You may have cutting-edge tools, the right business connections, or a well-crafted marketing strategy, but all of these will fall short if the people leveraging them cannot perform at their absolute best. Steve Farber underlines the importance of personal development in building an effective and efficient team in today’s highly competitive market with Dan Casetta of Cutco. He explains how he helps shape people into excellent leaders who know how to make others greater than themselves and cultivate love within their work environment. Dan also breaks down the benefits of fostering a healthy spirit of competition within the team and his leadership philosophy, centered on work ethic and energy.
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Prioritizing Personal Development With Dan Casetta
We’re starting Season 3 with a special series of episodes, of conversations that I’ve had with some really extraordinary extreme leaders. These are people who put the Radical LEAP framework into practice every day. By that, I mean they cultivate love, they generate energy, they inspire audacity, and they provide proof in the way they lead their various organizations.
My first book, The Radical Leap, came out over twenty years ago, which is a pretty significant milestone. We’re celebrating that milestone through this series of special interviews. Also, through the offering of a free copy of the audiobook of The Radical Leap, which is yours for the taking at RadicalLeap.org. I’m confident you’ll enjoy these great conversations. Let’s get started.
My guest is Dan Casetta, who is a brilliant leader, an incredible Sales Trainer, Sales Inspirer. He’s set records in the organizations that he’s run, particularly for Cutco. If you’ve heard of the famous knives, the Cutco knives, and the Vector company. I’m really excited to hear Dan’s story and learn some gems of wisdom from you, Dan. Thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you, Steve, for inviting me on. I’m coming to you live from San Jose, Silicon Valley, where the 49ers play and we’re known for having lost two Super Bowls to the Chiefs here. You’ve relocated to the right spot if you’re a football fan.
I’ll tell you, being in Kansas City, I believe that it is a requirement of citizenship to be a Chiefs fan. I’ll tell you, it isn’t hard. These guys I’m not like a football fanatic. I love watching football, but I’m not the guy that tracks stats and players and all that. It’s never been my thing. I’ve always enjoyed watching the game. These guys, it’s just pure entertainment because they keep winning.
Making A Significant Career Achievement At 17
I don’t know how, but they do it, like literally the last second of the game. Not in any conventional way. I lived in the Bay Area, so I was a 49ers fan. I lived in San Diego, so for a while there, I was a Chargers fan. I grew up in Chicago, so I’m a fair-weather Bears fan. In this town, when there’s a football game, when the Chiefs are playing, it’s like you got to watch because there’s nothing else to do. The whole place shuts down and everybody’s dressed in red and it’s frightening. Anyway, enough about that. Dan, tell us about your story. Bring us in from a high level and then we’ll dive down.
I’m a native here of the Bay Area. I was born and raised here in the San Francisco, San Jose area. My parents are immigrants from Europe. My mom was born in France, my dad in Italy. I grew up with that influence. When I was seventeen years old, I had just graduated from high school, was working at a movie theater in Burlingame, California, and was getting ready to start college and thought about the opportunity to do something new that I could actually learn something from.
Truly by dumb luck, I stumbled upon an interview to work in the Cutco sales organization. The job is selling high-end kitchen products in customers’ homes. It’s not door-to-door, but it’s in the home by appointment. When I first saw the opportunity, I thought, “I don’t really know if I can do that.” That quickly transformed into, “I think I really need to do this,” because I was pretty shy at the time, and my people skills were not very high.
I viewed this as a relatively low-risk opportunity for me to learn some things that would make a difference in my life. I took on the opportunity as a seventeen-year-old and had some success. Became a manager with the company while I was still in college, had some real success with that. I knew I liked management, I liked leadership, I liked that side of things a lot more.
Before we get into the leadership side of things, I just want to put a little punctuation mark on this. At seventeen years old, you decided to pursue this opportunity with Cutco because you didn’t have the skills necessary to do it. That’s a remarkable level of insight for anybody, let alone a seventeen-year-old.
Yeah, I don’t know that I exactly connected the dots in that manner that way, but I remember the interview was run where you were met one-on-one at first, and then they put you into a small group so they could do like an hour-long section of explaining what the job is all at once to, whatever it was, like eight people. They would talk to you at the end one-on-one to talk about whether or not it was going to work out. I was waiting, I think I was probably the last person that the manager talked to.
