The Culture of Trust You Create When You Buy Local With Lighting
Hey there, welcome back to the channel.
Of course I’m here with Andrew from Natural Light Edmonton. And we’ve been talking about something that is really on our minds lately, especially as Canadians and entrepreneurs. Where do you spend your money? I think that’s important and as Canadians, everyone talks about, buy Canadian. But I think it goes deeper than that. It goes deeper than just buy Canadian because in our local area here, we are in the Edmonton area, but wherever you are in Canada or the United States, if you’re watching this from there, where you spend your money makes a difference. And I think we’re just going to have a quick discussion and conversation about that.
Of course, Andrew, your business is Natural Light Edmonton. So, you do outdoor permanent Christmas lighting and the product that you install is a Canadian company called Gemstone Lights.
Yeah.
So, let’s get into this a little bit. When you came today in the office and we were just having a quick discussion, what kind of got you started on this topic?
Where You Spend Your Money Makes a Difference
Yeah. I’ve just been thinking a lot about, from a personal level, I’ve had this conviction for quite a long time and then trying to work it out into my business. So yeah, I’ll start with what the conviction was. Just that what I spend my money on and actually who I spend it on. So even from company to company actually says a lot about who I am, but also really does make a difference. It affects our economy, when you were just talking about buying Canadian and then even within that buying locally within Canada, if it’s within your province, within your town, within your community, but then even beyond that, you mentioned beyond just Canada, but who is it that you’re actually supporting? Are they people who are also supporting a strong culture, a strong economic growth, or is it people who really could care less?
We could care less about, and maybe it’s not even that people don’t care. Or maybe just indifferent. It’s very easy to get just caught up in yourself and your individual and I get that too and not everyone has to be super involved in economics and politics and all that. But there is something to be said about having a vision. And I think, if someone isn’t able to kind of look at their own business outside of simply their own profits, their own I need this much more to buy this next thing I want. If you’re not looking beyond that, your business probably isn’t going to last long term. And to me, long term is more than a few years. Long term. I mean, frankly, long term to me is probably a lot of people think, but I look at a good start would even be a 20 to 30 year business is probably much longer than what your average business even aspires to actually to be honest.
Yeah. So, what it sounds like to me is it’s not just about making money, having a business. Yes. It’s there to serve the entrepreneur, the guy who’s taking all the risk, who is putting their blood, sweat, and tears into building the thing. And they should be rewarded for that.
It goes more, if you can correct me if I’m wrong, it goes more into what is the character of the founder? What is the character of the business? What are your values? And do those values match up with your values? It may be something you care about, may be something you don’t care about. But I know for myself and the companies that we work with, I work better with people who align with my personal values.
Yeah, for sure.
Simply because I want people who are working with me and I want to help them grow if they number one are customer focused. Do they care about their customers, right? Do they care about the quality of workmanship? Do they care about developing and building their people? So let’s talk a little bit about that regarding Natural Light seeing as this is your channel, maybe tell us a few of the values that are important to you.
The Character of the Founder and the Business
Yeah, I think, I mean values that are important to me and I mean me and my family, we are unapologetically strong Christians. But in saying that too, we really value from a business, how does my Christianity pour over into my business? I think with regards to ethics and culture, wanting to build a strong culture that is, in essence of my faith is that you would treat others how you want to be treated and actually you would love others above yourselves and think of others more highly than yourself.
So in that I would look at my business, obviously I need to make money. This isn’t a volunteer, this isn’t a charity. My business would be under and that wouldn’t be the best for my clients either because then I wouldn’t be able to serve them. But that being said, having that sense of wanting my goal, a huge part of the goal of my business is actually the quality I give my customers. It’s not just a offshoot of it. It’s not just a result. It’s the point. It making things beautiful, making things of high quality, of just good repute, all those things. Even the way I present myself in my business and the way I talk, the way I act. And I think these things really do matter.
And I think, when you were talking earlier, kind of going a little bit off of that, I think when we look at culture and people, we want to help people out in general. People, I want to make a difference in life or whatever. And I think we often actually miss the greatest way that we can make a difference in life is actually our day-to-day living. Who we give our money. And by give, spend our money on essentially. If you’re buying lights, you’re not giving me your money. You’re buying a product. But that in itself is actually the building of society. Society is built on businesses, on relationships, on these things.
Poor societies and by poor not just financially poor, but cultures and societies that are not functioning well. It is actually because good businesses are not properly supported and maybe they’re just not even existing. Everything is just nickel and dime and what that creates is actually a culture of people just always wanting to get the best of someone else. When you’re actually nickel and diming someone, you’re actually in a sense trying to get the better of them.
Mhm.
