Episode 142 - The Secret Recipe of Servant Leadership with Cheryl Bachelder
When Cheryl Bachelder took the helm at Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen, sales and profits were declining and shareholders and franchisees were unhappy.
But during the nearly 10 years of Cheryl’s leadership, Popeyes stock moved from $11 in 2007 to a remarkable $79 at the time of its 2017 sale to Restaurant Brands International.
So what's the secret ingredient to Popeyes turnaround? Cheryl joined us today to share how her unique strategy of servant leadership proved to be a recipe for success.
Episode Transcript
*Some listeners have found it helpful to have a transcription of the podcast. Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it. The FDE movement is a volunteer-led movement, and if you’d like to contribute by editing future transcripts, please email us.
Henry Kaestner: Welcome back, everybody. The Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast, I'm back here, as always, with William and Rusty brothers.
Rusty and William: Greetings. Greetings. It's good to be here.
Henry Kaestner: Yeah. So I've been looking forward to this interview. We've got Cheryl Bachelder in our virtual studio, so to speak. And I've been thinking a little bit over the course of this time and covid about the chicken wars and just reflecting on the fact that behind the story of some of the greatest chicken sandwiches on the planet are some amazing Christians. And we've got Cheryl Bachelder, former CEO of Popeyes, an incredible leader. I think that I'd be hard pressed to think of a woman leader that's had more of an impression on the movement in the way that we think about things than Cheryl. And just really excited, Cheryl, that you're with us in studio today. Thank you very much.
Cheryl Bachelder: Thank you. It's so good to be with you.
Henry Kaestner: So as we get started with any guest, we'd love to hear about their background. And yours is particularly interesting because you come out of this family background and I want you to talk about the faith component of it and how you grew up and what your faith was like growing up in that family, but also a family of entrepreneurs and one that produced a whole family Thanksgiving table of CEOs. Your family has been really successful in business. And so what was your upbringing like?
Cheryl Bachelder: Well, I guess I'd describe I'm a particularly Midwestern girl, because that's where my life began. My parents were both from Indiana, so my early childhood was there.
Henry Kaestner: Oh, my goodness. We got to stop there. We spent so much time talking about Alabama because Williams from Alabama and I'm from Maryland, but Rusty is also from Indiana. And that's a big deal.
Rusty Rueff: Yeah. I was born in Kentucky, but grew up in southern Indiana, across from the river from Louisville, another chicken town, another chicken.
Cheryl Bachelder: Oh, well, I actually lived there for years.
Rusty Rueff: There you go. I first met Colonel Sanders when at church when I was a kid and I have his autograph somewhere that I have not been able to find my father laminated it for me and I can't find it. It's one of the lost items of my life to have, you know, the colonel's autograph.
But chicken in Indiana and Kentucky, it all goes together.
Cheryl Bachelder: It does. If we had a basketball in there, I'd be perfect.
Rusty Rueff: Absolutely. Let's get back to the important stuff. Yeah, that's right.
Cheryl Bachelder: As Henry implied, I'm the oldest of four kids, so I do have all the good and bad of being an oldest child. Some would call me bossy, my siblings particularly, but I'm the oldest of four. There are three girls. The youngest is a boy. And as you mentioned, all of us today, we're all married. We've had thirteen children between us. We are all believers.
And we all became business leaders, presidents, CEO, or owner of a company in various industries. One runs a hospital, one's in environmental services and one's in the software industry. And I'm in chicken. So very different industries, but similar leadership paths. And to be honest, it was like I grew up with a personal support group in my siblings, I mean, we did life together in every way, faith, family, work. I never really needed a therapist. I kind of had full-time help
Henry Kaestner: Tell us about your parents. So what did they do and how did they start this family culture that produced so many leaders?
Cheryl Bachelder: Well, you're right to call them out, because I always say anything that's happened in our lives with their children is a tribute to their parenting. My parents were fabulous parents. Why? Because I think they focused on the seminal things of faith, development, education. My mother was a school teacher. My father was an avid learner. So we were very focused on education and they had a very strong ethic around family and extended family. So our lives were very rich with aunts and uncles and grandparents who had strong faith and influence in our lives. So we grew up in a really strong place from a family standpoint.
