Walk West produced this episode of the Wake Forest University Center for Private Business podcast, How to Wake Up Your Business. Both people in the conversation, host Dana Alligood and guest Chuck Millsaps, are Walk West clients, and this piece demonstrates one of the reasons we are so lucky to work with them. We get to learn from people like them, not just serve them. Chuck's take on retention at Great Outdoor Provision Company stuck with us after we finished editing the episode, so we're sharing Donald Thompson's breakdown of it below.
Roughly 75% of the employees at Great Outdoor Provision Company have stayed more than 25 years. That's not the kind of number you get by chance, and it says a lot about how the company is run.
Great Outdoor Provision Company has built the kind of employee tenure most leaders would love to see. In Dana Alligood’s conversation with Chuck Millsaps on the Wake Forest University Center for Private Business podcast, How to Wake Up Your Business, two words kept surfacing: empathy and clarity. They sound simple, but both require discipline from leaders.
Empathy starts with understanding that people walk into work carrying things you may never see. Strong leaders ask what their people need to perform, grow and contribute. Clarity complements that empathy by making sure expectations, priorities and communication do not get lost in interpretation.
Chuck described a practice they call “clearing gaps”: making sure what one person said is actually what the other person heard. With five generations working inside the same organization, that discipline becomes even more important. Different generations bring different experiences, communication styles and assumptions to the workplace. Leaders cannot assume that sending the message means the message was understood.
One of the most useful leadership tips from the episode was simply asking, “What did you hear me say?” That question can prevent a small communication gap from becoming frustration, poor performance or eventually a resignation.
I would add a third word to Chuck’s two: reliability.
Empathy shapes how people get treated. Clarity shapes what they understand. Reliability is the one that determines whether they can actually count on the leadership around them, whether commitments mean anything once they're made, whether leaders follow through, and whether the organization's values hold up when the choices get harder.
That relationship between reliability and trust shows up clearly in PwC’s 2025 Global Workforce Hopes & Fears Survey, which surveyed nearly 50,000 workers across 48 countries and regions. Workers with the highest levels of trust in their direct managers were 72% more motivated than those with the lowest levels of trust. Yet only 55% said their direct managers do what they say they will do, and only half said the same of top management. PwC’s conclusion is straightforward: trust grows from reliability.
For leaders, the takeaway isn't complicated. People decide whether you're trustworthy based on accumulated evidence: what you say, whether you follow through, how you communicate when circumstances change, and whether your values hold up when honoring them gets inconvenient.
Great Outdoor gave us a powerful example of what that looks like in practice. When Tropical Storm Chantal put more than five feet of water into the company’s Chapel Hill store, leadership suddenly faced decisions about inventory, contractors, leases, reopening and the financial impact of a major disruption. Keeping their people employed, however, was a given. The decision did not have to be made during the crisis because the principle was already there.
Anybody can talk about values when revenue is growing and operations are running smoothly. Leadership becomes much more visible when there is pressure on the business, incomplete information and no perfect option. Those are the moments when employees learn which commitments are real.
They remember those moments, and they share them. Customers, partners, vendors and future employees form impressions from those experiences as well. Over time, the way a company behaves becomes part of its reputation.
For a privately held business, particularly one being built for the next generation, that reputation is an operating asset. It influences who wants to work with you, who stays, who recommends you, who partners with you and who trusts you when the next opportunity appears. The strongest reputations are reinforced by what people repeatedly experience from the leaders and organizations behind them.
This is usually where leaders overcomplicate the retention conversation. If good people are leaving, another program or perk isn't the first thing to look at. A more useful starting point is an honest audit of the leadership environment.
Ask yourself:
- Do our people know what we believe?
- Can they predict how our leaders will behave when circumstances get difficult?
- Are expectations clear, with the support people need to meet them?
- When communication breaks down, do we clear the gap quickly?
- Do we follow through on what we say we will do?
- Would our employees describe this organization the same way our leadership team does?
That final question deserves serious consideration. There is often a gap between the culture leaders believe they have created and the culture employees actually experience. Closing it demands more than better communication. It takes empathy, clarity and reliability, shown often enough that people know what the organization stands for and what they can expect from the people leading it.
Great people always have options, and you don't earn 25 years of loyalty with a clever retention program.
You earn it by being the kind of organization people keep choosing, year after year, because the leadership actually held up when it counted.
To hear the full conversation with Chuck Millsaps on the WFU Center for Private Business podcast, How to Wake Up Your Business, visit https://open.spotify.com/episode/6PXeHoH2tqMbJieRjFcGR2.