The Secret to Attracting Marketing Talent + Profit

What if “culture” isn’t a vibe — it’s the system that produces (or prevents) profit?

In this episode, Dane Sanders sits down with Taylor Holiday, CEO of Common Thread Collective, to map the exact link between behavior, environment, and business outcomes. Over 12+ years, CTC shifted from celebrating ideas to celebrating results — rewriting values around value creation, measuring contribution with clarity, and aligning incentives so rational self-interest pulls the rope in the same direction.

They unpack:

• Why you only change culture when the business needs to change — and how profit becomes the forcing function
  
  
• “Behavior + environment = culture”: designing standards that produce the outcomes you want
  
  
• Moving from inputs to outcomes: measuring value (revenue, retention, account growth) instead of vibes
  
  
• The treadmill vs. nap room metaphor: how your stated values determine who shows up and how they work
  
  
• Accountability as leverage: “the most value accrues to the most accountable person”
  
  
• Hiring and exceptions: when elite producers set their own workflow — and where that breaks
  
  
• Profit participation and clarity: reducing drama by making the money math obvious
  
  
• Using data to test sacred cows (e.g., the “drama tax”) and find non-obvious performance edges
  
  

You’ll also see how CTC reframed culture from a slogan to an operating system: explicit standards, measurable contribution, tighter feedback loops, and incentives that make winning the default behavior.

Additional Notes:

Explore the Prophit System:

https://www.prophitsystem.com

Together with …

• FERMÀT
• Bill