The Passionate Workforce: Nicholas Capman on How Your Employees Really Feel

In this episode of Author Hour, Eric Jorgenson sits down with Nicholas Capman, author of The Passionate Workforce, to talk about the four pages of book notes that started it, the ad that finally got him to pick up the phone, the number one bestseller he did not see coming, and why the return on a book is the return on a nice business suit.

Transcript

Eric Jorgenson: All right, Nick, thank you so much for joining us. You're welcome. I'm happy to be here. OK, before we dive into the book, The Passionate Workforce, could you give us just a little bit of your personal background of who you were before you became an author?

Nick Capman: Sure. I guess one way I'll introduce myself is I'll talk about how I found in my consulting company. It's a common way that I introduce myself and it's kind of a nice story for people to get to know me. So I originally went to school to be a high school history teacher. And when I graduated, the state of Massachusetts was going through a budget cut. So they were laying teachers off, not hiring. So the closest place that I could find a teaching position was in South Carolina. And so I told my grandmother, I said, hey, Grammy, I found a teaching job and it's in South Carolina. And she said, oh, you can't leave. And I said, I can't. And she said, of course not. And I said, OK. So that seven second conversation threw my four year degree out the window. So my first job out of college was selling phone and Internet service door to door to businesses. And the company that had employed me had hired all recent college graduates. And so the talk in the office was go and get two year sales experience under your belt. Then you can go apply for a pharmaceutical sales position, selling pills to doctors. And that's where the money is. So as a naive college graduate, I said, sounds fine. I got my two year sales experience, started applying for jobs. But instead of getting hired by a pharmaceutical company, I ended up getting hired by a multinational pharmaceutical engineering firm that was owned by Nova Nordisk. And I was placed as the head of North American business development at the age of 23. To which some people say, wow, that's impressive. To which I respond, you should be less impressed by me and more repulsed by the person that thought it was a good idea to make a 23 year old head of North American business development. So needless to say, I did what most 23 year olds would do. I made a lot of mistakes and I learned a lot of lessons. While I was there, I decided to get my MBA. And I had a professor that said he had started his first business, which was a bagel shop at the age of 26. And he said, well, I'm 26, I have to start a company. So there was a little portion of the business where I was working that did something called compliance consulting. And so the FDA group does compliance consulting and regulatory support for life science companies with the FDA and other regulatory agencies. And so I said, well, yeah, I think I can do that. And I created the FDA group. I ended up leaving my current employer, A, because now there was a conflict, and B, because they were going through a merger and there was someone else that did my job. They were obviously better than I was, so kind of the writing was on the wall. So I ended up going to another company that sold enterprise-wide software into the medical device space. And I used to run the FDA group out of my car in the parking lot during my lunch breaks. And I did that for several years until I kind of decided that I should probably just stop everything else and focus on this. So fast forward to today, I've been in business 19 years with the FDA group. We were recognized as being one of the fastest growing companies in America, four years in a row by Inc. Magazine, being headquartered in Boston. We're also recognized by the Boston Business Journal as being one of the top 50 fastest growing companies in Massachusetts, two years in a row. In the first year we won, we were ranked number three in the state. And there's some other kind of cool things about the company. But I think that kind of is sufficient for an introduction.

Eric Jorgenson: Amazing. I love a business that starts in a car. That's always a good, especially like on a lunch break. And I frequently find myself in the position of de-geniusing my guests. So if I just like translate that to Eric speak, the consulting services you provide help medical companies and others navigate the FDA approval process.

Nick Capman: That and compliance. So just like, you know, an easy way that I say to people that are in the esoteric space is just like you would help hire an accountant to help you with the IRS. Life science companies, pharma, med device, hire us to help them with the FDA.

Eric Jorgenson: Got it. Because this is a complicated process. You've done it thousands of times. And if you get it wrong, your company, you know, lizard eyes by whether you filled out the paperwork correctly and did the right things in the right order. And so this is a very important thing to keep, you know, the commercialization of scientific discovery humming along.

