Kyle Calvert

CJ Casciotta: Welcome to Change Log by Reculture, stories of operators navigating change in their own words. My name is CJ Casciotta, and we're about to listen to my friend Kyle Calvert, who is the CEO of two companies. One he helped start 16 years ago called Caliber Care, and a new one that's had to navigate a ton of rapid growth in a short amount of time called Canary. So it's an interesting premise: What's had to change? What's had to not change? And what's being learned in real time as he navigates two very different companies? Spoiler alert to Kyle: It all comes down to storytelling. Here's the interview. CJ: We are here with Kyle Calvert. Kyle actually runs two companies. He started as the CEO of Caliber Care, and then, Kyle, you recently began a new company. Can you give us a little snapshot of both? Kyle: Yeah. So Caliber started 16 years ago in Nashville doing non-emergency medical transportation. Discharges, medical appointments, just taking people kind of to and from where they need to go. Over those 16 years, we also saw there was a need in multiple other states, so we expanded. Part of that expansion into Florida opened us up for FEMA so that we could basically do the same thing when hurricanes or other disasters hit. Moving people in these disaster zones is really complicated on a good day. It's even worse when communications and technology start to fail, which is what you find in a hurricane. It's really difficult just to pick up the phone, answer an email or a text, or open documents. And obviously, in today's world, what business doesn't rely on the internet? So we started kind of experimenting and Frankensteining different equipment, hardware, and solutions. We ended up putting Starlink and a cellular router with a battery, and all the engineering that came with it, into a really small, rugged case that we call Canary. Canary is about a year or so into its life. So as a startup, it's a blast not knowing... CJ: Ha ha. Kyle: And it definitely has its trade-offs of, like, is it time to make the donuts? What time is it? Okay, yeah, we're good. We're all good here. Everyone's okay. CJ: Yeah. So to be clear, Canary has scaled really rapidly. You're being modest. It's totally taken off. Kyle: Yeah. You know, this is not a new space. That was kind of what I think was surprising to us. I always tell people when they're looking at jumping into something, we talk about boots on the ground a lot. You've got to get your hands dirty. You've got to be there. We're a decade into this FEMA contract, and every major hurricane, I am right there alongside our people. Sometimes that means two weeks away from home. But it's invaluable to learn how these things work and how they don't work. Lo and behold, we initially started out just making them for us. That was our initial use case. I wanted this just to be able to use during these deployments. Going into it blind, I think, was a blessing. Now we look back and go, "We did not know what we were doing, but that also meant we didn't know what couldn't be done." We had to make it happen. At the end of the day, the value in it is how easy it is to use. That's because we learned from boots on the ground. If things are complicated, they break. If you don't know how the end user is actually going to use it, or abuse it in some cases, it just doesn't work. CJ: So we ask four questions on this show, and the first one is: What changed? I want to couch that question in the context of the fact that you ran one type of business for a really long time, and then you got thrust into this new kind of business. They're not the same business. What had to change mentally as an operator in order to start scaling Canary versus Caliber? Kyle: With Caliber, we are considered experts in this area. We often get approached by companies that are much larger than us to say, "Hey, we need these questions answered. These are things you could help us with." With Canary, we were having to take so many steps backward to ask those questions of others. We're no longer the experts in the field. We're becoming them. It's so interesting when you're like, "Yeah, I'm a master at this," and now I'm going to go back to kindergarten. We just go about it with that kind of sense of humor of, "It's going to work out. It's going to be fine." A lot of it has been the grace that our customers have given us because we've had these orders come through and we're like, "Hey, thank you so much for ordering and supporting us early on." "It's going to be two months before you get your case because the batteries are in production or on a ship, and we didn't know lead time was a thing. We're so used to Amazon. What happened to overnight delivery?" And the customers are like, "You know what? It's worth waiting." CJ: Wow. That's it. Kyle: That kind of humbling has also had to change. Like, "I'm so sorry." And they get it, and they're okay with that. We're very much in the takeoff phase. With Caliber being at cruising altitude, you can just sit back and enjoy the movie and popcorn. With Canary, the engines are at full blast, just trying to get to the 10,000-foot altitude where you can use your laptop. We're not there yet. CJ: What, if anything, have you left behind in building Canary? You were younger when you really stepped into the operator role at Caliber. Is there anything you've left behind in this new phase of change and development? Kyle: I touched on that humility portion before, and I think that was one of the things I didn't have when I was starting Caliber. I'm 43, so you do the math. I was 26, 27 with Caliber. When Caliber was scaling to that large size, we had 35 locations from California to New York. When you're in that and people are calling you the expert, and you've got all these people looking to you to lead them, you get this false sense of, "I do know everything," which is very dangerous, by the way. I know the Bible touches on that and so many other examples, and you're like, "Those aren't going to apply to me." They do, by the way. There is no one out there who has escaped this kind of being in a vacuum, getting the yes people, getting a big head and ego about it. Because you see all this forward momentum and you're like, "Man, nothing can stop us." By the way, things can stop you. We had those kinds of internal collapses. We grew too quickly. We didn't have the systems in place. We didn't have the true expertise. It was more of a facade and a mirage that, when tested, really started to fall apart. You could start to see those cracks. Going into Canary, the thing I've had to leave behind is that ego. And that absolutely just comes with age. Listening a little bit more, taking things a little slower, and at the same time understanding that you don't have to have all the answers. But you do need to go find those people, those other experts, to get those things. That was not the case when starting Caliber. I was like, "I do have all the answers." Boy, was I wrong. It's such a good space now to go, "I don't have to have all the answers. I just have to have a few of them, and enough of the right ones." You can