An exploration of how the feeling we create for our employees is the very feeling they deliver to our customers.
Picture the morning shift at the scrap yard. The pre-shift rituals wrap-up and the yard comes alive—the thunderous roar of the shear cutting through steel, the rhythmic clang of the grapple loading trucks, the steady hum of forklifts weaving between mountains of sorted metal. This is tangible work. Physical work. The kind of business where you can see, hear, and feel the value being created with every bale compressed, every truck loaded, every ton processed.
Earlier in the 2025, a scrap company General Manager shared something that stopped me in my tracks—a short video clip from Simon Sinek on TikTok. This is the video above. As you seen, Sinek talks about how businesses create loyalty not through transactions, but through genuine effort. He explains that when customers feel a company genuinely cares about them—not just their wallet—they become loyal. It’s not the product that creates the relationship; it’s the feeling that surrounds the transaction. That feeling of being valued, of mattering, of being treated as more than a number on an invoice.
Watching that two-minute clip, something clicked for me and other managers in different industries. We spend enormous energy thinking about the external customer—the mills, the foundries, the brokers, even other scrap yards. We obsess over accurate weights, clean material grades, on-time pickups, and competitive pricing. And we should. But what if the most important customer experience is happening right here, inside our gates, every single day?
What if our employees are our first and most critical customers?
Think about it. The feeling our team has about this company—about their leaders, their tools, their safety, their value—doesn’t stay contained within these walls. It gets loaded onto every truck. It gets baked into every bale we ship. It shows up in every phone call with a customer, every interaction at the scale house, every judgment call made in the sorting line. The internal experience becomes the external brand, whether we intend it or not.
This article explores a simple but powerful idea: the same principle that builds customer loyalty externally must first be applied internally. Before we can make our customers feel genuinely cared for, we should make our employees feel that way. Because genuine effort, like poor effort, is contagious. And it flows downhill from leadership to team to customer, creating either a cycle of excellence or a spiral of mediocrity.
Section 1: The Sinek Principle – Beyond the Transaction
Let’s start with the core message from that video the General Manager shared, because it’s worth unpacking fully.
Simon Sinek has built a career on a deceptively simple observation: people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. More specifically, they buy how you make them feel. In the clip, he talks about customer loyalty and makes a critical distinction that many businesses miss entirely. Loyalty isn’t created by the transaction itself—it’s created by the feeling that surrounds the transaction.
He describes genuine effort as the actions a company takes that show they care about the customer beyond just making a sale. It’s the follow-up call. It’s the extra explanation. It’s going slightly out of your way to ensure the customer feels secure, informed, and valued. These actions often cost very little in terms of time or money, but their impact on the customer’s feeling is enormous. And feelings, Sinek argues, are what drive decisions. When a customer feels good about a company, they become loyal. When they feel like just another transaction, they shop around for the next best price.
Consider a simple example outside our industry. Imagine you take your car to a mechanic for a repair. Two days after you pick it up, the shop calls you. Not because something went wrong, but to ask if the car is still running smoothly and if you have any concerns. That phone call takes three minutes and costs nothing. But the feeling it creates—the feeling of being cared for, of your wellbeing mattering to them—is powerful. You’ll remember that shop. You’ll recommend it. You’ll go back, even if they’re not the cheapest option, because they made you feel like more than a transaction.
Now, apply this to our world—the scrap metal industry. Our genuine effort toward external customers might look like providing accurate scale tickets every single time, showing up for scheduled pickups without fail, ensuring material is properly sorted and free of contaminants, communicating honestly about market conditions and pricing, and being responsive when problems arise. These actions, consistently applied, make our customers feel secure, reliable, and valued. They stop viewing us as just a vendor and start viewing us as a partner. They know we’re looking out for them, not just extracting value from them.
This is the foundation of long-term business relationships. It’s why some customers stick with us through market fluctuations and why others become advocates who refer new business our way. The transaction—the tons of scrap, the payment, the logistics—is just the vehicle. The real product is the feeling.
But here’s the critical question: where does our capacity to deliver that genuine effort actually come from?
Section 2: The Missing Link – The Employee as the First Customer
This is where most companies miss the connection entirely. We understand customer experience as it relates to external customers, but we fail to apply the same logic internally. We treat employees as resources to be managed rather than customers to be served.
