Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Houston, Texas. It’s time for Houston Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Trisha Stetzel: Hello, Houston. Trisha Setzel here bringing you another episode of Houston Business Radio. Really excited about the guest that I have on today. We met through the Houston Regional Veterans Chamber of Commerce, Andrew Jacobson, who brings over 25 years of leadership and executive experience and facilitating strategic transformation operationally, structurally, financially, and most importantly, culturally. Andrew served in key leadership, coaching and advisory positions in the Military Fortune 100 companies and ministry organizations In his role as chairman of C-12 Houston, Andrew partners with Christian CEOs and business owners to more effectively steward the resources that God has placed under their leadership. Andrew, welcome to the show.

Andrew Jacobson: Thank you Trish. It’s an honor to be here.

Trisha Stetzel: I’m so excited to have you on. We’ve got a really great topic that we’re going to tackle today, which has a lot to do with being healthy in the environment that we’re working in and tackling that, that feeling of loneliness. But before we get there, tell me more a little bit about how Andrew got where he is today.

Andrew Jacobson: I will make it. It’s a long story, which I’ll make very short, but yeah, I started my career more in the traditional corporate track. Um, uh, really in the financial services industry, working for a fortune 100 company and moved up through the ranks on the HR side, uh, organizational strategy, the people and culture side. Um, I got my start in commercial lending as a commercial lending analyst, but ended up as VP of HR for North America, uh, for that organization, for one of their divisions. And in the process, um, you know, enjoyed, you know, a long career there, but I made a transition, um, out of that company into a ministry role where I joined a large 5000 member church in Dallas as an executive pastor, CFO, CFO of that organization. A crazy story on the side there. After doing some missions work in Haiti following that earthquake. But, um, great experience there. The church doubled in size while I was there. Uh, went to 11,000 members and five locations and had a there’s a great time working with that team left there and moved to Houston in 2016 to take on chief operating officer role at a, uh, another financial services organization.

Andrew Jacobson: And I, um, again led that organization, uh, really at a large cultural transformation. Um, and I’m excited about that company today. They are winning awards every year, multiple awards for the culture and the work environment they have created. But I left there after I felt like my time there was done. The work I was there to accomplish had been accomplished. And I’m looking for my next role where I could help other organizations achieve that same cultural transformation, healthy workplace, and have a, you know, kind of a significant impact on the community, on the lives of the people that work for those organizations came across C12, I had never heard of C12 before, but in the course of my search, um, talked to the, uh, one of the the really the founder of C12 here in Houston and, you know, talked about my background and he, uh, impressed upon me the opportunity to come alongside 20 to 30 CEOs and really help multiple companies achieve that same transformation. And that’s why I launched in May of last year. And I’m now facilitating, uh, CEO and business owner peer advisory boards and doing one on one executive coaching here in the Houston marketplace.

Trisha Stetzel: That’s fantastic. I’m gonna have to have you back just to talk about all of the things that you’ve done.

Andrew Jacobson: It’s a it’s a long story for the sake of, of this, of this time of the day. And we would consume the entire time if I tried to tell you my life story. It’s pretty crazy.

Trisha Stetzel: Totally get that. Now, on a serious note, I want to dive into this epidemic of loneliness and isolation. You’ve got some, uh, the surgeon General’s report. Did you review this? Came out late last year. And I think, yes. The Impact that this epidemic of loneliness and isolation has in the business space is huge. What are your thoughts?