And our dinner table you mentioned our dinner table was story time. And usually my dad, because he was the big extrovert telling us what happened in his workday and how he dealt with and how he thought about it. And they were vibrant, interesting conversations.
Henry Kaestner: So this is an audience, of course, of entrepreneurs, many of whom are parents. What are some things that you saw that your parents did well about? So this love of learning comes through. What was it about the faith part that they were able to be able to talk about faith in a way that was real enough that all four of you are now really serious about your faith? What was it that they did in such a way that you then now provide counsel to the entrepreneurs that are listening today that are parents themselves? What are some things that you saw that they did? Right, and maybe some things that you see as you've been around and mentored so many different entrepreneurs that are some common mistakes that you see?
Cheryl Bachelder: Well, I think of three things that I would attribute some of this to in my family at a young age, they instilled what I call faith practices, pray at bedtime, go to church on Sunday, reading to us from Bible stories and that kind of thing. So kind of what you'd expect kind of normal faith at home practices for young children. But I think the maybe the most important part of a childhood is when you can start to talk about things in those, you know, call it age 10 to 18 where, you know, you can bring up really more complicated things at the dinner table and talk through how you make decisions, how your values come to life and what you do, what's honest, what's got integrity, what would Jesus do? And there was just a constant conversation in our household about moral things from our faith.
And I've had many times after talking about that publicly, I've had young men come up to me and say, I never thought about how important dinner is and talking about stories from work. And I would tell you that shaped who I am as a leader. I can reference dozens of stories that taught me principles of my faith, particularly from my father. My mother was a little quieter but vibrant conversationalist.
So really engaging your children and you know what's good? What's bad. How did I know? What did I decide? What did I lose sleep over? One night, my dad was just beside himself pacing the floor, looked kind of sweaty and pale. I'm like, what's wrong with you? And he said, I have to lay off an entire plant tomorrow. And it's making me completely sick to my stomach. And I learned that night, if you're going to lay off an entire plant, you should be sick to your stomach. He was talking about the families impacted by that. Right, and why he had to do it and how hard it was to think through the impact on people. So don't underestimate and literally my dad and mom took us to work with them all the time. You know, we colored in the conference room and we followed my mom around where she set up her teaching class. And, you know, children need to see what work looks like and how you do things. And so those are a couple of things that really stand out to me. The third one, though, let important people of faith prevent your children, not just you. Our grandparents might have been the most important faith modelers and conversations in our lives. And my parents let us talk to them and spent summers with them and travel with them. You know, I think sometimes we think as parents we are in charge of everything. You know, if you have an aunt and uncle or a grandparent or a good family friend that you think is an incredibly positive influence on your children, let them have relationships like that, because sometimes you don't want to ask your parents certain questions. But this might be a safe place to go when you're really struggling with something important. And so my parents were brave enough to let us be with other people who influenced us greatly.
Henry Kaestner: That's a great word. That's great encouragement. OK, we're going to talk about Popeyes and your book and all of that, but bringing us up to speed you so you coming out of that type of a family. Your first job wasn't CEO of Popeye's. You had a career progression. Take us through right to the time that you become CEO of Popeye's, please.
Cheryl Bachelder: Well, my first job was teaching knitting lessons and they paid me in yarn.
Henry Kaestner: No way.
Cheryl Bachelder: Yes, always start there because, you know, I really believe children should learn how to work. And that was a hugely influential experience in my career. So I learned how to be kind of a startup that was about sixth grade.
And so very important part of my thinking as I started thinking about work at a young age. And you can help your children learn these trades. I went to college, started as a music major, wanted to be a choral instructor in high school, and obviously I did at some point switch to international business. About halfway through college. I was a kid, so I changed my mind and came out of college with an MBA and bachelors, kind of a straight-A student. I don't have much of a party story to tell, but I had really good grades. And then Procter & Gamble called me to interview when I graduated from business school. And interestingly, they called me because I had so much leadership experience on campus. And to this day, I think back on that, I don't think I would have even signed up for the interview.
