Cord Sachs is a Birmingham-based leadership expert and the CEO of FireSeeds, a company that helps companies find and grow great leaders and “the company behind many of Alabama’s fastest growing companies.”
The full conversation with Mr. Sachs can be heard on the Yellowhammer Radio podcast or in the video above, and a lightly edited transcript of his interview with Yellowhammer’s Andrea Tice and Scott Chambers can be read below.
Subscribe to the Yellowhammer Radio Podcast on iTunes. Learn more about Cord Sachs and Fireseeds at www.fireseeds.com
Scott Chambers:
Welcome back, Yellowhammer Nation. It’s Yellowhammer Radio SuperStation 101 WYDE. Your phone calls and tweets. You can tweet us @yhnradio. Joined right now today by Cord Sachs. So thankful to have Cord Sachs on with us. He’s with FireSeeds. Leveraging 15 years of recruiting and leadership development experience, Cord launched FireSeeds to recruit dynamic leaders and help leader development strategies in world changing businesses. He has been talking with us about the board room to the family room and so many other things that we’re going to continue today talking about living for significance over success. Cord, welcome back to Yellowhammer Radio. How’s it going, man?
Cord Sachs:
Great. Great, Scott, man, glad to be here.
Scott Chambers:
I’m glad to have you. I’m glad to be back on with you because I was feeling pretty rough last week when you were here and I was taken out by the flu just moments after the radio show ended last week.
Cord Sachs:
Got you. Oh my gosh. You didn’t go out and get a tattoo or an ear piercing, did you?
Scott Chambers:
No, I did not. I did not, but Andrea and I were both out with the flu last week.
Andrea Tice:
I am sure that in the case of coming into the studio, I’m sure you’re glad you didn’t do it last week-
Scott Chambers:
Yes.
Andrea Tice:
Because I think that’s why you’re here today.
Cord Sachs:
That’s right. That’s right.
Scott Chambers:
Yes, everyone else were taken out. They were taken out. Cord, I want to continue on our great conversation we had. The past few weeks have been remarkable talking about living for significance over success. Today, I understand we’re going to talk about measuring significance. Before we get going, if you will please first remind us the difference between the end goal of significance versus the end goal of success.
Cord Sachs:
Great, Scott. Yeah, just as a reminder again, success represents all the things that we can acquire in our lives, the tangible things we can put monetary value to. Those are the success-oriented things in our life. Significance is much harder to measure, it’s much more intangible, but it has to do with the impact we can have on people, the value that we add to the people in our lives.
Andrea Tice:
Cord, how do we think about measuring our significance?
Cord Sachs:
That’s a great question, and honestly, since the last show, that’s been the big question. How do we measure that? How do we measure significance? I can measure my success, but I don’t know how to measure significance. I’m going to give a little economics lesson, of all things, to give us a bit of a benchmark as we start to kind of understand how can we look into our own lives and measure our own significance.
I know you guys are probably on the other end of the campus in the journalism and the communications part. I was in the business school, but I’m going to ask you-
Scott Chambers:
The J-school kids, yeah.
Cord Sachs:
That’s right. I’m going to give you a little economics test as we move through.
Scott Chambers:
Oh boy.
Cord Sachs:
We’re going to use probably one of my favorite industries, the coffee industry, as our example to kind of play through this lesson.
Andrea Tice:
Okay.
Cord Sachs:
We’re going to use the coffee bean, and I’ve got a pile of coffee beans I’m going to set in front of you, Andrea, and this is going to represent the lowest economic offering. What is the lowest economic offering called?
Scott Chambers:
Commodity?
Cord Sachs:
Ding ding ding.
Scott Chambers:
Yay.
Cord Sachs:
You can trade stocks or you can … The lowest level is the commodity. That’s right. [crosstalk 00:03:14]
Andrea Tice:
That’s pretty good, Scott.
Scott Chambers:
I try. I try.
Cord Sachs:
It’s very good. I’m proud. If I put a pile of coffee beans in front of you, and you ask for a cup of coffee, Andrea, are you a bit disappointed?
Andrea Tice:
No.
Cord Sachs:
You’re not? So you’re going to be able to drink that pile of coffee beans?
Andrea Tice:
Oh, yeah. I see what you’re saying.
Scott Chambers:
Chew them up.
Andrea Tice:
You got me. Yeah.
Cord Sachs:
I got you.
Andrea Tice:
If they’re covered in chocolate, maybe so, but no, you’re right. It needs to go to another step, it seems like.
Cord Sachs:
That’s right. The lowest level is the commodity. There’s not a lot of value there. A commodity individual is an individual that says “I want to have a non-negative contribution to society. That’s my only goal is to have a non-negative contribution.” So there’s not a ton of our listeners out there that are commodity folks.
Let’s move to economic stage number two. You have to add value to the coffee beans to get here, but as you walk through Publix, you can reach across the aisle, and you can pull out the bag of coffee to take home. What is that economic stage called? It is what?