Andrew Jacobson: Absolutely, absolutely. You know the scary part about it, Tricia, is that report was issued late last year. It was an 85 page report. And the surgeon General really referred to this as an urgent, urgent public health concern. Um, but it went kind of largely under the radar. Cigna did another, uh, really exhaustive research project that they released in February of this year, talking about the impact of loneliness and isolation on the American public. Um, and it really has been, when you think about it, um, coming out of that report, they they discovered 58% of Americans today are battling loneliness. I mean, that’s a staggering number when you think about it. And when you go to the younger generation, 78% of Americans under the age of 30 are struggling with loneliness right now. And it is impacting not just personal lives. It’s impacting the marketplace. It’s impacting companies. Whether you have five employees or whether you have 500 employees or 5000, it is impacting the, uh, the Cigna report. Actually, they their their research came back and explained that $154 billion are lost in productivity annually due to loneliness. It’s not even due to all the other health issues, but due to loneliness alone. It is impacting the markets. And so the question is, what are we doing about it? And I will tell you, I think what’s really troubling, I said 58% of the American public.

Andrew Jacobson: But when they took a look at business leaders, 70% of business leaders are there’s the reason why they say it’s lonely. At the top 70% of business leaders, according to the Cigna research, are struggling with loneliness right now. And there was a there was a Harvard Business Review article, ironically, the almost the exact same number C-suite executives, 70% according to a Houston I’m sorry, Harvard Business Review article last year in 2023 had 70% of C-suite executives that are looking at leaving their role and leaving their company altogether due to exhaustion and fatigue, but also due to loneliness. And so it is one of those things we’re not talking about it. We should be strategizing as business leaders. This is something we should be taking seriously. It can actually it can be a major challenge, but it can also be a great opportunity for the company owners, the business leaders that recognize this for what it is and actually begin to take just modest steps to address it. It can not only have an incredible positive impact on your business performance, but on the lives of your employees. Um, I would even go your suppliers, your vendors, your marketplace, everybody you’re interacting with. Healthy companies radiate health, and it definitely has a trickle down effect.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, absolutely. So it is so important to have that healthy workplace culture. Uh, for the bottom line. You’ve made that point very clear here. So what’s what is the significance of a healthy peer advisory board? You mentioned that earlier that I did. Yeah.

Andrew Jacobson: It starts I will tell you, a healthy organization starts with a healthy leader. Um, and a healthy leader starts with a healthy and balanced life. Um, we I as an example, there’s and there’s multiple different models. So I’m not here to push one particular model. I am going to here to talk about the importance of having a trusted, confidential environment where you can come together with like minded business leaders and talk about the challenges you’re facing. Um, and, and it’s not just I think a lot of peer advisory boards do focus almost entirely and exclusively on the business. But I go back to, again, healthy leadership is much more broad. It’s a fully integrated life. And if one area of your life is out of balance, we see it all the time. We see you read articles you have, whether it’s in magazines or online, of businesses that have been impacted significantly by a leader whose personal life was falling apart. Maybe everything was going great, and we think we are better at categorizing our life and segmenting our lives, and we really are. Um, and so really it’s about having a really healthy, fully integrated life as a leader. I can tell you, the peer advisory boards that I do facilitate, we start off every month with a self-assessment that we check in with each other. We call the Life and Leadership Balance Wheel. And there’s literally 13 areas of our life that we evaluate. And to have a healthy, balanced life, you should have a healthy balance wheel.

Andrew Jacobson: And if you have flat spots, we always say if you have flat spots in the balance wheel, life’s not going to go that well. And if life doesn’t go that well, the company you’re leading is going to feel the impact of that. So that’s one of those things we take a look at is how do you live a fully healthy and to be able to come together every month and monitor that set personal goals in each of those 13 areas and then hold each other accountable over the course of the year? Yes. We’re also focusing on the business as well. We have a five point alignment matrix that we’re talking about, the business objectives we’ve set every year when we’re strategic planning. And we report out on that every month. And and if we’re low in some areas we’re behind target in some areas. What are we doing to address those things. So all of that. But I will tell you of the five points, what’s unique to C12, I will say if I’m going to put a plug in for C12, it’s of the five areas of business that we’re looking at. We’re looking at revenue generation, financial management or development operations management. But we do have this one category that’s unique, where we talk about how is your business having a positive impact, um, on your employees, on your community, and on the world as a whole. And it’s actually the fifth area, and we refer to it as business.