Perhaps I was the youngest person there, I probably was. I remember I was waiting for 30 or 40 minutes, and during that time, I had that time to think about what I saw. I certainly started out with an “I don’t know if I can do this” mindset. As I was sitting there thinking about it, I was like, “This would actually be really good thing for me to try to do.” I did have that feeling that it would be worth me trying out. I didn’t expect that I would have great success. I didn’t expect that it would be anything more than a summer job for me. I certainly didn’t expect that I’d be working there for 30-plus years as I have. That’s how it’s turned out.
That first taste of success that you had, starting at seventeen years old, was it pretty quick? Did it be a ramp-up time? What did that look like?
It was fairly quick. I struggled for a couple of days. My first couple days that I started working, I remember I did 7 sales appointments and only sold on 2. One was to my mom. The third day, I went to a follow-up session of training and it was like they flipped the lights on. It was like everything I was doing wrong was answered because obviously the company knows like what are the common things people mess up when they’re brand new. It was like it was all fixed and the next day I sold 7 out of 7.
I was off and running. I was identified as a candidate for what’s called the key staff, which is some of the leaders of the team that have potential to inspire other people and help other people. Eventually, I actually got to give a speech at a meeting. I remember I was giving a speech that was a personal development-oriented topic. It wasn’t really directly related to selling Cutco. I studied a bunch of Tony Robbins stuff to be able to have some great content.
I practiced and I spoke and had some really good success with that. There was this feeling as I was advancing that I was getting this recognition and appreciation, good feelings of contributing to other people. A lot of things that I just didn’t get in my life. I wasn’t a cool kid in high school. I wasn’t very good athletically really until college. I didn’t have a lot of ways of getting recognition. I was good academically, I was a smart kid with good grades and stuff like that.
However, I didn’t really have a lot of success in the ways that a lot of seventeen-year-olds would measure success. Cutco and Vector Marketing, the marketing arm of Cutco, was really the first opportunity for me to have a feeling of being appreciated, being recognized, feeling successful, feeling like I was good at what I was doing. These were all things that came through over those first couple of years before I really got into management and leadership with the company.
The company recognized in you that you weren’t just talented in selling, but you had the ability to inspire other people. I’m assuming then that you continued to sell through college? Is that right?
My second summer, I was an assistant manager, and that’s where you sell part of the time and you lead and manage part of the time. I was working in the office a lot helping my manager with the interviews and trainings and talking to the sales reps and all the things that managers do. He set me free a little bit toward the end of the summer to sell a lot in some big contests we had at the end of the summer.
I then got into training to become a branch manager where you run your own office, and that’s pretty much the end of my active sales period, after the second summer. From that point forward, I was focused almost exclusively on the management leadership side of the business. I ran a branch office two summers in a row between my sophomore and junior year of college and then again between my junior and senior year of college.
The second one, we were number one in the country. By that point, I was like, “I’m really good at this. I might as well do this as a career.” I still had one year of school left, which I went back and finished at Santa Clara University, and then I graduated and started as a full-time what’s called district manager at that time.
Out of curiosity, what was your major?
My major was Management. I actually didn’t declare my major until the beginning of my junior year of college. Ironically, I found a sheet that I had filled out in the first day of my Vector training that asked you what’s your major, and I had written economics on that sheet. I don’t even remember why I would have written that. By the time I got to junior year, I was thinking either management, marketing, or finance.
I was leaning toward finance and I took the first of each of those three courses, the first management, the first marketing, the first finance. I hated the finance class, probably because I just didn’t get along with the teacher. I loved the management class. Shoutout to Professor David Caldwell. It was great. There was a lot of psychology involved, which I really enjoyed. I really just decided that was the route that I wanted to go as far as my major.
You got into management and leadership functionally, not just as a course of study from when you were in college.
Running my own office when I was nineteen years old.
A Leadership Philosophy Centered On Work Ethic And Energy
That’s a bit unusual. Obviously, you found your niche in life. If I’m hearing you right, it wasn’t that your niche in life was knives. It was in people and they just so happen to sell a great product.
Absolutely.
Talk to me a little bit about how, I’m assuming then that as you were learning, both through your study at Santa Clara University and you said you read Tony Robbins and all that, as you were filling up your own bucket around the knowledge of what it takes to be a great and effective leader, did you develop a leadership philosophy of your own over time? If so, how would you describe it?