Nick Capman: If you want to get your product approved, then there's the compliance side where if you do things wrong, you're spending a hundred million dollars to fix it and you could face jail time.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I'd want to hire professional help as well. When you try yourself. No, no, that's I don't imagine that's a tough sell. So at what point in this, you know, you said you've been in business 19 years now. At what point did the idea to potentially write a book sort of surface for you?

Nick Capman: So I belong to a group called Vistage, which is a CEO advisory group. And so once a month we meet or I meet in person with about 16 other CEOs. Half the day we'll have a speaker come in and talk on law, culture, sales, marketing, HR, you know, all sorts of different things. And then the other half of the day, anybody that is in the group that has an issue can put it on the board and we try to help them fix it. So I had one member in particular, Tamron Campbell, the other people also that said, you know, you think different. And that was that was the moment where I realized I wasn't just regurgitating other people's ideas. Subconsciously and involuntarily, I had taken everything that I had learned through reading trainings, presentations, seminars, and it kind of had formed into my own my own thing. And so that was that was so then what I did was I said, well, I think I want to write a book. So I created a Word document. I called it book notes and it was I had it in Calibri 11 and I had four pages of book notes. And what I would do is I found myself repeating the same things over and over. And so every time I would say something in a meeting or somewhere and I'd be like, oh, yeah, I say that all the time. You know, that's one of my things. I would just put it in my notes. And so that was how I kind of started. And then I started to look at Scribe Media and reached out to you. And, you know, the rest is history.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I I'm always fishing for people who have book notes, you know, whether it's an Apple note or something, you know, I feel like so many people just have this like floating list of ideas or notions. And, you know, it's really fun to just scratch stuff down in the corners of papers or in a in a catch all doc. So when did you decide to kind of make the leap of like, no, this is where we're going to flesh this out? Was there was there an event that happened in your life? Was it just a change of circumstance? When did it become a real project? Why I decided to contact scribe. No, to like commit to writing the book, you know, you've been collecting notes a long time and kind of hearing this like you're a busy guy.

Nick Capman: You're a marketing pitch. That really what it was is there was an advertisement. I think I started on LinkedIn and it just it had it said everything that I had been thinking, you know, like, yeah, it's right. How am I going to market it? How am I going to do this? How am I going to do that? And it's like, hey, do you worry about this, this, this, this? I'm like, yeah, I do. They're like, do you want to do this, this, this, this? I'm like, yeah, I do. And then I just contacted you.

Eric Jorgenson: And that's amazing. We got to find that ad and, you know, print it again, send it to a lot more people. If it was if it was that effective, that's incredible. Did you have a hope of for what the book would would do for you? Did you publish it in a business context at all? Or was this just like a personal project?

Nick Capman: Yeah, it was a personal project. I knew that it wasn't specific to my industry. And so whereas like a lot of times people can write books that are specific to their industry and it can lead to business generation. This was kind of a personal project. You know, so I'm in the FDA space, but I'm not an FDA expert. If I were to be so bold as to use the word expert, I would say organizational leadership and development and management is kind of and I could apply that to any space. Right. But that that's kind of my my thing. Right. That's what I feel really confident in. And so I said, well, it was kind of, you know, as cliche as it sounds, kind of this give back feeling where I knew I had a really good system and I just wanted to share it. And so that was that was kind of it. There wasn't any huge. I mean, obviously, you're like, you know, New York Times bestseller or like I'm going to make millions of dollars. But but those you know, that was, you know, wasn't like a thing that I was that wasn't a priority. That was like if it happens, great. But it was more of I just wanted to share something and see what it what, you know, if I engaged with media, what what could come of this? And so that that was kind of the driving force behind it.

Eric Jorgenson: How closely did the final book sort of feel to your original vision? Like, I'm always curious how the book kind of changed to the creative process. It's a couple of years ago now. And, you know, this book is published in 2024 for reference. Yeah. So I'm asking you to dig back a little bit.