Andrew Jacobson: As a ministry. How is your business being used as a platform to positively impact the lives of the people that are interacting with your business every day? And that’s where this topic of loneliness comes back into play, because we are now as business leaders and we have over 4000 members in C12 now across the country are looking at how are we identifying employees in our in our companies that are struggling with loneliness because so many of them cover it? Um, there’s a really interesting example that’s kind of comical, but there was a comedy movie that came out back in around the 2000 time frame. I don’t know if you remember, it was a mel Gibson Helen Hunt movie called What Women Want, and in that movie, Mel Gibson could hear what was going on in there. And it’s supposed to be a comedy, but there’s this one troubling scene in that movie where as he’s walking through, there’s this younger, um, administrative female employee, and he recognizes she’s talking about suicide. Um, that nobody she just wants to end her life. Because even though she’s there, she’s an attractive woman. She’s an educated woman. But she felt like nobody knew her and nobody cared, and nobody knew the challenges she was going through. And it haunted Mel Gibson. It was a major segment of that movie. But you think about that today. Um, the epidemic of loneliness has also led to what we’re seeing as an epidemic in suicide in our country.

Andrew Jacobson: The suicide numbers, the mental health challenges today that we are facing are definitely at numbers we’ve never seen before. And because none of us really feel trained to deal with that, I’m not a trained mental health professional. Most CEOs and business owners aren’t trained. They just avoid the topic. And really, you don’t have to be a mental health professional to be able to care about your staff and to be able to create an environment where they can come and have that sense of belonging and that sense of connection. When I think about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it’s that middle need. It’s five. There’s five levels, but that middle need is love and belonging. And you know, right after your your physiological needs and your safety needs, the very next need is having that sense of connectivity and belonging. And I will tell you, coming out of Covid, that is one thing that we haven’t addressed. And that’s where I think this really exploded, was remote work environments, everybody going remote. And now there’s something it’s appreciated. I think a lot of employees like the opportunity to work remote. It’s convenient. You save money on gas, you don’t. You can, you know, you don’t have to dress professionally from the waist up. You know, all these things that we do. But the fact of the matter is we’re losing that connectivity. And as a result, it is creating what I would consider, what the Surgeon general consider an epidemic in a actual public health emergency.

Trisha Stetzel: Wow, I got goosebumps and like five different things that you said there. And it’s so, um, it’s scary and interesting all the time that this is happening out there right under our noses. So having this healthy peer advisory board is very important where you’re getting the feedback together so that they’re not lonely. How deep do you go, then to helping those CEOs build that same type of, um, culture in their businesses so that we’re even pushing the loneliness down or the, the, um, the epidemic of loneliness out further. I start to involve the employees.

Andrew Jacobson: Yeah. What we do, and I’ll tell you the example is just the meeting once a month. When we get these CEOs together, they get to practice what they then want to take back to their company. So it starts again. It starts at the leadership level. A healthy company will start with a healthy leader. That healthy leader will build a healthy leadership team. That healthy leadership team builds healthy. And again I’m going now to multi level you know a tiered company. If you’re just five employees that healthy leader walks back and creates a healthy environment. But if it’s a larger company it starts at the leadership level. Um, you know Google did that. There was a study that came out a couple of years ago now about the the impact of psychological safety in the workplace. And they found that the highest performing companies across industries, this is industry agnostic. The highest performing companies over time are the companies that have an environment of psychological safety in the workplace, where employees are comfortable being their real self, they don’t have to put on their fake face when they walk into the door, and then they go back out and they, you know, they’re surviving work as opposed to thriving in the workplace. And so it does start at that leadership level. And just to clarify, this isn’t all we talk about. This is a topic when I was Pat when we were coming about this, I mean, obviously we are talking about all different business topics.