Ask yourself: what generates our ability to deliver genuine effort to our external customers? Is it just machines and procedures? Is it the quality of our equipment or the sophistication of our systems? Those things matter, certainly. But at the end of the day, it’s people who operate the machines. It’s people who make judgment calls. It’s people who notice problems before they escalate. It’s people who go the extra mile—or choose not to.
This brings us to a concept that deserves far more attention than it typically gets: the employee as the internal customer.
Before an employee can make a customer feel safe and valued, they need to feel safe and valued themselves. Before they can deliver genuine effort externally, they need to receive genuine effort internally. Their “purchase” isn’t a product—it’s their discretionary effort. It’s the extra care they take. It’s the extra vigilance they apply. It’s the proactive idea they share. It’s the problem they solve before it becomes your problem. Employees “buy in” when they feel leadership’s genuine effort is genuinely directed at them.
Now, contrast this with what I’ll call the “babysitting” model of management—a model that, unfortunately, is all too common in industrial settings.
Babysitting is transactional and fundamentally distrustful. It operates on the assumption that employees will do the bare minimum unless watched, corrected, and controlled. It says, “I need to monitor you constantly to ensure you’re doing what you’re supposed to do.” The communication is one-way: orders down, compliance up. The focus is on catching mistakes rather than preventing them. The manager’s time is spent checking, verifying, and correcting.
What feeling does this create? Resentment. Infantilization. Disengagement. The employee feels like they’re not trusted, not respected, not valued beyond their ability to follow instructions. And here’s the predictable outcome: they deliver exactly the bare minimum. They don’t report near-misses because “no one listens anyway.” They don’t suggest improvements because “that’s not my job.” They don’t go the extra mile because “why should I?” The babysitting model creates the very behavior it fears, becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So what’s the alternative? What does “genuine effort” look like when directed at employees?
Genuine effort for leaders means providing everything employees need—not just what you think they need, but what they actually need—to perform at their best abilities. It means treating their success, safety, and growth as your primary responsibility. Let me break this down into specific categories:
Clarity: Employees need clear expectations and the “why” behind rules and procedures. It’s not enough to say “wear your PPE.” They need to understand the genuine reason—the real stories, the real risks, the real consequences. When people understand why something matters, compliance becomes commitment. All Toolbox Talks and Safety Training Videos use the genuine model.
Tools and Resources: This means functional equipment, PPE that actually fits properly, maintained machinery that doesn’t constantly break down, and the right tools for the job. Nothing communicates “you don’t matter” quite like asking someone to do quality work with inadequate or broken equipment. This is easily accomplished.
Safety: Not just compliance with regulations, but a genuine, visible obsession with sending them home healthy every single day. Safety as a core value, not a checkbox. Safety as something that’s discussed, refined, and improved based on their input, not just mandated from above or when the Environmental Health & Safety Manager walks through.
Growth: Clear paths to learn more, earn more, and take on more responsibility. People want to know there’s a future here, that their investment of time and effort will be recognized and rewarded, that they can develop their skills and advance their careers. Earning a CDL on their own or taking the exam to get their state issued Hoisting License should be something any employee seeking out knows what the clear path is. Maybe even becoming a lead or supervisor.
Autonomy: Trust them to solve problems within their realm of responsibility. Give them ownership. Ask for their expertise rather than assuming you have all the answers. Recognize that the person doing the job every day knows things about that job that you don’t.
When this effort is genuine—when it’s consistent, visible, and authentic—it creates a powerful feeling. Employees feel trusted. They feel respected. They feel like partners in the enterprise rather than cogs in a machine. They feel like they own their part of the yard, and ownership creates pride, and pride drives excellence.
This is the missing link. You cannot sustainably deliver genuine effort to external customers with a team that doesn’t receive genuine effort from you. The internal experience inevitably becomes the external experience. The feeling flows through.
Section 3: The Scrap Yard Leadership Model – From Dictator to Catalyst
Understanding the principle is one thing. Applying it practically in the daily reality of a scrap yard is another. So let’s get specific about what this looks like in leadership terms. Let’s contrast two models: the Dictator and the Catalyst.