But Procter and Gamble was that formative first job out of college, and they taught me huge things about how to be a leader, how to run a meeting, how to do a budget, how to launch a new product, really foundational general management skills that I needed to practice. And to be honest, I think Procter and Gamble might have been the most important thing that's ever been on my resume. It's opened more doors. It gave me more foundational skills. You know, I always say pick a first job where you're going to just really get the true MBA and learn from some incredibly smart people. So that set my career on brand management in motion. For the first 15 years of my career, I was leading brand groups are doing brand turnarounds, went from P&G to Gillette, then the food business at Nabisco. And my first general management job was running the plants of lifesavers organizations. Snacks and candy couldn't be more fun. And that is really where I got my stripes in product innovation and brand turnarounds of that. So that's kind of first half. Second half was the big move into the restaurant business. First job with Tom Monahan at Domino's Pizza, a phenomenal faith-based entrepreneur helped him grow that company and make a sale. That was his career finale. He sold the company to private equity. And then that started me on my restaurant leadership journey. I went from there to Yum Brands where I ran KFC. And then, as you said, it ended up at Popeye's. So in short, that's how it went.
Rusty Rueff: That's a great story. We have so much in common that we don't even know. The one thing we don't have in common is you went to IU and I went to Purdue, so we don't have that in common. So I'm sorry about that. But I also got recruited to P&G in brand management, but I couldn't pass that statistics test. You remember that statistics test?
Cheryl Bachelder: Yeah, they had a current events test and a statistics test that worked.
Rusty Rueff: Yeah, I had no problem with the current events, but that statistics was tough…I want to talk about how much your Popeye’s experience sort of hinged on your experience with KFC and then about that transition. How did you go from there to there?
Cheryl Bachelder: Well, I guess it's a story of trials, tribulations, midlife crisis, call it any of those things. When I joined Yum Brands, you know, Yum Brands, the largest restaurant company in the world, is like a pinnacle company to be a concept officer, a president of one of their divisions, huge global company. I mean, I thought I was going to the best end game in the world, right. As president of KFC. Well, it didn't turn out that way. I had a very rough experience there in every respect. The business went, well, almost too good to be true for the first fourteen months of my leadership. And you're starting to think whoa, I've got this. And then the next six months were an absolute nightmare. We got attacked by a PETA organization. We got bad press everywhere we went. There was an anti fast food movie. I mean, it just like rained problems on that business and the business didn't perform. And then I was under a lot of pressure to perform.
Of course, God chose that time to give me breast cancer just for the heck of it. And so I got barraged on the personal front with a diagnosis. I didn't expect a treatment plan. It took almost a year. It was difficult to do the job and do the recovery. And I had teenagers at home. So I look back on that time as a real crucible. But here's the beautiful thing. I needed every one of those battles. And out of getting through those battles and learning experiences, I was prepared to be an entirely different kind of leader. And I often say that everything that turned out well in the Popeye story we're going to talk about is the result of everything I learned from all of those common failures, trips, difficult moments. They forged a different kind of leader in me, and they were the ultimate preparation for the job, the platform, the opportunity that was going to come four years later.
Rusty Rueff: So we want to transition to that story. But before we do, can you dig in a little deeper around you know, what does failure teach you that success doesn't?
Cheryl Bachelder: Well, you know, in one word, it's a humbling experience. It's end of your rope. You know, I didn't have what it takes. I wasn't prepared for that job. I made a couple decisions I’d do differently next time. I mean, you just have to stare at it in the mirror and accept that that would you know, that was you. And guess what? It's much easier to make a list of people you'd like to blame for those problems than it is to look in the mirror and I won't lie to you. I think I did blame other people for a period of time. I was angry at the stages of grief, like, you know, well, I'm sure it was because of so-and-so and…
No, no, no, no, just stop. Stare it down and move into a posture of learning everything you can about who you were then and what the implications were and what you need to think about for the future. One of the things that I needed, I call it my walk in the wilderness because I spent four years untangling what happened during that time period before I took the Popeye’s job outside of time to think about it.