Andrew Jacobson: Every month is another business topic. This this month we just talked about, um, you know, that healthy elements of a of a solid sales architecture, what all goes into a, a highly productive sales architecture. But a couple of months ago when we talked about this topic of, um, just overall connectivity and engagement in the workplace versus loneliness and isolation, what are some common practices and, and companies that are part of the C12 organization took those. There was actually a number of things we walked away from, and it’s neat to have them come back the next month and the following month and start reporting out on some of the things they’ve already put into place, creating a caring matrix as part of their a part of their dashboard. You all have leadership dashboards. We have key performance indicators. We’re talking about all of our business performance. But I go back to again, I don’t care what business you’re in, your people unless you’re a solopreneur. And it’s all technology driven. I don’t know, maybe you’re. But even then it’s your you as a person are still your mental health. Your emotional health is still so important. But most companies, when it comes to caring for their people, that seems to be one of those things. They kind of dump over to an HR department somewhere and say, you come up with programs, you do this, we’re about something else.

Andrew Jacobson: Whatever your industry is, we’re about the industry productivity. We’re not so much about the people, and yet it’s the people that make it happen. And as the people are healthier or the lack of health, it does manifest itself in the performance of the company as a whole. And that’s where I go back to what we’ve done is has to practice it in that environment where we have psychological safety, transparency. We have this thing we refer to as Buffalo culture at C12. I know in talking to veterans, they love the topic because we know what that’s like as a veteran. I’m also a veteran as well. We’ve talked about that. We both are. Um, but this idea that when when a storm hits the only hurting animal in North America, we have deer, cattle, elk, buffalo, there’s all these different, the only ones that actually herd together and face into the storm and charge the storm are buffalo. Every other, every other herding animal tends to scatter and run away from a storm. Um, but we don’t. We actually. And so one of the things we take a look at is how do we as a leadership group, a cadre of, of business leaders, how do we address these hard topics and charge into them together? So we come out the other side faster and more healthy.

Andrew Jacobson: And this is what, again, a practice that we now take to the leadership teams of organizations. And they take it to their management. And from there you’re seeing, you know, things like a care team. And some of these employers have created a care team. It’s different and it’s usually a group of employees, maybe 1 or 2 employees from different departments that come together and they’re creating, you know, social events. Um, they’re creating, you know, opportunities outside of work for people to connect and feel a part of something. They’re even creating, serving opportunities. There’s something really healthy about serving together, um, getting your eyes off your own problems and being able. There’s people who I don’t care what situation you’re in. There are folks in our community that have bigger problems than we do. And from a emotional connectivity, that whole love and belonging to serve together. Um, you having done this with multiple different teams and different environments, everything from a half day event to a one week mission trip and a corporate, we actually had a corporate mission trip that we did every year to see how that changes the culture and the work environment. And when it comes down to it, the quality of the work product, um, is definitely impacted significantly by having a team that is excited and thriving in their work environment.

Trisha Stetzel: That’s awesome. So, Andrew, I want to talk specifically about C12. I know you’ve been talking at a high level. You’ve given us some little tidbits about it, but, um, C12 attracts Christian CEOs who, if you could speak to your best client right now or to a client, who might that be.

Andrew Jacobson: Really? When it comes down to it, I think the ideal client and they’re out there today. We haven’t done a really effective job yet of of building the brand awareness of C12. Um, so I’ll just say that for the ideal client is the CEO, the business owner. Um, there’s both depending on how the organization is structured. But the top of the org chart, who is looking for maybe some additional input. I think we all get stuck often in positions where we’re not making decisions and we’re like, man, it’d be great if I had somebody to talk to who’s navigated, I would say navigated this section of the river before we’re going down a section of a river, there’s rapids, there’s rocks. It would be nice to talk to somebody who’s navigated that section of the river to tell us what to look out for, and in the corporate world, what that means is coming together as a group. C12, we have it’s called C12 because there’s 12 in each forum. We get together once a month. And like I say, we start off with talking about, um, personally, uh, you know, whatever our challenges are, whatever our successes are, and we provide advice and counsel to each other as a group, but then we go from there into a really a timely strategic business topic every month. And these are I mean, the curriculum is developed for the global C-12 organization. So if you’re in a C-12 forum in Boston or if you’re a C-12 forum here in Houston, or if you know you’re in South Africa or Taiwan, we actually are in seven countries now.