The Dictator Model (The Order-Giver)
This is the traditional, command-and-control style that many industrial operations default to, often without even realizing it. The Dictator leader focuses primarily on rules, compliance, and output metrics. Communication flows one direction: downward. “Do this. Don’t do that. Faster. Be careful. Why isn’t this done yet?”
Safety, under this model, becomes a list of prohibitions. “Don’t stand there. Don’t operate without gloves. Don’t take shortcuts.” It’s reactive and punitive. When something goes wrong, the response is to add another rule, deliver another lecture, impose stricter monitoring.
What feeling does this create? At best, compliance born of fear—people follow the rules when watched because they don’t want to get in trouble. At worst, apathy and resentment—people tune out the constant barrage of orders and do exactly what they’re told, nothing more. They don’t report near-misses because they fear blame. They don’t suggest improvements because they’ve learned their input isn’t valued. They hide problems until those problems become impossible to hide. Fires, constant equipment breakdowns, or even employees showing up late, leaving early or calling out once a week.
The result is an operation that functions only when the Dictator is present. The machine breaks down, metaphorically and sometimes literally, the moment leadership looks away. There’s no culture of ownership, no proactive problem-solving, no genuine engagement. You get compliance, not commitment.
The Catalyst Model (The Sinek-Inspired Leader)
Now consider a fundamentally different approach. The Catalyst leader focuses on purpose, capability, and safety as a shared value. This leader sees their primary job not as giving orders, but as removing obstacles and multiplying their team’s effectiveness.
Communication becomes a dialogue. Questions replace commands. “What do you need?” replaces “Why haven’t you done this?” The leader operates from a position of genuine curiosity about challenges and genuine respect for the expertise of the people doing the work.
Safety, under this model, transforms from a compliance checklist into a shared commitment to everyone’s wellbeing. It’s proactive and collaborative. When something goes wrong, the response isn’t to assign blame but to understand the system failure and fix it together.
Let me illustrate this with some practical shifts in language and approach:
From: “Wear your hard hat.”
To: “That hard hat is there because we’ve seen what falling debris can do to someone without one. I need you to go home to your family in the same condition you arrived. That matters to me.”
The first statement is a rule. The second is genuine effort—it communicates care, provides context, and appeals to shared values.
From: “Why wasn’t this done?”
To: “What did you need to get this done that you didn’t have?”
The first statement assumes failure and assigns blame. The second assumes good intent and seeks to understand obstacles, positioning the leader as a problem-solver rather than a critic.
From: Holding all the answers and making all the decisions.
To: Asking the best questions and trusting expertise.
“You operate this crane every day. You know it better than anyone. What’s a potential risk you see that we haven’t officially addressed in our procedures?”
“How can we set up this area to make it easier to do the job safely and efficiently?”
“If you were running this operation, what’s the first thing you’d change?”
These questions do something powerful: they communicate respect, they tap into frontline expertise, and they create ownership. When someone suggests an improvement and sees it implemented, they’ve invested a piece of themselves in making the operation better. They become a stakeholder, not just a worker.
The Ripple Effect
Here’s where it gets really interesting. Leadership style doesn’t stay contained at the leadership level—it cascades through the entire organization.
For example: A Catalyst in the scale house creates a team that looks out for each other. They point out a worn hydraulics on the material handler before it becomes a safety incident. They double-check loads for drivers they respect. They take pride in accurate material sorting when customers arrive because they know it matters. That same team, when interacting with additional external customers, naturally extends that same care and attention outward. Other examples: The driver represents the company well at remote sites or other scrap yards. The Nonferrous scale operator communicates clearly and professionally. The yard supervisor follows up proactively on potential issues with the yard employees.
The genuine effort cascades from leadership to team to customer, creating a culture where excellence is the norm rather than the exception.
Conversely, the Dictator model also cascades. Employees treated as untrustworthy tend to behave in untrustworthy ways. They cut corners when not watched. They hoard information. They view customers as problems to be processed rather than partners to be served. The culture becomes defensive, reactive, and mediocre.
The leadership model you choose doesn’t just affect your immediate team—it shapes the entire customer experience and, ultimately, the success of the business.
