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Episode Summary
Two of your employees walk up to your desk and tell you to change or they’re leaving. Most owners get defensive. Tom Walter listened. He was 55, deep in debt, fighting with his brothers, and tired of being the boss he had spent his whole life hating. What came next rebuilt Tasty Catering from a middling Chicago caterer into a top-four player with employee engagement scores in the 90s. I met Tom at Small Giants before my keynote and his story stuck with me. We got into the conversation that triggered the change, how his team ran the culture overhaul without him in the room, why they numbered the core values so anyone could call out a violation, and how playing the Great Game of Business turned dishwashers into people watching the P&L on a five-by-ten board every Wednesday. We also got into the difference between an engaged employee and an entangled one, why most owners obsess over consequences instead of antecedents, and how Tom kept every single person on payroll when COVID shut down the hospitality industry. Real stories. Real numbers. A driver named Tony who found $550,000 of business driving around an empty industrial park.
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## Top 10 Takeaways- If your income disappears the moment you stop showing up, your team feels it before you do.
- Numbering your core values is what makes them enforceable. Otherwise they’re just posters.
- You can’t lead a culture change you’ve never experienced. Find someone on your team who can.
- Antecedents lead to behaviors lead to consequences. Most owners only manage the third one.
- The average employee gives you 4% of their daily thoughts. The ceiling is closer to 10%.
- Disruptors in your people’s personal lives are the biggest drain on discretionary thinking.
- Financial literacy for your team isn’t generosity. It’s how they stop seeing the company as a paycheck.
- Engaged employees act like college athletes. Entangled employees act like Olympians.
- A bonus tied to a clear profit threshold beats a vague “we share success” promise every time.
- If you violate the values first and apologize publicly, your team learns the rules are real.
Sound Bites
“I had a passionate hatred for bosses, people that use their position of controlling my paycheck to dominate me and mentally abuse me. And then lo and behold, 30 years later, I was doing the same thing.” (@TBD) — Tom Walter
“They said the famous words that changed my life forever. If you don’t change, we’re leaving.” (@TBD) — Tom Walter
“All your life you’ve been focused on outcomes, consequences. It’s antecedents lead to behaviors lead to consequences. From that day on, I never thought about the outcomes.” (@TBD) — Tom Walter
“The average company, average person has 60,000 thoughts a day. The most an employer typically gets is 4%. What if I could get 8%? That’s 250,000 more thoughts from the same employees.” (@TBD) — Tom Walter
“Tomas, it’s my company too.” (@TBD) — Tom Walter (quoting Hugo, his employee, refusing a $20 tip)
About This Episode
Tom Walter is the founder of Tasty Catering, author of It’s My Company Too, and a member of the Chicago Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame. He has spearheaded over 32 ventures, serves on advisory boards for five Chicago-area companies and two universities, and is an active member of the Academy of Management and the Small Giants community. His book has been the subject of six doctoral dissertations and is used in over 40 university courses. Tom is one of the clearest voices in the country on how a small business can build a culture that outperforms competitors financially while becoming a place people fight to work at.
Resources Mentioned
- It’s My Company Too by Tom Walter, Ken Thompson, Ray Benedetto, and Molly Meyer — Tom’s book on entangled employees and organizational culture. Available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
- Tasty Catering — tastycatering.com
- The Great Game of Business by Jack Stack and Bo Burlingham — The open-book management methodology Tasty Catering plays every Wednesday.
- Good to Great by Jim Collins — The book Jamie and Tim distributed to every Tasty employee in Spanish and English to kick off the culture change.
- Organizational Culture and Leadership by Edgar Schein — Chapter 10 specifically, for the six ways to embed and maintain culture in an organization.
- Drive by Daniel Pink — Referenced for discretionary thinking and intrinsic motivation.
- Finish Big by Bo Burlingham — How Ryan and Tom first crossed paths through Small Giants.
- Kotter’s 8 Steps of Change — The framework Tasty Catering followed (unknowingly) during their cultural revolution.
Connections
Phase + Module:
- Module 7 — Leadership Team — Building the team that runs the company so the owner doesn’t have to
- Module 8 — Executive Compensation — Aligning incentives so the team is rewarded for the value they create
Milestones:
- Milestone 19 — Functional Leaders — Distributed leadership where everyone is responsible for something
- Milestone 21 — Leadership Development — Tasty’s internal “TC University” as a working example
- Milestone 22 — Company Bonus Pool — Profit-threshold bonuses tied to clear financial targets
Concepts referenced:
- The Owner-Operator Trap™ — Tom at 55, deep in debt, hating the boss he had become
- Business Operating System — Core values, weekly P&L review, and financial literacy as the operating rhythm
- Sustainable Financials — Why open-book numbers only work when the team understands them
- Monthly Owner’s Package — The principle behind Tasty’s five-by-ten Wednesday P&L board
- Independence by Design™ — Building a company that doesn’t require the owner in the chair to function