Heart and Hustle

Many peo­ple just cruise by in life. But if you want to rise to the top and out­per­form every­one else, you have to work hard­er — and don’t give up when things get tough.

That’s the dri­ve behind CEO Dean Fras­er and the incred­i­ble suc­cess of Elec­tri­cal & Instru­men­ta­tion ser­vices com­pa­ny CDN Con­trols, to whom we intro­duced you, last week.

In this sec­ond of a four-part series, Fras­er talks about the ​‘heart and hus­tle’ infused in the DNA of their company.

Every com­pa­ny has a DNA – the build­ing blocks that make it unique – that shapes its cul­ture and strat­e­gy, informs what you can and can’t do and deter­mines your authenticity.

For CDN Con­trols, it’s the ​‘heart and hus­tle’ that runs through every lev­el of the com­pa­ny – from the CEO to the front lines – to always do bet­ter for their cus­tomers. Lis­ten below as Fras­er talks about CDN’s heart and hus­tle and how hard work pays off.

Pro­duc­tive Paranoia

Fras­er also cred­its the growth of the com­pa­ny to what he calls ​‘pro­duc­tive paranoia’.

“It’s our deter­mi­na­tion to win. We’re always hus­tling — all day, every day. We’re always on, always think­ing of what we can do bet­ter, and how we can grow prof­itably. We’re always look­ing over our shoul­der and we’re nev­er going to say, ​‘this is good enough’.

Fras­er talk about CDN’s pro­duc­tive para­noia here.

And that’s a mas­sive thing to main­tain, because when peo­ple get too com­fort­able, every­thing starts to get loose and slows down. And then your DNA changes.

A DNA Checkup

Because of that, Fras­er – with his ​‘do bet­ter’ dri­ve – recent­ly brought in a third par­ty to do a cul­tur­al assessment.

“We want­ed to see where the cul­ture was with­in CDN — not just on the exec­u­tive senior lead­er­ship team but man­age­ment and front­line employ­ees. as well. And when we gath­ered all the data and put it all togeth­er, what (peo­ple) think CDN is and what we think, was very, very close. It was a good exer­cise because you’re nev­er quite sure, as you grow, and don’t have that touch with the front­line guys as much as we used to.”

Want to hear more? Here is the link to our recent CDN Case Study and watch the full inter­view with Fras­er below.