Nick Capman: Well, no, I can remember.

Eric Jorgenson: There's always a crossroads.

Nick Capman: Yeah, I can't remember.

Eric Jorgenson: Oh, yeah.

Nick Capman: Big time. I was I was really surprised at how concise it was. I there was no fluff. Right. And the the person that helped me write the book was just amazing. He was so good. And and then the editing process was just so good. And so, you know, as as an author, you do have to read your book several times. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But, you know, when you get to the end and you've cut out all of the if ands and buts, and it was just so concise that was there was no fluff. There was nothing that was a waste. You know, I was just really happy with how it came together.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, good. What's the what is your like elevator pitch for the book before we kind of talk about, you know, how you use it? The title is The Passionate Workforce, How to Create and Maintain Maximum Employee Engagement. And so this is your this is like you teaching all, you know, from the sort of organizational management, cultural creation perspective over your two decades in business.

Nick Capman: Yeah, so so I think there's two types of books. There's the book that you can, you know, listen to when you're on the treadmill. And then there's the other type of book where you have to sit down, you got to highlight, you got to take notes, you can take action. Right. And so it was really important to me that I wrote the former. I wanted something that people could listen to without a ton of effort and get like put in 20 percent of the effort, get 80 percent of the bang. And so so really, if if there's any action required on the person's part, it's just that they write down the 15 pillars, which is what I promote. And and then the the assessment tool. So essentially, you know, there's in order. So let me let me get into the theory. So the theory is we all fall on a spectrum. And then that's why you see that rainbow colored thing. It's like a sun horizon. So that that represents the spectrum of us going being from resentment to passion. And so, you know, we've all been passionate at one point or another about our job. And we know how we act when we are passionate. We show up on time to care about the quality of our work. We're innovative and creative. We're, you know, all those sorts of things. Similarly, we've all been resentful at some point. Same person, different behaviors. Right. Don't show up on time. Don't care about the quality of our work. Not innovative, creative, destructive, even. Right. And I've got I've got a tidbit in that in the book where I talk about how me and this other kid were dropped off at a warehouse and we were supposed to do something. We decided we wouldn't. There was no management. And all we did was race forklifts for two weeks. And I came back. I was like, you guys didn't do anything like not really. But we showed up every day and we hung out there. I don't know. We didn't know what we're doing. So the theory is if you can get everybody into a passionate mindset, then you can expect optimized performance. How do you? So my theory is if you're hiring the right person and the right person has joined the job, it's not the employee's responsibility to bring passion. It's the employer's. It's not 50 50. It's the employer's job to create passion. So there's 15 pillars or 15 tactics, strategies, whatever, more tactics than strategies that if you implement them, then you will have those individuals that are reporting to you in a passionate mindset, which means that you'll obviously have higher retention, but you'll also have optimized performance. The other thing is it's a really simple assessment tool. So if anybody's familiar with the NPS assessment tool, it's just, you know, what would you rate this on a scale of 1 to 10, right? If you're 9 or above, you're great. If you're between 7 and 9, you're good. But there's room for improvement. And if you're below 7, you've got issues. And that works out really well. So what we do is we in our company is every year we send out an anonymous survey to all of the employees and ask them to rate management on those 15 pillars. And I'm happy to say that this past year was the first year that we got above 9 on every pillar. So, oh, wow. Yeah. So that was the theory behind the book. And so to kind of come full circle, what would people be able to get out of it? They'd be able to get a sense of, you know, peace of mind. You know, it's a very easy read. And it's very easy to implement. You just have to understand the 15 pillars and make sure that you're measuring them, I would say, on an annual basis. You could do more than that, especially in the beginning. But you have to do an initial assessment to kind of see where your baseline is and then work toward increasing those numbers. And there's different ways in which you can improve those numbers. But you essentially want to try to get everything above a 7 and above a 9 if possible. And then you'll have a passionate workforce, which means you've got optimized performance.

