Slow Down to Speed Up
Bobby Herrera runs Populus Group 🏔️, a roughly $500 million workforce company he's led for nearly 24 years, with about 350 full-time employees and a flexible workforce of up to 7,000.
His attrition runs more than 50% below his industry, and his customer NPS is more than three times the average.
Those numbers exist because, at the moment most founders would have stomped on the gas, Herrera did the opposite. He hit the brakes on a growing company, on purpose, and his team revolted.
Skip this one and you miss the clearest case yet that slowing down to build culture is a growth strategy, not a tax on it.
👀 Here's what you get in today's edition of the Culture Creators:
The growth decision that made his own team revolt (and why he'd do it again)
The one thing he does with your résumé before he'll read a word of it
The number he tells every CFO to track instead of the usual KPIs
Check out the episode wherever you get podcasts.
— Nate Bagley, Producer of Culture Creators
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Ask most founders what was most instrumental to their company’s success and they'll point to an ingenious product, a market ready for disruption, or even a lucky break.
Bobby Herrera points to something far less glamorous: the human systems most leaders treat as an afterthought.
There’s a reason Patrick Lencioni calls Bobby Herrera "the best CEO you've never heard of."
Over nearly 24 years he's built Populus Group into a $500+ million workforce company with about 350 full-time employees and a flexible workforce of up to 7,000, while holding attrition more than 50% below his industry and customer NPS more than three times the average.
(He also wrote an awesome book, “The Gift of Struggle,” about his journey. You should check it out.)
His thesis is simple and a little heretical: Most companies treat hiring, onboarding, and training as overhead, the administrative box to check so people can hurry up and get to "the real work."
Bobby believes that building a high-trust, enthusiastic, purpose-driven team is the real work. Without a team like that, how can you expect to accomplish big, hairy, ambitious goals?
That’s he’s spent so much time and energy dialing in the processes and systems to support hiring, onboarding, and training — or as he’d call it, “Selecting,” “Welcoming,” and “Developing” his team.
1. When growth hides the cracks, slow down on purpose
Herrera describes his company in eras.
The first he calls "the most fun I never want to have again."
The second, after a burst of growth, he calls the "holy bleep" era.
By the time Populus Group hit around 100 employees, the cracks were obvious: attrition above what he'd call healthy, and a set of "unwritten and unspoken behavioral codes" that left people guessing how to act.
The seductive move when revenue is climbing is to pour more fuel on the growth fire.
Herrera did the opposite and entered what he calls the "era of slow," deliberately decelerating to dig a deeper foundation.
His team thought he'd lost it. "They were literally coming at me with pitchforks," he says. "What are you doing? We're growing. Why are you slowing us down?"
His answer: "If we wanna build something special, meaningful, and structurally strong, we have to dig a deep foundation of our culture, our purpose, and our values."
It took years of fighting that resistance to bring it to life.
The strategic logic: fast growth on a shaky foundation is a form of debt. That debt manifests as turnover, rework, and an inconsistent customer experience. Slowing down to standardize how people are brought in and developed is what let growth resume on solid ground instead of collapsing back on itself.
Make the case to your CEO: Don't pitch this as "let's hit pause." Pitch it as paying down risk. Put a number on what each chaotic hire and surprise exit costs you during a growth spurt, then propose that one quarter spent standardizing selection and onboarding pays itself back in retention. You're not asking to slow the business. You're asking to make its growth durable.
2. Select people. Don't hire résumés.
The first foundation crack Herrera went after was his own hiring process… and the problem started with him.
As the company grew, he handed interviewing off to his managers and assumed they were evaluating people the way he did.
They weren't.
He had never actually taught them how he read whether or not a candidate was a good culture fit, so competent people who were poor culture fits kept slipping through… and they often chipped away at the culture he was trying to protect.
His fix wasn't to host a hiring quick workshop and hope his team “got it.”
He actually climbed into the process himself, built real systems around it, and made sure every manager understood why selection mattered and how to do it well.
A big part of this is using intentional language.
Herrera doesn't "hire," he "selects” (and the difference isn't just semantics).
Skills get screened before the first conversation with a hiring manager, so the only question left in the room is whether this person will make the culture better than it already is.
To emphasize that focus, Bobby actually flips the candidate's résumé face down when he’s interviewing.
"We select, we don't hire," he says. "We flip over the resume ceremoniously so we can really understand who they are, what brings them joy, what defines who they are. Because what they've done on their resume doesn't give you those answers."
Every candidate goes through at least four interviews — the first two are exclusively about values — with the hiring manager present through all of them so accountability never gets diffused.
The strategic logic: a mis-hire is one of the largest unbudgeted costs a company carries, between the severance, the re-hire, and the quiet drag on everyone who has to work around a bad fit. In an era where AI résumé screens optimize for keywords, the thing that actually predicts success on your team, who the person is, goes unmeasured.
Make the case to your CEO: Bring the real cost of your last bad hire, fully loaded. Then propose that culture-fit interviews aren't a delay in hiring, they're quality control on your single most expensive purchase. Keep the hiring manager present through every interview so ownership of the decision never gets diffused.
3. Make the first week about belonging, not paperwork
The first week of employment is sacred.
It’s the only time a new hire is wide open — emotionally, mentally, and appointmentally (their calendar is blank).
They will never again be as curious, as energized, or as willing to believe in your company as they are on day one.
If you make them spend that week on setting up login and passwords, filling out benefit forms, and going over policy manuals, you teach them — before they've even done a thing — that processes are more important than people.