And I think we have to, and it’s not saying we can’t want a deal or that we shouldn’t shop that we should, oh just blindly say yes to whatever price that someone offers. That’s also foolish. But realizing nickel and diming really just it’s not how we’d ever want to treat, we never want to be treated that way. At least we shouldn’t.
If you like being treated that way, I would encourage you to think otherwise. But yeah, we want to invest in one another. A good economy, a good society wants the best for everyone.
Mhm.
And so that does look like caring who you’re getting to do your lights, not just necessarily the cheapest or even if someone actually does offer a good service, but they’re not good people. You might not want to go that way. You might be like, I just think we’re not on the same page.
Well, it brings to mind, because I did a study of some of the luxury brands this year just figuring out who are the people behind these brands. Why they are the way they are, how they got their start. And take Rolex for example. Rolex, they’ve created exclusivity, they’ve created scarcity. But when you actually look at what they’ve been able to accomplish, all the different parts of that watch, it doesn’t get the actual title of superlative chronometer unless it’s been fully gone through and inspected by a master who’s been working with Rolex for decades.
Every watch is touched by multiple hands. They smelt their own steel. They make their own gold. Everything is made in their factories so that they have control of the whole process along the way. So when you get that Rolex, it’s not just a watch. This thing can do my heartbeat, see how fast I’m going, track me on a GPS, and a Rolex can’t do that, but a Rolex is a fine piece of jewelry that you can hand down for generations. This thing will die in probably a couple years and it’ll be useless. I’ll throw it in the garbage. It serves its temporary purpose.
Exactly.
Which is fine. But thinking about that, they started out, they wanted to be the best. They wanted to make the best wristworn watch because there wasn’t one that was accurate, deadly accurate, and they wanted to be able to do that. So, they figured out how to do that and then they figured out how to scale that.
So thinking of that, that’s the kind of companies that I want to be aligned with is ones that actually want to be the best and provide the best experience and the best products for their customers and always seeking to improve and get better.
Yeah.
Right. Not just settling for status quo, but wanting to improve and be better year after year. And who knows what Natural Light’s going to look like in the next 10 years. I mean, you’ve only been in business a year, year and a half.
Yeah.
Right on your own doing this.
Who knows what it’s going to look like and how it’ll develop. But if the companies that I work with, I know they’re going to be successful if they’re not solely focused on dollars. Because if you’re focused on money, that is not good enough. That is not good enough. There’s one podcast I listen to. You probably don’t listen to it. And it’s not family rated, but it’s okay. What they say is good. Andy Frisella, he has a podcast and his mantra has been personal excellence is the best rebellion.
So being personally excellent in what you do and that is personal grooming. Are you going to the gym? You eating right? Getting enough sleep, drinking water, going to church, all these things, right? Being personally excellent and then being that example in your community, being that example in your business and for your team brings everybody up. So I think that’s what we’re talking about today.
So yeah, no, I would agree with that. I think we in a society where we are just constantly bombarded by thing after thing. I always hate to put it this way but it’s the ad society people know. We’re just, it’s billboard after billboard, commercial after commercial, hit after hit, reel after reel. And it’s like, I mean one, yeah talking about podcast but a lot of podcasts will address this too, it’s dopamine hits after dopamine hits and we’ve really lost this sense of actually channeling that towards the proper things. You can actually get a proper, quote unquote dopamine hit through good work. But the problem is we actually look at the work as the thing. We don’t actually look at the work as the value. We look at the finish.
And so we’ve lost the whole value of going to work. It’s just basically I get there to get to the end of the day and then it’s do whatever I want to do. It’s me and my time. And really, I get that and there is value to having our own time, but there is a much glorious, a much more greater goal to be had when we look beyond simply ourselves and our community, our friends, even me and you as partners in a degree of business and your business and my business, you helping me with my advertising and marketing and all these things.
It’s wanting the best for both of us. It’s wanting to see good businesses, great businesses hopefully thrive and build a culture of great things. And essentially, I mean I’ll be unapologetic about it to in time be rid of the not so good, the crappy businesses. Nobody wants them out there. Nobody wants the cheap garbage version.
And it’s that when we don’t know the difference, right? In fact, often and this is what I hear from a lot of people is if you feel scammed and taken and people even impersonate good businesses, oh yeah, we have the same product, we have the same thing. And then it’s when you find out it wasn’t and maybe they did a clean install or whatever and lots of other things in business, but when you find out you’ve basically been had that someone scammed you, that is just an awful feeling. And we shouldn’t have that. There should be a degree of accountability but also trust and that’s a hard thing to find.
We don’t have really good, it’s not like you can just Google, I mean we do this but it’s not always that accurate, Google best business and if you do that maybe you’ll find something but then also we’re like well how come there’s so much more money? It’s probably a big part of it and then it’s just a decision of whether we want to in business-wise whether we want to spend that or not.