Eric Jorgenson: Amazing. And the book is sort of a self-contained, like it's got everything you need to implement it, right? Yeah. I feel like most books like this kind of inevitably slide towards and then hire our professional implementers and come to our course and, you know, pay our membership fee and all that.

Nick Capman: Yeah. So let me let me say, so we are an EOS company. So I bleed orange. I love EOS. This, this is, I would say, is a supplement to that. So EOS tells you how to run an organization. What my book does is it allows you to make sure that the individuals are in a passionate mindset so that you get optimized performance. So, yeah, I think some of those trainings and seminars are bogus. EOS certainly is not one of them. But my book is just a nice, easy read in order to achieve a goal.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I'm a fan of EOS. I've read a lot of the books as well, and we've used it in our company. But I, you know, I think the success of EOS spun out a lot of low effort copycats who like the business model, but, you know, it didn't put quite as much rigor into the background. And, you know, it can be tough to separate the wheat from the chaff then. So how do you use this book now in your organization, in your career, in your life? Like, where is it deployed? Do all your managers read it? You know, do you, are you, are you on a speaking circuit? Like, where does it show up in your life?

Nick Capman: So I do speaking engagements. I say, well, first, it gives me a little bit of credibility, right? So, you know, I started my business when I was 26. And, you know, I'm 45, and I feel like I look younger than 45.

Eric Jorgenson: You look great.

Nick Capman: Thank you.

Eric Jorgenson: You look great.

Nick Capman: And my hair doesn't look gray on this video, but it is. And so I remember I was so happy when I finally got gray hair, right? Because I needed, you know, some level of credibility. And so this is, I would say, a spoke in the wheel in terms of credibility. Like, what have I done with the FDA group? What have I done for the industry? What speaking engagements have I done? You know, what awards and accolades? Have I written a book, right? So a book is one of them. So I'd say it just gives a little bit more credibility so that when I'm, when we as a business are talking to people, it's more about how can you help me as opposed to, I need to see if you're the real deal. You know, so that's benefit. Another thing we do is for all of our clients and our employees. Well, let me talk about, first, we give the book to all of our employees after 90 days of employment and say, hey, you made it through the first three months. Congratulations. And then we give them some other like kind of company swag. And, you know, we tend to make like a personalized box for them. For our new clients, what we do is we send them a, an FDA group box, right? I think I don't know where we get them made, but it's got like the FDA group logo and it's got a ribbon and all that stuff. And you open it up and it's got confetti. And what we, what I put in there is I wanted to send out my book, but I didn't want to be pretentious. So I also included an FDA group engraved bottle of wine. So it's an engraved, it's really, really pretty. It's engraved and it says the FDA group. And so we have a bottle of wine and then we have my book and then just a thank you card for, you know, working with us. And so that's actually how I use the book.

Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. I love that. I feel like that's a great, I love hearing answers where the book is almost triggered by a natural part of the business where there's like a precursor that happens, you know, every month or every year or every week or every day that triggers the book going out into the world. And, you know, a lot of people sort of rely on their memory or, you know, inspiration to involve the book. And when you can bake it into a process like this, new employees, new clients, you know, the book, it just pays dividends, you know, almost automatically for years and helps teach people how you think.

Nick Capman: Yeah. The other thing is right now I'm in Brazil, so that's where my background is the way it is. But when I'm at home in my home office, I actually have the book on my screen, so it's always visible when I'm talking to anyone that I'm talking to over Zoom.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, we've had, I've had meetings with you before when you've been at home. You've got a great background that's very thoughtfully curated. And I do think that, you know, that subtext is also smart and clever. Both of us are away from home at the moment. So we're coming up on, well, no, we're just past two years, your two year anniversary of this book being out in the world. June 22nd. Yeah. What are some of the unexpected good things that have happened as a result of this book being out?