That impression is almost impossible to reverse later.
Herrera treats week one as the highest-leverage window he'll ever get, so new hires spend all of it on culture before they touch a single job task.
"You have one day to be new," he tells them. "On day two, we expect you to start contributing to the culture and helping us make it better."
During that week, new hires don't just hear the values from the CEO. They're given a list of tenured employees to call and interview about how the values actually show up day to day. His reasoning is sharp: "They're gonna believe them before they believe me."
Each new hire also receives a carabiner and a "climber" number that ties them to the company's story from the start.
The strategic logic: a new hire's loyalty is cheapest to earn in week one and expensive to buy back later. As Herrera puts it, "You either invest now, or you pay later." Recognition is one of the highest-leverage tools in that window: 83.6% of employees say it affects their motivation to succeed.
Make the case to your CEO: Tie it straight to attrition. Ask when an employee is more engaged, week one or month six, then show what early attrition costs and propose moving that first-week energy off paperwork and onto belonging. You're capturing loyalty while it's free instead of buying it back later.
4. When someone struggles, diagnose before you discipline
Early on, letting people go nearly broke Herrera, and he handled it badly. When someone wasn't working out, he reacted the way most leaders do: emotionally, inconsistently, and often too personally.
He had no fair, repeatable way to tell whether a stumble was the person's fault or his own, so he'd treat a single bad week the same as a chronic pattern, and punish people for gaps that were really his failure to set them up.
What pulled him out of it was admitting, candidly, that he'd been "imperfect at this," and then building a simpler way to think it through.
He calls it "two's a trend."
When someone goes off track, he asks one diagnostic question first: is this happening because they can't, they don't know how, or they won't?
Only "won't" is a fit problem, and even then the exit is handled with grace, what he calls making someone "available to the marketplace compassionately."
"Can't" and "don't know how" are a leadership opportunity, not a personal failing.
He pairs this with a preference for "feed-forward" over feedback.
Feedback relitigates a past nobody can change, while feed-forward aims the same honesty at the next move, where the person can still act on it.
The strategic logic: most "performance problems" are clarity or skill gaps, and those are far cheaper to close than to replace a person and start over. Diagnosing before you discipline protects the investment you've already made in someone, and keeps exits from poisoning the trust of everyone still watching.
Make the case to your CEO: Reframe your performance process around diagnosis. Before anyone lands on a PIP or an exit, require a simple read on whether the gap is can't, don't-know-how, or won't. It lowers regrettable attrition and gives managers a fairer, more consistent way to act.
5. Redefine the KPI your CFO will actually fund
Every HR leader knows the moment…
You've built something that's genuinely working. People feel it, engagement is real, the floor has more energy than it did a year ago.
Then the CFO asks, "What's the ROI on that?" and you don't have a number that fits on their spreadsheet.
The work is real, but the language doesn't translate, and culture gets filed under soft cost.
It's one of the most deflating gaps in the job.
Herrera has a reframe for exactly that moment. Most people hear KPI and think "key performance indicator."
He redefines it into three questions any leader can answer: "
How well are we keeping people inspired?
How well are we keeping people interested?
And how well are we keeping people involved?"
Then he connects it to the metric he measures above all others, trust. "The more trust you have, the faster things move and the less things cost."
That's the bridge between the human language HR speaks and the financial language finance funds.
The strategic logic: culture skeptics aren't wrong to want a return, they just need it in their own terms. Inspired, interested, and involved are leading indicators of the lagging numbers a CFO already watches: productivity, retention, and customer loyalty.
Make the case to your CFO: Don't defend culture as a cost. Position it as the mechanism that makes everything else faster and cheaper. Open with inspired, interested, and involved as leading indicators, then connect each one to a lagging number they already track. You're speaking their language, and quietly repositioning HR from spend to lever.
The "so what?"
Herrera is the rare leader who treats culture as the foundation the business is built on, not a soft cost to justify.
And he has the retention, the NPS, and a 24-year track record to back it up.
For the HR leader who's spent years making that same argument, this episode is a field-tested system, plus the CEO-ready language to put each piece of it to work on Monday.
We turned Bobby’s process into a Playbook for YOU!
The bonus toolkit for this episode includes:
A diagnostic to catch when your growth is outrunning your culture
A one-pager on his “Select | Welcome | Develop” model
A fair way to handle underperformance before it becomes an exit
A planner for the first-week welcome
A talk track for defending the ROI of culture to your CFO
Everything you need to bring Bobby's system to your own team this week, available on the SHRM website this weekend.
When you overwork a top-performing employee, they stop caring, they stop contributing, and they leave.
Like Bobby Herrera says in today’s episode, you need systems in place to help employees to:
Feel inspired
Stay interested
Keep involved
Those systems prevent things like burnout, help you retain top performers, and movitate B-players to become A-players.
"The more trust you have, the faster things move and the less things cost."
Bobby measures trust above every other number in his company, because it sets the price of everything else.
High trust means faster decisions and less second-guessing.
Low trust shows up as wasted time and cost that never appears on a balance sheet.
It's the rare idea a CFO and a frontline employee would both agree with.
Bobby couldn't pick just one culture crush. He's a lifelong student of culture, and he pointed to four organizations he's borrowed from over the years:
What draws him to all of them is how unapologetic they are about who they are.
As he put it, "It's not for everyone, but for those of us that it is for, this is how we succeed." His eight years in the Army shaped the rest.