Yeah. I think that’s just a big part of, nobody wants to be owning a business that’s not successful. And by successful, obviously more than just making personal money. No one wants to work for a company like that. Nobody wants to just be a slave to their 9-to-5 and just hating what they’re doing.
Yeah.
And not finding good purpose to it because they know what they’re selling or what they’re making or what they’re offering is garbage. And a lot of people know that that’s what they’re offering, right? And so yeah, having that mantra of just trying to do our best in every way.
Yeah.
Trust Comes From How You Respond When Things Go Wrong
One of the biggest parts of doing your best in every way is when you screw up, cuz everyone screws up, it’s how you respond to that, too. If I make a mistake on an install, if something goes wrong, you will not hear any of my clients be like, “And he never came back to fix it.” Or he really, “Well, I don’t know if I need to fix that. It should be, you know.” It’s taking responsibility saying hey, I apologize. I missed this or I didn’t do this. And that actually says probably as much or more than the initial product itself is the willingness that when you make a mistake or when something doesn’t go the way it ought to have that you address it and you try to make it right to the best of your ability.
Yeah.
Mhm. And I think people do appreciate that.
Yeah.
Especially in a trade where, well every trade, there’s things that don’t go exactly right. There’s always oopses and uh oh and that kind of stuff that happens. But you’re right, it’s how the trades person and the company deals with the and fixes the problem, makes it right, whatever.
And it’s not to say, avoid working with large companies because there’s a lot of really really big companies out there that are multi, that they go across country and whatnot. And it’s not to say that you shouldn’t work with them just because they’re big, but look at their reputation and look at how do they treat their employees and how do they treat the customer, right?
Yeah. Well, and onto that point, I mean, at this point, I do offer and I use it to my advantage and I think it can be an advantage is that I am a small company. I mean, my goal is to get bigger. I want to get bigger, but I want to do it. And I will only do it a certain way. And so that means that yeah, it’s going to take time. It’ll take while I train people, it’ll take a few jobs where I probably have to go back and be like, “Okay, this wasn’t quite done to our standards, so I’m going to have to go back and fix it.”
But that’s just a reality. No one starts as the CEO. No one starts as the master tradesman. Everyone needs to work their way along. It’s more what does the master tradesman, how does he respond to his pupil when they make a mistake and then how does he respond to the client that the pupil was working for, right? So it’s, do you need to go back? Do I need to go back and fix this or can I get my people to go back and they do it right?
And at the end of the day I don’t think many people have an issue with that if someone does something in error, but it wasn’t intentional or negligent. And if it’s a big company, yeah, big does not mean bad. I mean, at the end of the day, it’s just too often we do see as companies try to grow, they often things get dropped and then it’s not just the dropping that’s the issue, it’s the response to the dropping, right?
We all know there’s going to be pains and the customers are likely to feel a degree of that pain. But as long as the result is still the same where we’ll come back, we’ll get it fixed. I mean, that I think says it all. I don’t think many people would have a huge beef with that at the end of the day. As long as they know that they’re confident, hey, yeah, I’d be happy to have this younger guy do the job as long as when it’s done, if I have an issue, you’re going to come back and adjust. If something’s not done quite right, you’ll come back. I mean, yeah, that’s most people would actually be excited to.
Oh, for sure.
Yeah. It’s like the one who goes and gets the haircut from the first time hairdresser. I mean, some people might not want that, but as long as the actual barber’s like, “Hey, if they make a mistake, I’ll fix it.” I mean the rest go at it, right?
Yeah.
So anyway, yeah, I think that’s just a big part of it is it is just the processes. It’s never, it’s not even the, it is processes, but it is the standard and always at the end of the day, by the end of the job being like and this will be the outcome no matter what. I’m going to make sure this is how it is finished. Whether it’s me personally, whether it’s my employee or whether it’s even a subcontractor, it’s I will come back and make sure it is done to the standard that we hold and that our customers expect.
Yeah.
So yeah, and as you grow, just like other large companies that have grown, there’ll come a time when you can’t be doing that guy. You can’t be that guy who goes out and does the finish but you should have people in place who will go out and do those things. Right.
They’ll have gone through the process.
That’s right. And yeah, go back to the big companies. They didn’t become big because they’re ripping people off. You can’t get big on a bad reputation.
Not for long.
Not for long. You have to have a good reputation, right? So, I don’t mind working with larger companies. And if they charge me a little bit more, well, gives me a little bit extra peace of mind as well.
Yeah.
Because then, okay, well, they’re probably not cutting a corner in order to get this job done, and if I have any problems, I can contact them, right? So that’s very important.
So let’s talk about developing culture and I was thinking about this when we were talking, look at the large cathedrals and castles and stuff in Europe. Some of those cathedrals took hundreds of years to build. Hundreds of years. So the person who designed it never saw it finished.