I often say it was like the Israelites time in the wilderness, but at least it didn't last 40 years. So unpacking that and putting yourself in a posture, willing to learn from it, I literally created a journal that became the roadmap for how I would lead for the rest of my life.
What would be the tenets? I stopped being defined by what other people think the tenets of leadership are. I wrote my own tenets out of that experience. And this is really important because I tell you, I was really impressed to work for Yum Brands because I had this really cool plaque on the wall about what they believed and they had great leadership development programs. I really thought they were the pinnacle leadership place, but I hadn't done the work in my heart to define for myself what my pinnacle leadership would look like. And it's that is far more important than the plaque at their office is to wrestle through. What do you believe leadership does? How will you put your beliefs into action? What will that look like? And then you're prepared. By the way, leadership is a great place to get a lot of feedback and criticism. So might as well get prepared for what you believe and how you put it into action, because lots of people are going to second guess you. So I think the maturity that came from that was show get it together, figure out who you are and what your principles are that you're going to lead and do that and stop worrying about what other people think. I don't work for other people. I work for an audience of one. So that was a real important crucible moment in my development.
Rusty Rueff: So you had these four years, you worked through kind of all those things. You get the call to go to Popeye’s. Can you take us to that moment when you sat in that first important meeting for potpies? You know, what had changed in you? What was your mindset going into now, this new opportunity?
Cheryl Bachelder: Well, I literally wrote a purpose statement for my leadership in that time in my life that guided me through that time. And essentially it was that I was going to use the next platform, opportunity or job that I got to teach servant leadership principles. And that's where I landed. That is the leadership model that comes from my faith. And it also is the leadership model, I believe, creates the environment where people perform their best. And so I decided, despite the fact that that's not the cultural norm, I'm going to teach it and I'm going to stand by it until I get performance results on a case study I can share with other people to be more convincing. So I put scriptural references right on the page. My verse became in humility, count others as more significant than yourselves. That became the filter for our mission statement, our values, my personal behavior each day and decision making really using that humility word as the guidepost. And then I really moved in to thinking about what our business model was. And it was franchising rights. Franchising is a zero authority, all persuasion leadership model. Franchise owners do not work for you. You have a contract with them. And like all contracts, you only use the contract when you're in very deep trouble. And on normal days, your job is to persuade people to follow you as the brand leader. And so I knew out of my tenants of leadership that building trust with owners was the number one rule in my job and that I would create a plan and a leadership team around that dynamic of having a very high trust relationship with our owners, which sounds really obvious. It's very unusual for that to occur in franchise. Most franchise owners, the owners of the brand, are at war with their franchise owners. And guess what? Great business performance does not come out of internal warfare. So that's what I wanted to show teach and that within the business model and franchising was a really good place to demonstrate that.
Rusty Rueff: So it sounds like there was certainly a receptivity to your leadership style. You know, obviously they wouldn't have hired you had it not been that. But as I understand it, as we've looked at the state of the business, it wasn't all that good going into it, and you had a lot of work to do, so take us through that work and the difficulty of that and maybe even also because we have a lot of listeners that are maybe going into a new role soon. What did those first 30, 60, 90 days look like for you with your plan?
Cheryl Bachelder: That's a lot of good questions. Taking them one at a time. One piece of context. I was on the board of directors when I got offered the Popeye’s job and it was material because I had colleagues that knew who I was, how I thought, how I operated in the boardroom. And they had an extra degree of comfort with me heading in. And that was really material. Now, one piece of advice.
Rusty Rueff: Can I ask you a question on that, though? I imagine you hadn't have been on the board. Do you think that they would have received you with your style had they not known you going in?
Cheryl Bachelder: You know, I think when you don't know your board, there's a long period of proving who you are and your credibility. And it's all through the performance results of the company. Right. And so here's the other point I wanted to teach. Servant leadership was my platform for turning around this company.
And I've never asked my board members this, but I think they probably would have said, you can teach whatever you want as long as it turns around this company and gets the share price up.
