Franchise Update Magazine Issue IV, 2015 | Page 15

ceoprofile

What has inspired your leadership
style? It all starts with my mom, Natalie
Ehrlich, and her incredible will power.
She raised me as a single mom while
working multiple jobs and getting her
degree, going to graduate school, and
eventually earning her doctorate. That
took a lot of determination, and while
she taught me a lot of valuable things,
her refusal to quit—or let me quit—has
stuck with me. Just to give you an idea
of how determined she is, she once ran
52 marathons in a single year.
Another major inspiration for me
was not a person, but rather a position
I held. In high school and college, I
was a point guard and it fell on me to
identify my teammates’ strengths and
weaknesses, to learn how to manage a
team’s emotions and personalities, how
to communicate quickly in high-stress
situations, and how to inspire hard work
and determination among very different
kinds of people.
I first witnessed the power and value
of delegation through Coach Sutton of
Oral Roberts University. I had coaches
in the past who screamed and yelled
the whole time, running around like
crazy. Coach Sutton, however, would
evaluate a situation, communicate his
plan and directions to his offensive,
defensive, and scouting coaches, and
then send them out to work with the
team. By doing this, rather than trying
to micromanage everything, the team
got a much better understanding of his
vision and how to implement it. That’s
a lesson I use to this day.
What is your biggest leadership challenge? Effectively communicating my
vision. Everyone at Oxi Fresh shares
the overall vision of being the numberone carpet cleaner in the world, but
it’s communicating the finer aspects of
that vision—the many plans and goals
I have—to my franchisees that can be
challenging.
How do you transmit your culture from
your office to front-line employees?
One of the main ways we accomplish this
is through the principle of “Ownership
through Scoring.” Every technician in

our system gets an individual Customer
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