Nick Capman: Well, it was unexpected that we would be number one bestseller, right? So that was cool.

Eric Jorgenson: That's amazing.

Nick Capman: But actually, this is this is a bad answer, but it's a compliment. Everything else was expected because Scribe Media does a really good job of telling you what to anticipate. And so other than that happening, which was humbling, there wasn't actually anything else. I kind of knew from the support of Scribe Media what was going to happen. So no real surprises.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And any big moments of celebration, any doors that opened as a result of a conversation or somebody reading the book that you didn't know about, feedback from clients?

Nick Capman: Oh, well, I love getting messages when people read the book, you know, or, you know, I'll be at a conference and somebody will stop me and say, you're Nick Capman, right? And I'm like, yeah. And they're like, oh, you know, I'm so-and-so and I read your book. You know, that's very cool. Yeah, it's very, very cool. You know, one thing that does come to mind is when we did the book signing at Barnes & Noble. You know, my wife is a perfectionist. We had a table and we had balloons and we had a poster and that was just, you know, I didn't put a lot of pressure on myself. You know, if nobody showed up, I would have been happy. But we probably had about 60 people. We passed out probably 60 books. We did a good job of kind of telling people that we're going to be out there. And so I would say 90% of the people that came were intending to come. And maybe there were a couple of people that were in the store that kind of, you know, meandered over. But for the most part, it was people that came to kind of celebrate the book signing. And we took pictures and shared it on the internet. So that was really cool.

Eric Jorgenson: That is really cool. Do you recall how you set that up? Did you just approach your local Barnes & Noble? Yep.

Nick Capman: I said I have a book and they had some questions about it. And I think I passed the assessment in terms of what they required in order for them to kind of put a table out there for your book signing. And so, yeah, it was as simple as that.

Eric Jorgenson: Amazing. I think that's a really, it's a powerful example. Relatively, you know, small local events. I mean, 60 people is not small. Like that is an impressive number. But you don't have to fill an auditorium to have a meaningful event. And then the reach that that event can have in terms of building credibility and like the photos that you take and where you share those and, you know, being able to use those as kind of marketing, not just the book, but, you know, increasing your credibility is also like, I think these people, these things pay huge dividends and people really underestimate, you know, how easy it is to get some of those and that it's worth, you know, doing well as you did it.

Nick Capman: Yep. I agree.

Eric Jorgenson: Those are all great answers. I feel like you undersold your, you know, the quality of your celebrations, your high points. It's really, I mean, I know you did this as a personal project and not with any intent to directly impact the business, but it's really hard to pin down an ROI. On something like this, you know, you're, you're only two years in giving it to clients and employees. You've, you know, hopefully it helps the sales pitch, but you know, this thing will be around for, for decades.

Nick Capman: You know what it is, it's a nice business suit.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah.

Nick Capman: You know, you know, what's, what's the ROI on a nice business suit? What's the ROI on preparing before an interview or before a meeting? You know, what's the, you know, cause it's, it's never one thing. It's a combination of many, many things, but it, you know, I see it as just a bigger painting of kind of, you know, who, who I am. So like I, you know, I have, I have 12 daily affirmations that I read out loud every day. And that is partially who I am and partially who I want to become. Right. And so, and we're all imperfect people. And so we're never finished trying to improve ourselves. So, you know, I see the book is just a checkbox that I could use in order to kind of be the best version of myself. Right. And don't they have a saying, like before a man dies, he's supposed to have children, write a book, and then something else. I forget. Oh, plant a tree. Oh, well, yeah, I did all those three. I planted a tree. I wrote a book and I had children. So I, whatever that, that thing was, I did those three.

Eric Jorgenson: Love it. You're playing with house money now. It's all just gravy from here.

Nick Capman: Yeah.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Yeah. You know, build one of, one of the fastest growing companies in Boston, you know, you've overachieved considerably, I would say.