Scott Chambers:
That’s goods. Goods, something like-
Cord Sachs:
Yeah. Ding ding ding. Absolutely. That is your good. There’s more value that’s been added to the coffee beans. Someone grinded them up, added flavor, they put them in an attractive package, and now you’re willing to pay a little bit more money for the bag of coffee than you were for that pile of beans. So maybe that bag of coffee, each cup will represent about 10 cents now. A couple cents for the pile of beans, 10 cents now a cup at the good level. The good individual, they want to provide the minimum about of value just to keep the status quo. The person says, “I’m just going to do the minimum amount to keep my job.” Some of our kids at home are struggling because they just want to do the minimum amount to just pass and not fail. That’s kind of the level of a good.
Then as we move to the next stage, we’re driving down the road and we see this yellow ambience that is the waffle house. We pull in, and we ask-
Scott Chambers:
Spattered, smothered, covered.
Cord Sachs:
For a cup of coffee, and it is delivered immediately to us. What is this economic stage called?
Andrea Tice:
Well, I think I can get this one right, Cord, so let me redeem myself. I would call that a service.
Cord Sachs:
That is the service.
Scott Chambers:
Yeah.
Cord Sachs:
Very good, very good. Good job, Andrea. Yes, so then another level, it’s called the service. This is the level where you come in with some expectations, you want to get a hot cup of coffee, and as long as that cup is delivered to you in a relatively quick amount of time and it’s hot, you are satisfied. This is at the level where a lot of us and a lot of your listeners begin to engage with other people. They do want to have a satisfied customer. They want to give enough value in their relationship to where people are satisfied with that relationship.
There’s two more stages. There’s five total. There’s two more stages of economic offering.
Andrea Tice:
Oh boy.
Cord Sachs:
Most business schools, they don’t talk about these two. I’m going to kind of paint the picture of the environment that produces the level four, and I’m going to see if you can describe what environment I’m talking about. As you pull in, you smell the ambience and the smell of seasonal coffee brewing. You hear music that’s played. If it’s Christmastime, it’s Christmas music. You look around, there’s leather plush seats that you can go sit down in. When you walk up to make your order, there’s tons of opportunities for you to personalize the order with whipped cream and sprinkles. When they get your order, they ask for your name, and they write it on the cup so that when your cup of coffee is ready, they call your name out, and your personalized cup of coffee is ready for you. All right, where are we?
Scott Chambers:
Starbucks.
Andrea Tice:
Starbucks in-
Cord Sachs:
Starbucks. I was going to give the first hint of the green mermaid. You didn’t need it.
Scott Chambers:
No.
Cord Sachs:
We’re at Starbucks.
Scott Chambers:
They’ve got a lot of my money, Cord, I know.
Cord Sachs:
And guess what? You’re now willing to pay four and even five times for that cup of coffee because of the experience they have provided. This fourth level of economic offering is called the experience level. It’s when we think holistically about other people, and we want them to experience us as positively as they possibly can as we engage. These are encouragers, these are those that really try in an engagement to leave that individual as positively as they possibly can. They do think very intentionally about how they engage. They’re interested over interesting. They think about, they ask questions about the other individual. They add a lot of value in that relationship. That is the fourth level. There are those out there that we call an experience individual, and they offer a ton of value.
There’s one more level. There’s one more level of economic offering. I have actually leave the coffee industry to get to this one because there’s not anybody in the coffee industry that I know does this.
Scott Chambers:
All right. We’re down to two minutes, by the way. Two minute warning.
Cord Sachs:
Two minutes. Here we go, wrapping it up. There is someone in the fast food industry because last night, if you went to the Chick-fil-A on 280, you would notice that they had their Daddy-Daughter Date Night.
Scott Chambers:
Oh, that’s cool.
Cord Sachs:
There are some organizations out there that they think not only about delivering you an unbelievable service with what you expected in an environment that gives you an experience, but they want there to be transformational change. The fifth and final level of the economic offering is transformational change. When you think so holistically about the individual that you’re engaging that you not only want to impact them, but you want to impact the people around them that matter most to them. That’s what Chick-fil-A did last night. They didn’t want to just sell chicken sandwiches, they wanted to provide an experience that actually transformed the way dads that would come into the store engage with their daughters.
Scott Chambers:
That’s incredible.
Cord Sachs:
Always individuals that live with this intent and this mindset to deliver transformational change in the relational investments we make throughout our lives. Five levels of impact, five levels of economic offering, a benchmark to begin to engage the level of significance I have when we measure up to these five areas.
Scott Chambers:
That is beautiful stuff there, Cord. I enjoyed talking about significance and success with you today and look forward to continuing on this conversation next Tuesday, man.
Cord Sachs:
Awesome. It’s always a pleasure. Excited to be here, excited to engage, and getting great feedback from tons of folks for improvement.
Scott Chambers:
Awesome. We’ll talk again next Tuesday. Cord Sachs with FireSeeds. Andrea will see you tomorrow. God bless.
Andrea Tice:
All right.
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