I think that my leadership philosophy has evolved over time. In the early stages, Steve, I would certainly say that there were pieces of my leadership philosophy that were based on work ethic and energy, one of the points in your book for sure. My original divisional manager was known for just high energy and enthusiasm, and I got a lot of that from him. I also feel like a part of my philosophy was a philosophy of continuous improvement.
That’s a principle that Tony Robbins has shared ever since way back in those days. I bought into that, and so I always felt like each new year or each new campaign, each new goal that was set, I always wanted to strive to exceed what we had done in the past. We had a really solid trajectory of pretty consistent growth over my first 8 or 10 years as a manager that set us up for a lot of long-term success.
I also feel like one of the things I learned is the idea of a positive focus, meaning whenever anything would come up that was a challenge, we would always be looking for, “What is the gift in this challenge? What are the solutions that we can enact? How do we move forward from this?” versus dwelling on the difficulty or, “Woe is me, why is this happening?” That was something that became an important part of my philosophy.
Positive focus allows us to look for possible solutions for challenges instead of dwelling on it. Share on XI’ll add, Steve, that what I’ve always tried to do as I’ve learned new things is find ways of sharing those things with the people that were working with me. We always had meetings that we would run where we didn’t talk about selling knives or anything related to the specific Cutco business. We talked about life and improving as humans.
What were the things we had learned in the last couple of weeks that we could share with each other. I would be sharing information from the books that I had read and my 18 and 19-year-old college student sales reps would be excited about reading something from a list I gave them or from just their own personal discoveries that they could share. There was this constant culture of personal growth and improvement that permeated the organization. That was certainly a big part of the leadership that I tried to provide.
If I were to try to quantify what you just said, the principle that I’m hearing there is that you focused your attention on the personal development of everybody on your team. That’s where you put your emphasis. I’m just trying to imagine as a 17, 18, 19-year-old sales rep out there trying to make some money and thinking that I’m in the business of selling knives, and then knowing that I’m coming to a meeting with you and the team.
I’m just imagining that and knowing that the subject of the conversation is going to be me and how I can get better at being me and how I show up in the world overall. I got to imagine that turnover in that particular business is pretty high is one assumption that I’m making, but what I’m predicting out of this is that your particular turnover rate had to be a lot lower than the industry average.
Yeah, we had a lot of great retention and development through this process, for sure.
Promoting A Healthy Spirit Of Competition
Your willingness and ability, you the collective you as an organization, to deal with challenges and learn from them and rise out of them. Are there any particular specific examples that you could share with us of when you guys really hit a challenge and then found a way out?
Steve, there are just so many that have become signature stories over the years. When I was a branch manager, which is a summer operation, you run from the beginning of May until the end of August, and you’re competing with all the other branch managers in the company. There were 110 branches that summer and we set a goal to be number one. It was my second time doing this, so I felt like I knew the ropes from the first time.
How did you do the first time?
The first time, I think we were like 26th at the end of the summer. We did all right but nothing spectacular. We set a goal to be number one from the very first day. The very first interview, we were telling people, “This is our team goal this year, we want to be the number one branch team in the company.” a team in Wisconsin took the lead from the very start and opened up a pretty sizeable lead halfway through the race.
We were in fifth place after nine weeks and then we went from fifth to second pretty fast. We were still pretty far behind and we just started closing in and closing in. The third from the last week, they beat us and I think they thought, “All right, we got it. We’ve weathered this storm.” the last two weeks we just reestablished this charge.
To make a very long story very short, there was over $300,000 in sales that happened in each of those teams for the summer and when the final numbers came out, we won by $12. There was no order that small. Every single order, not just every single person, every single order counted. There were so many neat stories that spun out of that experience.
A guy that came in from was in the hospital with a stomach virus and almost died came into the office by coincidence the very last night and said, “Did we win?” we’re like, “Dude, it’s the last day.” He’s like, “I was in the hospital, I was sick, I almost died.” We’re like, “Are you all right?” He’s like, “Yeah, I’m all right.” I’m like, “Can you sell anything else tonight?” He’s like, “Yeah, my sister wants a paring knife.”