No.
And they did it as a praise to God because they thought it was their duty to make this thing for God, right?
Beautiful. Yeah.
And absolutely awe inspiring and beautiful. And I think there’s multiple trades people who were involved in that. People who did all the stonework, the people who did the making sure the architecture was right, the drawings, the engineering, the carvings, the artwork, the glass, everything that goes into them.
There’s a lot of people who were there and spent their entire lives working on that church.
Yeah.
Can you imagine that?
Yeah.
That’s incredible. And we don’t have that. Like you said, we start Monday trying to get through to Friday.
Yeah.
First off, we’re just trying to get to the end of the Monday and then we try and get to the end of Friday and then we’re like, “Oh, thank God. Now I can do something that I really enjoy.” I think if you’re wanting to do something, if you don’t have something in your life that you really are enjoying, maybe it’s a trade that you got to pick up, right? Maybe if you have some desk soul sucking desk job, it might be time for you to look into a trade.
Yeah.
Because Canada is short of trades, short of building trades. All of them. All of them are short. So maybe you want to pick up a hammer, become a framer, drywall, paint, electrical, or even installing gemstone lights.
Gemstone lights. Yeah. Well, and I think often too to be honest, what you do matters for sure. And I think some people should probably, the quickest and easiest most obvious answer for some people is get a different job whether it’s a different job or for a different company. Because that can make a difference too.
But I do think one of the biggest issues that people do have is what they’re doing with what they have. I’ll be honest, when I look at the way I value my life and I work my way backwards and so I look at it and say I have a morality I want to keep, a family I want to provide for, a church, a culture, a people that I want to support and grow. And so if the best way to do that was for me to literally shovel dung at the zoo, I could do that with a smile on my face five, six days a week, if I knew that was actually the best way to accomplish the greater goals.
And I think when we often mistake our nine-to-five or whatever it is as the greatest thing that is just, you can definitely take a lot of value in your job, don’t get me wrong, but I think often times we then work for a large part of the money that we get. And so then what am I doing with that money? What am I doing with, this is my time that I’ve given to this thing and then I get paid for that thing, but what am I actually accomplishing with the responsibility that I’ve now been given with what I have?
And I think that is often what makes people actually most sad and depressed is not actually, I think someone has to do the hard and ugly jobs. They’re not meaningless jobs. If people like going to the zoo, someone has to clean up after the animals. It’s not pointless.
It’s actually what are you doing with what you have? Are you building a strong family or strong relationships with people, community, all these things? And that is culture. That is the definition of what will build good culture. If you think society’s going to hell in a hand basket, it’s not all exterior forces. It literally is just people focusing on the right thing and not being distracted by useless meaningless things. Too much, right?
Like too much Netflix. We have Netflix, but not too much Netflix, not too much video gaming, not too much of these things that then end up we wake up the next day and we’re like, you’ve actually done nothing. You’ve actually accomplished. You worked your hours and you did accomplish something at your job, but then with what that gave you, you decided to do nothing. It’s like you were given talents and then you just wasted them.
And you’re going to feel that waste more than anyone else, to be honest. You’re going to feel like I did nothing.
Building a Good Culture Starts With Every Dollar You Spend
And that’s essentially going back to what we started with with even who you’re hiring, company like mine and Trevor and many others. It’s when you know you’ve supported something well. This is why people even feel good about giving a can of food to someone who’s hungry. You see the need, you filled that need. You felt good. We ought to rediscover that in the whole of life from every dollar we spend being like it, to our best efforts. I mean, yeah, not everything’s going to be the most culture setting company.
There’s, we’ve got a long way to go to create a good society of where you even have options in every field for a good company. But still, generally, I think when you actually value every aspect of your life, you’re going to start to see that you can actually gain joy in even the smallest thing from the person who you get who hired to do your drywall. And you’re like, “Yeah, I just supported that guy and his family or I know this, whatever it is.” It’s actually going to add a whole another level and it actually does make a difference.
Yeah. You know, every client I have matters. It’s just a truth.
That’s right.
One client, 100 clients, you got to start somewhere every day.
Tomorrow I have another client. If I don’t value that client, then I don’t have another job. You can look too big picture and be like, oh I’ve got so many. It’s every single day valuing what you’re doing and just creating that mentality. So yeah, that’s awesome.
No, that’s good. I think it’s good and for people to know what you’re all about and the vision that you have for Natural Light. It’s not just a lighting company.
Yeah.
It just starts, it just looks like a lighting company. And if you’re somebody who cares about where your money goes and cares about getting a quality job done on your home, call Andrew from Natural Light and you can visit the website at my-naturalite.com and schedule a free consult with him and he’ll be happy to come out and give you a quote.
Sounds good.
Great. See you guys next time.
Yeah. See you.