So as leaders, you don't need to have everybody applauding your servant leadership initiative to do it. That confidence has to come from you. You need to have performance results as a result of your approach that builds your credibility as a leader. I had a stock analyst on Wall Street say at an investor conference, why do you talk about servant leadership all the time? And I said, because it's creating industry leading results for you. And he said, that works for me.
So, you know, I really think as people of faith, you need to step confidently into the principles that you think create a place where people perform their best and not expect that everybody's going to clap because you're teaching servant leadership. They don't. You just have to bring home their bacon, right, to prove your point and then you get permission to speak with credibility about servant leadership.
So here's the third thing you mentioned the state of Popeye’s. Popeye’s was a train wreck in 2007. So this was not some premier job. Everybody was lined up. We offered that job to three people that were great and turned it down. So you could argue I was a last resort. I don't mind that I was because it was a perfect opportunity for what I wanted to do. I've done turnarounds my whole life. It's the only way I'm really an entrepreneur because I've worked at big companies, big corporations. But turnarounds are for entrepreneurs only. They're very high risk. Right. So you know what I'm saying? I walked into a burning building. Seven years of business decline. Sales are down. Profits were down. Franchisees were very, very angry. They had four CEOs in seven years. I often say there was low morale. They were discouraged, they were mad. They were skeptical. You could even argue most people were kind of numb because they'd been wandering around in this place of poor performance for a very long time.
It was anything but a wonderful place. And yet it was a platform to demonstrate why hasn't this been working? How could it it works differently. First 30 days. Most important thing I did is I kept my mouth shut and I went on the road for a listening tour. I went to seven cities and had three meetings in every city. So twenty one in total, every city I listened to, franchise owners talked to me. I listened to restaurant general managers talk to me, and I listened to Popeye's customers and I let them tell me what was wrong. And I just brought a notebook and listened. I called it a listening tour. I took my top leaders with me so that we would learn at the same time and year at the same time. And honestly, every idea, every strategy we put in place to turn around that company came from those meetings.
We didn't have to invent anything like they usually say. Right. The answers usually in the room, everybody knew what was wrong. Nobody was fixing it. So listening to them was very, very important. And then we created a plan. I called it a roadmap to success. And then we took the plan on the road in draft form and ask everybody if we got it right or not.
We ask all the franchisees, we ask a lot of restaurant managers, are we on the right track? So listening feedback loop more opportunities for input. I always say you have to go slow to go fast. So we spent a few months building alignment on what the problems were and what we were going to fix before we started fixing anything. Because you can't step in to these roles and just start saying, I've got all the answers and have any credibility. So we developed a lot of that trust and credibility by simply listening carefully, writing down what they said, take it back out and test it, come back home and develop the thought and be innovative and really collaborating during that period of plant formation. Then we put it down on one page and a three pillar strategic plan that we use for five straight years without changing.
William Norvell: Wow, that's amazing. William here. So I want to talk about a few things, but I don't think anyone's expressed a sheer love for the product yet. So I have to stop for a second. Pretty much every Sunday night at the Norville household for the better part of a decade to 15 years, I lived about 500 yards from a Popeyes and it's such a part of my life. And so just so grateful for it, you know, three spicy tenders with biscuit fries. If I want to feel good about myself, I'd add some green beans. But that was just for my own personal enjoyment. But just, gosh, I love the product. I love it so much. And then I waited in exceedingly, excruciatingly long lines for this chicken sandwich, just, oh my gosh, me and a buddy roamed around the city down here to multiple, multiple stores trying to find one. And it took us about a month to get one, but it did not disappoint.
Cheryl Bachelder: Well, you know, you just said what I love about Popeye’s customers. I've never met anything like the Popeye’s customers don't wait in line a week for Popeye's food, you know? And now the only problem it gave me is we were also our dry cleaners were incredibly slow and our franchisees would say, oh, people away, they're happy to wait. I'm like, no, no, no, they're happy to wait. Good.