“I’m going to call her up and sell her over the phone right now.” He sold a paring knife over the phone for $28 back then. We won by $12. Amazing that that guy would come in after being sick for whatever it was, a month and a half. He was AWOL for a month and a half and he comes walking in like, “How’d we do? Did we win?” We’re like, “It’s the last day right now.” He cared.
Everybody cared so much about the goal. We established such a great culture around the team’s success that people really cared about it and it was powerful. The adversity story though, Steve, that I really wanted to get to happened a few years later. We had been doing very well for about a three-year stretch and then we were having a particularly challenging start to the summer. There was a big contest in the middle of the summer.
It’s like the Super Bowl for our company. It’s a two-week sales contest, it’s where everybody goes after it. We had won this contest three years in a row and we were really flailing this particular summer. Another manager called me up and said, “I want to get some advice from you on how to do well for the push because we really want to try to beat Seattle and Tacoma.” He didn’t even say, “We really want to beat you guys.”
It was like they were considering us out. I told my team about this and I was just on fire. I’m like, “These guys think that it’s a three-way race but they don’t know that we’re here, we’re the champions, we’re going to do this.” We borrowed a slogan from the Houston Rockets, who had been overlooked that year in the NBA playoffs. They were the defending champion but they were the sixth seed in the West and were overlooked and their slogan was, “Never underestimate the heart of a champion.”
Never underestimate the heart of a champion. Share on XAnd we took that slogan and we talked about it every day at all of our events and we really promoted it with our team that we were going to win this contest. We ended up winning the contest by a small margin. When I was up front revealing our total and our team knew we had won and I said, “Never underestimate the heart of a champion,” our whole team just exploded with just delight and joy that we had been in this difficult spot and we pulled it out and ended up winning the contest. That was a really fun one and there’s a lot of intertwined stories with that one as well.
I’m curious about something. Sales organizations oftentimes have these internal competitions. There are a couple of different management theories on internal competition in companies. One is that if you have too much of a competitive environment, that it tends to work against you because people will respond to it by being less helpful to each other.
If I’m operating at a zero-sum game environment, then my thinking is my success is somehow predicated on your not being as successful as I am. Therefore, I’m going to do whatever I can to make sure that you’re not successful, which is the dark side of the competition. How does that work in the Cutco-Vector organization when you look at it across the enterprise?
Yeah, luckily, Steve, because we work with people initially who are usually 17, 18, 19, 20 years old, they haven’t developed the scarcity mindset that you have described through being in the corporate culture that can be more cutthroat. We’re able to take them from the start and convince them of a much more healthy spirit of competition, which is, “I want to do my best, I want you to do your best, I’ll help you, you help me, I’m going to try to beat you, I want to beat you, but if you beat me, I’ll be one of the first people to stand up and clap or congratulate you.”
That mindset permeates our organization very well. I think that it sticks all the way up to the highest levels. Even right now, I’m competing with one of my colleagues for an end-of-year race that we have a couple more weeks to go here. And it’s a close race and I think we both want to win and I think we’re both talking about it.
Just like the race many years ago where it was a branch manager race, where I think the other guy thought he had it, I think my colleague probably was expecting that he had it and I thought, “I don’t know if we can catch up.” We just had a great week last week and if we do it again this week, we’ll catch him and it’s going to be super close. This is with almost $30 million of business over two entire regions.
This same colleague many years ago I competed with in a very close battle. And during that time, like he set a couple of records and one record he set, he called me and he said, “I wanted to tell you first that we just broke this record.” It was a record that I had held that he broke. It was a mark that I had tried to achieve, it was $200,000 in sales in one week for a team. I had tried to achieve it a number of times and never did it, and he did it and he called me first. I think that’s the way that we have promoted competition in our company. It’s a really healthy spirit of competition.
It’s like where we started this conversation with the football thing. You see two different kinds of attitudes on the football field at the end of the game. You see either the fight breaks out or the hug across the proverbial field happens. It’s all in the attitude of the individual players, but it’s also an expression of the attitude and the culture of the team.
I’ve got a seven-year-old boy who’s playing sports and I love giving him examples of how to win and lose properly. The handshake line at the end of a hard-fought hockey series is always an inspirational thing to watch. When you see also guys that do stuff that’s a little bit show-boaty, and sometimes my son is like, “I saw that.” I’m like, “I don’t like that move. That’s not a good move. That’s not something that we do on our teams or in our family.”
