our culture, as we go.

Matt Vance (Co-Host): I think that was a perfect answer, and it makes sense.

Crista Vance (Co-Host): Yeah, that’s something that your organization obviously exemplifies — being open to learning and growing. I don’t think any companies out there do everything right the first time. And so being willing to take a good, hard look at it and say, is this the perfect, optimized, efficient system or process or value — and being willing to adjust and be better.

Zach Christensen (Guest): Yep. Continuous improvement. It never stops. I think culture is the same way. You just keep figuring it out as you go.

Crista Vance (Co-Host): Yeah. I think a lot of your success is attributed to your openness to learn, the transparency that you guys have as a team, and that open communication. That’s huge.

Zach Christensen (Guest): Yeah. I’ll give you an example — we can kind of wrap here with that question that you asked, Matt; it was awesome. One of the values that changed: originally it was professionalism, because we wanted to look like we knew what we were doing, and really taking care of the person. But we actually changed that to perseverance, because we didn’t want to quit. And I think in an entrepreneurial startup like we were, and have been, we couldn’t quit. You have to keep pushing forward. And in that transition, I felt like professionalism maybe was absorbed up into mutual success. If we’re really thinking about a win-win, then we’re going to be professional in the way that we do business. But perseverance came through, and now that’s part of our FIRM GRIP. That’s what we end with — perseverance, never giving up.

Crista Vance (Co-Host): I really like that, and that sounds like a wise change that you made, because you saw the need for that. And I think having an open mind to change as needed also makes sense — you’ve learned what works right now, and you go with that until there’s new evidence to suggest a potential change. So I think that’s a great place to end, unless you have any final words of wisdom for the conversation.

Zach Christensen (Guest): I’ll just share something from our last Lunch of Tears that we had as we wrapped up our book on gratitude. It was A Simple Act of Gratitude, which is about writing thank-you notes and being grateful. One of our interns was scheduled to do the Lunch of Tears before the last one, and he didn’t get to his last point. I actually looked at his slideshow and saw the last point, and I’m like, “This is amazing. We need to end with this.” So this is how we’re going to end today.

So if you know Lou Gehrig, he was a baseball player for the Yankees, and at the time he was known as the Iron Horse because of how many games he played in a row. And in baseball, that’s hard — you play almost every day, six days a week typically — and he hadn’t missed a game. And then he got diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease. And in his last speech at Yankee Stadium, after he’d been diagnosed and he wasn’t playing, people were thinking, “Oh, he’s going to have some sad story for us.” He stood up there and said, “Hey, look at the people I’m surrounded with. These guys in pinstripes. Could I be surrounded by a better group? I’m the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”

Crista Vance (Co-Host): Wow.

Zach Christensen (Guest): And he died two years later. They didn’t know how long he was going to live, but it was definitely cut short. He was in the prime of his career at the time — a .360 lifetime batting average. But for him to be diagnosed with something that he knew was eventually going to take away — you can still think, but you can’t function with your body anymore — for that to be taken away, and for him to still say, “I’m the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” Powerful stuff.

Crista Vance (Co-Host): That’s amazing.

Zach Christensen (Guest): So that’s what I try — ever since I’ve heard that and reflected on it, that’s what I want to create at Lifestyle. I want to fill it with people that I’m proud to be around, and feel like I’m the luckiest man on the face of the earth.

Matt Vance (Co-Host): Well, you’re making it happen. So thank you for sharing your perspectives here, and great advice. And to everyone listening, make sure to connect with Zach and follow him on LinkedIn. He’s got some great things to share along his journey with Lifestyle Medical. And thanks for listening, everyone.

Crista Vance (Co-Host): Thanks, everybody. We’ll see you.

Zach Christensen (Guest): Thanks, Matt. Thanks, Crista.

Matt Vance (Co-Host): Thanks for listening to the Culture Profit. If this episode gave you a useful idea, share it with a leader building a better workplace. Production of the Culture Profit is sponsored by Mobrium, helping employers turn employee feedback into stronger culture and reputation. Learn more at mobrium.com. Until next time, go find one way to prioritize your people, and watch your profits grow.