Andrew Jacobson: You’re going to have a very similar experience when it comes to the curriculum, and it is business topics that will help you as a leader. Um, just become more knowledgeable. These are MBA caliber curriculum that we go through every month. We do a deep dive every month into one of the 12 companies, and it’s a case study for everybody in the room. But at the end of it, that CEO or business owner is able to bring, after doing a presentation on what their company is, has done over the last 12 months, what their goals are for the next 12. But these are the challenges they’re facing. And then we together collaborate and brainstorm on the best solutions. 12 minds at a table. Running companies are going to make way better, way better decisions than a CEO in isolation. And that’s where I go back to this whole idea of isolation and loneliness, to be part of a peer advisory group where you are all in it together and you’re all pulling for each other to succeed. Um, you know, the performance over time. It definitely shows those who are willing. I think you have to be willing and open to receive guidance and direction. That takes a degree of humility. But also, um, you know, a willing to just to be candid with each other, that whole Buffalo culture. And so the ideal CEO, business owner is, um, you know, for the curriculum to make sense.

Andrew Jacobson: There is a minimum size if you’re a solo preneur, you know, we’re talking about things like employee benefits and compensation. We’re talking about things like, you know, management training and leadership development. If you’re a solopreneur, it’s probably not. It’s nice to still have that. I’m sure we’d all love to have a peer advisory board. There are other organizations out there that I can connect people with that are going to be great for those startups. Um, we’re looking for employers, typically with ten or more employees. And we have, you know, we have some members with thousands of employees. Um, but that’s typically, I think the sweet spot for C12 is that ten employee company to probably about 500 employees in that area. Now, it sounds like a big range, but you’re dealing with a lot of the same issues at that point in time. So that’s kind of what we’re looking for. And it is I mean, we are unapologetically a Christian organization. So we are talking about faith in the workplace as well, and and how to encourage CEOs that have their faith to live out their faith, um, in the in the role that God’s placed them in, in leadership. So we do talk about that as well as part of it. We’re not a Bible study. We’re not a prayer meeting. It is a business peer advisory board. Um, but that’s that’s kind of who we are. That’s our target audience.

Trisha Stetzel: That’s beautiful. Thank you for sharing that with me. So if someone’s interested in having a conversation with you or maybe even interested in joining one of your peer groups, if you have, I’m sure you do. Uh, how might they get in touch with you?

Andrew Jacobson: Andrea C12 Houston comm is is the way and if you if you take a look at C-12 Houston comm. Um I’m one of five C-12 chairs in the greater Houston area. I do handle the downtown section of Houston. Um, we’ve got forums up in the woodlands, out in Katy, down in Sugar Land. Um, out actually in Brenham in College Station as well. That falls under that purview as well. Um, but yes, if you want to know more about C-12, reach out to C-12 Houston Comm. You’ll see, uh, each of our bios there as well, and you’ll see where the forms are. You can submit, uh, interest notice. And one of us will be giving you a call back and setting up an initial meeting just to talk a little bit more about your company, about your life personally, and tell you a little bit more about C-12.

Trisha Stetzel: Fantastic. And Andrea, I’m going to put that link inside the show notes. So for those of you who are listening or watching, you can just click on the link and find that exact place that Andrew sent you to so that you can fill out the form and get in contact with Andrew or one of his counterparts, Andrew. Thank you so much for being on with me today. It’s such an important topic, and I think that what you’ve offered today is going to be so valuable to the listeners.

Andrew Jacobson: Absolutely. Thank you, Tricia, for having me.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, I’m glad you were on today. That’s all the time we have for today’s show. Join us next time for another exciting episode of Houston Business Radio. And until then, stay tuned, stay inspired, and keep thriving in the Houston business community.