I just think that this this whole idea of how to win and lose with grace is an important part of elevating yourself and competition is such a key part of bringing the best out of yourself. It just gives you an extra reason to do what you already want to do anyway. I think everybody should embrace that level of friendly competition, particularly in a place where your win is not somebody’s loss necessarily.
Right, so it is not a zero-sum game that you’re playing. I suppose it is if there’s only one winner and one prize or whatever it is. However, in the striving for everybody to get there, all those boats are rising.
Exactly. I think that going all the way back to that branch race when I was in college, the two of us, made each other a lot more money because we existed and we were there to compete with each other. In the end, it’s not about who’s number 1 and who’s number 2. It’s a lot more about what did you achieve? How much did you grow? How much did you improve? What did it bring out of you personally. Those are more important things because those are long-term lasting qualities that affect every other goal you set both personally and professionally forever.
Dan’s Current Job And Career Journey
Seventeen years old to now, 36 years at the same company, which is really remarkable nowadays. Can’t believe that. It’s not much more unbelievable than 30 years. Either way, it’s pretty amazing, which is a testament to both you and the organization certainly. Where are you now? What is your responsibility now, what’s your span of influence in the organization?
At this point, I run the Western region for the company, which is the Western states, essentially the coastal states plus Nevada. There are 6 regions in the company, 7 if you include Canada. There’s 6 or 7 of me here in the company. It’s like a regional vice president role in most companies what they would call a regional vice president.
Now in part of what you you’re doing nowadays, you I mean you give a lot of talks. You’re still focusing a lot of your attention on education and inspiration and all that. Do you do that company-wide or just in your own region?
I do it mostly in my own region although we do have some corporate events from time to time. There’s a lot of cross-pollination that goes on where we’re assisting in helping other people throughout the company. I’m primarily responsible for my own region. I’ve got a team of divisional executives that run each of the geographic areas throughout the West and they each have their teams. I help with developing them and also with a lot of the events that our sales reps come to throughout the region during the year.
Did every one of your leaders start selling in homes?
Yeah. One thing about the Cutco-Vector organization is that everybody starts in the same spot and moves up based on performance. It’s just how we’ve always operated and for better or for worse, it’s what we do.
Everybody understands the experience of sitting in a stranger’s home, even if it was only for one summer 36 years ago. I imagine that’s something that you remember in your DNA and never forget.
Yeah, exactly. Although everybody’s a referral so it’s a friend of a friend that you’re seeing and they’re not really a stranger so much as somebody that you didn’t know.
It’s not like, “Anybody home? Do you need a knife?”
We haven’t done that since like the 1970s. But I imagine it would be hard to recruit people to do that. Although we got people knocking on our door all the time selling stuff and it just amazes me that people are still doing that. I try to be friendly but because I’m a friendly guy, but I’m not always particularly gracious. I feel sorry for them.
How Dan And Steve Met Each Other
One of the things you said earlier is you developed the habit early on that continues to this day of taking in knowledge from where you can get it, wherever you can find it. Reading books and attending seminars and I’m sure I’m assuming watching videos and all that. Which leads us to how you and I connected. You are an example of something that I’ve described a couple of times in this series of somebody that I never would have met had it not been for the books that I’d written.
I didn’t even know that Dan Casetta existed somewhere on the planet until somehow we connected because there was something in that book that whatever. I’d love for you to tell that story because after all this is the LEAP Hour and we are giving away the free download of The Radical Leap audiobook. I’d love to hear your experience in all that, just tell us that story if you would.
Sure. I don’t know what year it was, Steve, when I first came across The Radical Leap, but I came across your book. I’ve been an avid reader and student of personal development ever since the Tony Robbins and Jim Rohn days and Zig Ziglar. I read The Radical Leap, I really liked it, a lot of the principles, the four key tenets, I guess you could say, resonated for me a lot.
I read all your books at that point The Radical Edge, Greater Than Yourself. These became textbooks for me as a leader and I started to share The Radical Leap in my organization. I remember having one of my managers, shoutout to Jon-Ross Nofuente, gave a message at one of my events about The Radical Leap and shared it with my entire organization from his perspective. That was great. Over the years I’ve distributed quite a few copies of the book to people in my organization.