go into these things making mistakes. By the way, I've made so many mistakes. I'm going to make so many more. Before, you didn't want to advertise that you were making mistakes, and you certainly didn't want people to see your mistakes. Now, I think in leadership, that's one of the biggest, I don't know if you want to call it professional equity, but saying, "I was wrong," apologizing when I do something wrong, and building that team by leading right beside them and allowing them to see, "You know what? I really am just human, trying to learn this at the same time that you guys are." CJ: That's good. You already touched on this a bit, but what are you learning through this change, through building another company while you're leading another one? Kyle: That people really are the most important part of any company. Truly, you can have the best products, the best services, the coolest brand. But at the end of the day, while I started helping truly manufacture, drilling things into holes and putting these things in, just like with Caliber, I started in a van doing actual transports. I've been the accountant. I've been the janitor. I've been all of those kinds of things. But as it scales, you have to understand that you're not physically able to do all of the work. You can't. I can't physically build every Canary case. I can't also go do every patient transport, especially when we're in multiple states. So realizing how important our people are, that they are the ones who are actually going to be doing the jobs day in and day out, it's been really helpful from a culture standpoint for them to see that I trust them, getting circles tighter, getting people to understand that they do have value, and thinking about how we keep them engaged. CJ: Yep. Okay, last question, and this is maybe my favorite question of all four. What remains? Meaning, what are you carrying forward? This is the opposite of question two, which is, what are you leaving behind? What's sticking around? What's enduring? Kyle: Very early on, I think it was the second week of Caliber, I went out to pick an elderly lady up. That's the vast majority of our customer base on the Caliber side. She invited me into her home, gave me her purse, gave me her keys. She had arthritis, so she was giving me her key and asking me to help her with the door and help her arm her security system. All of this terrified me because I knew in that moment every person we hire is going to be in this exact scenario, if not on a regular basis, then on a daily basis. This is going to be something that plays out. So I immediately came back and said, "Okay, we have to make sure we hire the best people." Because if this person goes into this elderly lady's house and sees cash lying around, because that's what they do, we've got to know that temptation isn't going to hit them. I just kept thinking, "I don't want to end up on the six o'clock news. I don't want it." So we needed people who were going to act like I acted in that moment, and at scale. That was the other thing that really concerned me. Are we going to have to lay eyes on every employee every day to make sure they're doing their job? Or can we really do a great job on the front end hiring, and then also training, continuing training, performance reviews, and making sure everyone is doing what they say they're doing and is who they say they are? That was really important. Just like when Eric and I built the first case and knew that lives depended on it. That connection is lost if you don't tell the story. This scenario just played out this week. A search-and-rescue team had drones in the air, actively searching in the woods, relying on Canary's network to stream live video. The last thing we want is a case to fail. We don't have failure as an option. CJ: Mm. Kyle: And we embed that into people. You're not just wiring nuts together to connect four batteries. Those batteries are what is going to run this case. It may very well be you or your family relying on this case's network and battery to be saved during a search and rescue. I would say one word that has been there from the beginning to the end is storytelling. We are storytellers. And I think that is what connects the boring, mundane, "these are things we just have to get through" to, "Here's the why behind that." There is a why behind everything we do. You can give them the black and white in a print book, or you can take the moment to say, "Here's why we are so picky and particular about who we hire." It's because in the second week we were open, our founder was in this scenario with cash in a purse and prescription drugs within arm's reach. It's the story of our box being the one that was streaming live video back to help a family in their van in floodwaters get found quickly. That resonates with everyone. That's part of being human, that human connection and putting yourself into that moment where that could be your mom at home with all of your cash that you're about to inherit, and then this driver takes it all. And they're like, "I could see that. I could see that being my mom." "That could have absolutely been my family in that van." We've really held storytelling within our DNA over the last 16 years. The story has just changed slightly. CJ: Yeah, it's beautiful. I think there's a sort of sneaking idea that as technology continues to progress, we can optimize and eliminate the intentionality out of storytelling in order to scale our companies well and our brands well. And what I'm hearing from you is, you can create the coolest technology, the greatest-looking product, brand, et cetera, but you can't separate intentionality from storytelling. Those two things are inextricably linked if you want to create a brand that scales and continues to be effective. Kyle: Yeah. And that's one of the things. It's very expensive and time-consuming to hire someone. I think you can ask any owner out there who looks at scale, and it's finding the right people. That recruitment process is astronomical. Then to get them to say yes and actually show up on day one, it's nothing short of a miracle. What's so interesting is that companies, at that moment, from what I've seen, that's usually where they start to fail. They get the person in the door and they're like, "Whew." And we're like, "Actually, believe it or not, this is when the really difficult part starts." To get them to truly change and adopt our culture as their own. It's in that moment where I think companies look at that and go, "Yeah, hey, we got them through the door. Thanks so much. Here's your employee manual. Good luck." And we're like, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no." CJ: This is the beginning. Kyle: Yeah. This is where we have them sit shoulder to shoulder. And that's a huge thing. When people look at why their churn isn't working, or if they have a lot of churn in those first 90 days, it's because people didn't get fully converted into your culture. The only way to make that happen is through meaningful human connections. I think the single best ROI, when you look at a company, is all in the first 30 days.