William Norvell: We didn't prefer to wait, but we will. So it's just an important part of my life and my family's life. And so, gosh, it's just a joy to have you here. And hearing some of the behind the scenes story. So one of the things I would love to switch to see, you're talking about the turnaround a little bit. And we've heard about the listening tour. We've heard about the plan. But then you have to execute it. Right. Walk us through a little bit of what actually happened. How did this happen? I know the story. Right. It's happened pretty quickly, too. So you're planning was rewarded as well. Walk us through how it got implemented and how the turnaround happened so quickly.
Cheryl Bachelder: Well, I just have to point out, because I did ask this question a lot, everybody thinks of Popeye’s as the most amazing fast turnaround in the world. But we just all have selective memory because we launched our turnaround plan in the fall of 2008. So if you remember the collapse of Lehman Brothers or anything like that, you know, complete economic crisis in the country and our big ad campaign, all the money we were going to throw at it was September, October, November of 2008. So we went from a excited, vibrant, can't wait to put our plan into action to a freaked out leadership team that we had just spent a ton in the worst economic time in history and then our promotions, you know, you basically promote something, a new product or a new sandwich or item every month, our first three promotions.
But we actually traded people down to lower priced items, you know, so sales went down instead of up. Right, because you can't do that. And so we made mistakes right out of the box. And the reason people think it was quick was how agile we were in responding to our own mistakes. You know, when they're your mistakes, sometimes it's hard to own and throw overboard your plans fast. But our head of Brand said I was wrong. We can't do that. Bunch of value products threw it overboard. He admitted franchisees were right. We need to get up to these kind of price points to be profitable. We just overnight took our lumps, fixed it, and it was in the spring of 09 that we started to see really, you know, transactional business results, which is fast return around six months when you've been in trouble for seven years is fast. But you have to remember, March of 09 was kind of when everything bottomed out. Our stock had been eleven dollars in November of the year. I started in March of 09. It was two dollars and eighty five cents. And so it was a really fragile environment. Now you really got to be successful because you're getting way too close to the edge of the cliff in the financial markets. And so we stayed highly agile, highly responsive, intense throughout that whole year until the fundamentals of our plan started working. So the fundamentals for us in this business model were we started really hitting that with new products. The new products started really connecting the dots. Our drive thru were suddenly, dramatically faster because we actually bought the equipment for taking your order at the drive through. It was amazingly simple, but important to do. We started being profitable because we took some costs out of the supply chain. So we started to see meaningful move in the markets in that year so that we could tell the street and our board and others that we were starting to see a turnaround. So the amount of tenacity and persistence required in these start ups or turnarounds don't underestimate. Right. We had to stick through that when nobody would have been comfortable saying it's a sure bet Amen.
William Norvell: And on that topic, I want to switch to I've heard you talk before about identity and we talk a lot about that on the podcast here. We try to talk a lot about how to remind ourselves and remind entrepreneurs specifically that their identity is a child of God first and as a CEO or leader second. I was wondering if you could give us a little bit, because I've heard you talk through this so obviously during the turnaround. But even more of, you know, the end of the story, wild success. You led the company to incredible profitability. How would you encourage entrepreneurs to hold that identity intact as they navigate running a company and an organization?
Cheryl Bachelder: A friend of mine who was the president of a Pizza Hut when I was at KFC on my very first day, he said, Cheryl, I just got one thing I need to tell you.
You're never as great as they say you are. You're never as terrible as they say you are.
And that was Mike Rawlings, who ended up being the mayor of Dallas eventually. And he couldn't have told me anything more important about being a business executive than that. And it is very much a faith identity statement. Right. Is your worth, your dignity. How God sees you is not reliant on whether your turnaround plan succeeds or fails. And I you know, I think it took me a long time to mature to a true understanding of what that means. But I have a good friend here in Atlanta who is president of Chick fil A.
And Tim basically says don't get too enthralled in the affirmation and don't get too put off by the criticism. You know, you have to live between. Both of those are unrealistic pieces of feedback. And I think our faith just gives us so much to lean into. I don't have to rely on the world for my feedback loop. I don't have to rely on my neighbors. I don't have to rely on my siblings because, you know, you're going to get a lot of feedback in the world, good and bad. I have the feedback of the creator who designed me for good things, I don't do them every day, but I'm designed for good. He's patient, he's kind, and he gives mercy.