I wrote a blog a number of years ago about the 10 books that have changed my life the most and I had The Radical Leap on that list. Recently I was having my assistant buy some books to give away to our people. I like to send books out for birthdays or other things to people in my organization. And I said, “I want to get The Radical Leap. Can you reach out to the author and find out if we can get some signed copies?”
She dug around and found her way to Veronica and we were able to get you to sign some copies that we can give out and that’s how we have connected even further now. We also have the mutual connection of Dr. Barry Posner who is Jim Kouzes’ partner. Jim is one of your biggest mentors in life. Barry taught Dr. Posner, I would have called him back then, now he’s Barry, but he taught at Santa Clara back when I was there. Now he’s been very high up at running different departments at Santa Clara University for many years and now recently accepted an opportunity to be part of an advisory board at Santa Clara University led by him. We’ve got that mutual connection as well.
I just had a flashback on that. That blog post that you wrote, I think when you guys reached out to us to get signed copies of the books, which I’m always happy to do and grateful that people ask for it. I think that’s when you shared that blog post with us as well. I can’t tell you what that feels like.The Radical Leap was listed in a book called The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. We still crow about that one, so I’m always very careful to say, “Yeah, it was listed in the 100 best business books of all time and it wasn’t my list, just so you know. It was not a list that I created.” To see that book on the list alongside The Leadership Challenge by Kouzes and Posner, my mentors, is indescribable and still is.
How Can Love Fit In Your Leadership
From the heart, thank you so much for taking the effort to reach out to me, otherwise we never would have connected. If you look at the elements of LEAP or the tenets of LEAP or whatever we call them, framework, Love, Energy, Audacity, and Proof. In the context of your business, you talked about energy a little bit before. I can hear the audacity of the goals that you set and how you prove in yourself right from the very beginning. Each step along the way in your own career. Where does love fit into the equation? How do you guys cultivate love in the way you do business?
I think love starts with loving what you do and thinking about what is your purpose in what you do and what’s the impact of what you do. I feel like that’s an easy one for us at Cutco-Vector because we make a profound difference on so many young people at a truly formative time in their lives. We’re a lot like a bridge between formal education and what it takes to succeed in the real world. It’s easy to feel good about what I do every day.
Love starts with loving what you do, thinking about your purpose, and understanding the impact of what you do. Share on XSpecifically, how do we incorporate love in what we do? I remember a lot of years ago a guy that was one of my colleagues and competitors that I really admired talking about building a big organization and he said, “The number one key is love your people.” I remembered hearing him say that and thinking about “What does that mean to me? How does that apply to me?”
Part of that is to prioritize the success of the individual over the success of the group. Prioritize individual success over my own success. Jim Rohn calls this enlightened self-interest. It’s to give yourself in the service of others. It’s that at times, you will make decisions that might not seem like they’re in your interest today or this week or this month. You’re making decisions that are in the best interest of the individual on your team. When you do that 100 times over, 1,000 times over, it is so much more in the interest of yourself in the long run to approach things that way.
It’s never bad to make decisions that are in the best interest of individual people. If you really love the people on your team, you’re thinking about them and what’s best for them. You don’t have this ulterior motive in the back of your mind of, “How can I manipulate this situation so that it can end up being what I want?” It’s just “What’s going to be best for this person?”
Cutco is a family-owned business which really values the community in Olean, New York, a little town in Western New York where the factory is near Buffalo. They view that community as their family. They make so many decisions there that are in the interest of the people there. If the company wanted to be as profitable as possible and that was the only interest, they’d move the factory to another country. They wouldn’t have it in the United States.
During COVID, we paid all of our employees in the factory for like eight weeks while they weren’t showing up in full. These are the kinds of things that the company does because they value family and individual. We try to create this family feel and culture of love. Some people might poke holes in that and say that maybe we keep people for too long or we’re too lenient on somebody who isn’t succeeding at the highest level because we’re really trying to prop them up and help them.
The other side of that is that when anybody is considering their career path or what they’re going to do next or how long they’re going to stay with our company, they know that’s a part of what they get when they’re here. That’s probably a part of what they don’t get in most corporate cultures. It’s an attractive thing for people to be with us and stay with us when they know that there’s that culture of love and that family feel.