Nick Capman: Well, I appreciate that. You know, there's, I don't know if you're familiar with Maslow's hierarchy, but you know, at some point, you know, it's funny. I think I mentioned this to you, or it might've been Travis, where I was thinking, I think it was actually, no, it was Travis, because on my podcast, I'm having one of your other authors talk about the paradox something, which was really, it caught my attention because I was going to write another book called the Paradox Theory, because I started noticing and I started my book notes again, but I'm just so busy with everything that I, you know, we started a technology company and we got so much going on. I just can't afford to do another book right now. But, you know, the paradox is there's so many there's, you know, the one that kind of jumps out more than most is people that try to make themselves happy are the ones that are the most depressed, you know, and if you can, if you can stop worrying about yourself and your happiness and just focus on other people's happiness, the strangest thing happens, you become happy and you weren't looking for it. And there's many others, you know, my faith in God has grown. It's a big part of my life. And there's a lot of paradoxes in faith. Right. So, you know, I guess to use another cliche, you know, it's that point at which you kind of want to give back. You know, the book was an opportunity to give back. And, you know, it's funny how when you're honest about trying to help other people as opposed to seeing what you get out of it and really, really forgetting and not considering what you're going to get out of it, which is truly trying to help other people. God likes that. And right. He wants us to treat our neighbors as and give love to our neighbors as Jesus loved the church. So when you when you focus on other people, it's just amazing the blessings that follow.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think like a study of paradox would be a very interesting book and a very interesting life. I have seen enough things that are like the truth seems impossible. Yet there it is, which is just really it keeps keeps life fun. Lots of mind bending discoveries out there to to poke at and ponder for a really long time. Yeah.

Nick Capman: So I'm really looking forward to that podcast. So for anybody that's listening, I had a technical podcast. So if you want to go to sleep easily, you can listen to the last one down. But if you're interested in leadership and management, I have the Passionate Workforce podcast, and I am going to have some authors from Scribe Media on that one with and I can't remember the full name of his book because I only read it once when it was passed over. But I'm really looking forward to that conversation.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I'm looking forward to hearing it. And I love when the podcast name in the book name can line up and it just feels like a nice cohesive project. That's great. My my two closing questions here for you, Nick, what advice do you have for somebody who's where you were, you know, two, three years ago, you've got a you've got a book notes doc floating around, but you haven't yet made the leap to say that this is going to be, you know, your project for the next year.

Nick Capman: Well, I thought of so here's the reality. Writing a book is like running a marathon. And so even with the support of Scribe Media, there's a lot that goes into it. So it's it's it's very time consuming, and it's also very rewarding. And I think one of the things that people notice is authors tend to write multiple books, just like marathon runners tend to run multiple marathons. Right. So I've run one marathon so far. I'd like to run another one, but just trying to find the time for training. Right. So I would say understanding that it's going to be work and it's going to be rewarding.

Eric Jorgenson: That's great advice. Yeah, that's that's been my experience as well. I think the marathons is a better analogy than tattoos, which is what I usually use. You know, it seems very intimidating and impossible tattoos. But once you once you get one or once you write one, you're going to do it again. This is this is fun and exciting. And you do it again.

Nick Capman: Yeah, yeah.

Eric Jorgenson: So it's funny. So great minds think alike. Yeah. All right. Nick, where can people find you? Where would you send them? You've got the Passionate Workforce podcast. The book is called The Passionate Workforce. Where else do you hang out online or should people check out?

Nick Capman: Yeah, the best place to reach me is on LinkedIn. That's where I spend most of my time. And then in terms of the book, if anybody's interested in the book, it's wherever wherever books are sold. Amazon is a great place. It's we have it's also on Audible, Kindle. So anywhere you can buy books, you can find it.

Eric Jorgenson: Awesome. Thank you so much for for writing this book, for for giving back, teaching what you know, and for taking the time to share it with us today. Thank you. Thank you very much, Eric.