He forgives me when I mess up, which sometimes my brother doesn't, you know, so I think just really being secure and who we are in Christ is the most powerful place to be because you might get fired, your company might go bankrupt, you might get sick, you might have a problem at home. There's going to be so many places in life where if your identity is false, you're going to fall into a black hole of despair without knowing the truth of our faith. And so I would make a particular call out to women on this point because I am a woman and that's the only thing I claim to understand. I really think women worry too much about how others see us and whether we're a success or not, whether we're doing what we should be or not, and whether we look the part or not. All these, you know, physical appearance things women get charged with. We really need to mature in our understanding of our identity in Christ and let go all those voices in our head. The wrong voices.
William Norvell: Hmm. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I know you've written some of these things down in your book, Servant Leadership. I'd love to get a chance. Could you just give us a you know, this is shameless plug minute or two. Tell our audience if they're not intrigued already, if they didn't know you wrote a book and they're not already putting it in their Amazon cart right now, why? And kind of what was the hope behind writing the book? And tell us a little bit about the one you've recently released.
Cheryl Bachelder: Well, thank you. It's called There to Serve. The subtitle is How to Drive Superior Results By Serving Others. I really wanted a case study out of a publicly traded company on how to drive performance through the servant leadership model. So I wanted to refresh the conversation. There were some leaders talking about this 40 years ago and it was kind of stale.
So this is one case study on how to do it. Think of it as a how to book. In fact, there are 40 questions called Dare to Serve Reflections to ask yourself as you go about leadership. If you aspire to be a servant leader, these will give you some real thought starters on things you need to be thinking about developing as a leader. So I wrote it for you to help you be the best leader you can be.
William Norvell: Oh, that's fantastic. And we'll obviously link to that in the show notes, but it shouldn't be hard to find either, from what I can tell. Thank you so much for joining us. And as we always come to a close, one of the things we love to do is invite our listeners to share what God is doing through his word in their lives. And it's amazing to see how that transitions between our guest and our listeners. And the stories we get to hear are amazing. And so I'd like to invite you to share, you know, what God may be telling you through the scripture these days could be something you read this morning that pierce your heart, could be something you've been meditating on for a season. If you wouldn't mind sharing that with our audience, we'd be really grateful. Oh, absolutely.
Cheryl Bachelder: Absolutely. This is a beautiful time in my life as I walk with God and understand what his call is on this season of my life after my corporate career. So I guess what's been exciting about the study time and reflection time, I always viewed my corporate work as developing leaders for a living and particularly servant leadership leaders. And God says, keep doing that. And now I really find myself helping others activate their God given call. That's what this conversation is we're having today. The scripture that's on my heart is Ephesians 4:1 I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you've received. I just want you to leave this conversation charged up to activate your beliefs in your leadership and make a difference in the kingdom. You know, God is restoring the workplace to his intended purposes. And I wake up thinking how fun it is to join him in that process. So I that's what I'm thinking about. That's my passion. And I hope I've given you a sense of that energy as well.
William Norvell: Indeed. Yeah. The only thing that could be better is free chicken sandwiches. But, you know, I'm not I'm not asking, but I'm at but I'm not not asking.
Rusty Rueff: I'm actually surprised that William hasn't asked you, like, OK, we're going to be done. And then before we say goodbye, nobody will be around. You're going to give me that recipe, right? You're going to get there we go.
William Norvell: You can't do it on the air, Rusty. They'll never give it on the air. I know. I know.
Cheryl Bachelder: I've been sworn to secrecy.
William Norvell: I'm sure you have. I'm sure you have.
Cheryl Bachelder: I have to be careful.
Henry Kaestner: Cheryl, thank you very much for your time. Thank you for your leadership. And you're so right when you can get into the sense that it's so much fun to work with God in the work that he's doing as an entrepreneur, I can tap into that. It's really special and it gives you a lot of joy, makes of work, a lot more fun, and then the people around you get a sense that you're having fun and have joy in your work, too. Cheryl, thank you very much for your time. God bless you.