It is an attractive thing for people to stay with us when they know there is a culture of love. Share on XIt’s a great example of what I often say to people. When people say this concept of love at work, that’s very provocative and oftentimes, they imply that I’m the guy that made it up they started talking about it, which is just patently not true. Nothing that I’ve ever written about is something that I made up. It’s all based on observation.
I just shine a spotlight on it in my own unique twisted way. It’s because of companies like yours. It’s observing it’s observing those things that really work beyond the so-called conventional wisdom of how a business is quote-unquote supposed to operate. What you just described, Dan, is also very much a Greater Than Yourself approach.
The GTY approach, for those who haven’t read the book, Greater Than Yourself is my third book. Traditionally speaking, we could say it’s about mentoring, but the whole idea behind it is that the greatest leaders become the greatest leaders by making others greater than themselves. That our success comes from our ability to lift other people up. That’s exactly what you just described.
For all those reasons, if I’ve got year after year, decade after decade of a track record of lifting people up, doesn’t that reflect positively on me as well? Of course it does. I get a reputation for being the person that creates superstars. To say that helping somebody else is going to diminish my opportunities is completely total BS. It’s exactly the opposite.
My greatest opportunities come from my ability to lift other people up, which is which is a very direct and very obvious and quantifiable act of love. Of course, the other thing that happens as you just described is you not only do you get a reputation individually, but if you have a company that does this as a matter of routine where people do this for each other, then you gain a reputation collectively as a company and therefore you attract the and keep the best talent.
I can’t imagine anybody would fault you guys for bringing somebody in at 17, 18 years old, showing them a career path and then having them stick around for 36 years. Where is the where is the downside in that? They’re not there because they have to be there, they’re not in indentured you’re not an indentured servant. You’re there because you want to be there, because you’re really doing what you love and you’re helping other people to do that.It’s remarkable. I should say it’s notable. I don’t think it’s remarkable. What’s remarkable is that not every place does it. That to me is truly remarkable. I just don’t freaking get it. It just seems so obvious, doesn’t it?
A Mastermind Group On Ongoing Personal Development
Yeah, I started a mastermind group about years ago and the way it started was I wanted to put bring together the 12 most successful people I’d ever met in my life, put them in a room, have dinner and talk about business and life. It taken on a life of its own. I’ve had maybe 45 different people come to the event, all notable leaders in the Silicon Valley, some extremely notable leaders in the Silicon Valley.
All one in a million in their fields. One of the nights we were talking about this issue of culture in a business. I was describing how I feel like one of the most important keys to culture in a business is how you bring this feeling of love and appreciation and just this family feel into the team. I was talking about one of the keys I employ for that is the idea of ongoing personal development, always sharing things that are not specifically related to the job but are more related to the developing the person holistically.
There were a number of people in the room that were like, “We do that at this company,” or there was a famous podcaster in the room who’s like, “I love this.” He had me on his podcast to talk about it and we discussed it in detail and he was like echoing. There were a couple of guys though that were like arms crossed and one of them who was a big corporate lawyer was like, “I don’t buy into this stuff. When I was growing up in my company, all we wanted to do was make money.”
“Everybody just wanted to make money and that was like the most important thing. How do we make the most money? We didn’t care about any of this stuff.” Not everybody buys in to the idea that developing the individual holistically, loving the person, that that creates this great success. It’s tough for me to see that not everybody buys into it. I think some people who are in the world of publicly held corporations that are beholden to these other interests don’t necessarily see it the same way as we do in a place like Cutco where we’re not beholden to anybody’s other interests.
I think a lot of it is a self-perpetuated myth because what somebody like that, that corporate lawyer guy and other folks of his ilk, for one thing let’s be clear about that, they’re not my clients. That person is never going to hire me and my team to come in and help them with this love stuff. I wouldn’t want to either because this is not about converting people. It’s about taking people who already get it just need help to really to really implement it.
What it does is it belies this myth, which is reveals this myth, which is somehow it’s one or the other. “We weren’t concerned about love, we were concerned about making money.” that implies that those are mutually exclusive pursuits. What you guys are demonstrating is that no, that is how you make more money, when you cultivate that environment.
We’re in a business after all. You compete for the numbers. You just told us several stories about competing for the numbers. Nobody’s saying that making money is not important. What we’re saying is that the way you make that happen in a meaningful way time after time is by cultivating love. That’s how you do it. That’s a mind challenge for some for some people. Again I think what’s so important about the work that you’re doing and the way that you’re doing it, Dan, is it goes as you’ve just described with your like your mastermind group, for example. It goes way beyond what you guys are doing at Cutco-Vector.
You serve as an example for the rest of us. And personally, I’m grateful because when I’m out there on my soapbox about how important this stuff is, I point to the evidence. I’m not making this up. Look at look at this company. Look at that company. Look at look at Cutco-Vector. Look at Dan Casetta. Look at the way that he does it. Look at the results that he gets.
I’m sure you can give me plenty of examples of people who are tremendously “successful” on the bottom line that display none of these things. They get there in a in a brutal a fashion. When people say to me, “Well, what about them?” Say, “Well, that’s too bad. All I can say is I can’t prove it but I think they would have done a lot better if they did it differently.”
Stephen Covey once said, “Have you ever reached the top of the ladder of success only to find it was leaning on the wrong wall?” I remember that and thought there’s a lot of different ways to get to where we want to get to in life and some ways leave you feeling great when you get up there and other ways leave you looking around and going, “Wait, is this all there is?”
The beautiful thing about that is that that wall is not necessarily about the kind of business that you’re in. It’s like you’re not going to wake up one day and say, “I’ve been leaning on the knife wall for all these years. If only I was leaning on the software wall.” It’s got nothing to do with that, as you’re demonstrating. These principles apply in any industry, in any business.
Leadership Is A Real Privilege To Be Earned
The wrong wall to me is discovering that you’ve been you’ve been pursuing the wrong value set, the wrong priorities over the years. Dan, as we wrap this up, what final words do you have for folks to take away from our conversation? Last words of advice.
For sure one thing I would say is download The Radical Leap. You’re getting the free audiobook, you might as well jump in there and get that. I also feel like the other your other books are great, Steve. We’re stocking up on Greater Than Yourself right now to give away as gifts to a lot of our people over the next few months. I think that’s something that we’re excited about.
I guess what I would say to leave is that leadership is a real privilege that one earns and it’s also a responsibility that I think we should all take seriously in the world because the world needs people who set positive examples, who spread great ideas, and who have a powerful impact on a lot of people. I’ve oftentimes encouraged people to write down who are the five most influential people you’ve ever met in your life.
Leadership is a real privilege that one earns. Share on XMaybe they start with their father and their mother and whoever else. Thinking about who those people are and sending those people a note to let them know so they feel recognized. Flipping that thought around and thinking how many people would have you on their list? I bet there’s a lot of people that have Steve Farber on that list.
I know having worked with so many young people directly over the years that there’s a lot of people that would have me on their list. That’s a real blessing that I put a lot of work into having become having that become possible. I think that’s a great part of the fulfillment we can all get is when we know we’ve made that much of an impact on a lot of people.
That is a ladder that has been leaning on the right wall for sure. When you say people that have had influential you mean influential in your own life. Not an influencer like a Instagram influencer.
No. Not like MrBeast, although he’s pretty cool. People who’ve directly influenced you.
That is a beautiful idea to leave us with.
Important Links
- The Radical Leap
- The Radical Leap audiobook
- Dan Casetta
- The Radical Edge
- Greater Than Yourself
- The Leadership Challenge
About Dan Casetta
Dan Casetta connects good ideas and great people. As a respected and trusted business leader, Dan has had a profound impact on thousands of entrepreneurs, leaders, and salespeople over the past 25 years. Throughout his career with the Vector Marketing/Cutco sales organization, Dan has been a one-in-a-million achiever and transformational leader.
He became the most successful and influential field manager in the nearly 70-year history of Cutco, and his programs for leading and developing teams were integral in sparking the company’s rapid growth and expansion. Throughout various roles with the company, Dan has coached and mentored top sales reps, managers, and executives, teaching skills like selling, leadership, financial well-being, and personal development to the company’s top talent.
Dan helps create champions both in and out of his Cutco business. His influence has extended nationwide speaking, writing, and hosting gatherings of like-minded success-oriented people. He’s the co-author of “Success Starts Today” with Jack Canfield and “Cutting Edge Sales” with Jon Berghoff, Hal Elrod, and a Who’s Who of powerful present-day influencers who started their careers with Cutco. His passion is in adding value to the world and leaving positive ripples everywhere he goes.