Section 4: The Tangible Payoff – Safety, Retention, and the Bottom Line
This might all sound philosophical, and that’s fine—philosophy has its place. But let’s speak the language of business for a moment. Let’s talk about measurable outcomes, because the Catalyst model delivers them in ways that directly impact the bottom line.
Safety Performance
A team that feels genuinely cared for and psychologically safe operates fundamentally differently than a team that doesn’t. Psychological safety—the belief that you won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes—is the foundation of a proactive safety culture.
When employees feel this way, they report near-misses before they become actual incidents. They suggest improvements to procedures and equipment. They watch out for each other and speak up when they see risk. They ask questions when they’re unsure rather than guessing and hoping for the best. This is the highest form of safety culture, and it directly reduces incidents, injuries, workers’ compensation costs, insurance premiums, and regulatory scrutiny.
Compare this to the Dictator model, where employees hide problems, don’t report near-misses, and only follow safety rules when watched. The costs—both human and financial—are dramatically higher.
Retention and Recruitment
In an industry where skilled labor is increasingly difficult to find and retain, keeping good people isn’t just an HR concern—it’s a competitive advantage and a direct profit driver.
Consider the true cost of turnover. You lose not just an employee, but all the knowledge, relationships, and institutional expertise they’ve accumulated. You pay recruitment costs, training costs, and productivity losses while a replacement gets up to speed. You risk safety incidents because new employees are statistically more prone to injury. You damage team morale when good people leave.
People don’t leave companies where they feel valued, respected, and invested in. They leave bosses who make them feel the opposite. The Catalyst model creates loyalty. People stay because they’re engaged, because they see a future, because they feel like partners rather than expendable resources. In a tight labor market, this is a massive competitive advantage.
Operational Excellence
Engaged employees don’t just show up—they bring their full attention, creativity, and problem-solving capability to work. They notice inefficiencies and fix small problems before they cascade into big, costly downtime events. They maintain equipment more carefully because they take pride in their work. They sort material more accurately because they understand the downstream impact. They communicate more effectively because they’re invested in the team’s success.
The cumulative effect of hundreds of small improvements, proactive interventions, and careful attention compounds over time into significantly better operational performance. Cleaner material. Less downtime. Fewer customer complaints. Higher throughput. Better margins.
These aren’t soft benefits—they’re hard financial outcomes that show up in quarterly results.
The Ultimate Cycle
When you step back and look at the complete picture, you see a virtuous cycle:
Internal genuine effort (leadership investing in employees)
↓
Creates a feeling of trust, value, and ownership
↓
Drives discretionary effort, vigilance, and engagement
↓
Produces superior, safe operations
↓
Enables external genuine effort (employees investing in customers)
↓
Creates customer feelings of reliability and partnership
↓
Builds loyalty, referrals, and long-term relationships
↓
Generates profit and stability
↓
Provides resources to reinvest in employees
This cycle is self-reinforcing. It builds momentum. It creates organizational resilience. And it all starts with how leadership treats the internal customer—the employee.
The inverse is also true. Neglect the internal customer experience, and you create a downward spiral: disengagement leads to poor performance, which creates customer dissatisfaction, which pressures margins, which leads to cost-cutting and more pressure on employees, which deepens disengagement. Many struggling operations are caught in exactly this spiral without recognizing the root cause.
Conclusion
Let’s come back to where we started—that short video clip the General Manager shared. Simon Sinek’s message about genuine effort creating customer loyalty isn’t just an external customer service principle. It’s a fundamental truth about human relationships and organizational culture.
The feeling we engineer for our customers starts with the feeling we engineer for our people. It’s the same principle, applied inward before it can flow outward. Our “product” for employees is leadership, support, respect, and investment in their success and wellbeing. Their “purchase” is their engagement, their skill, their care, and their discretionary effort—the difference between doing the job and doing the job exceptionally well.
You cannot fake this. Employees know, with uncanny accuracy, whether leadership’s effort is genuine or performative. They know whether they’re valued or merely tolerated. They know whether safety is truly a priority or just a slogan on a banner. And they respond accordingly. Their response shows up in how they treat equipment, how they interact with each other, how they communicate with customers, and ultimately, in every metric that matters to the business.
The scrap metal industry is demanding, competitive, and often unforgiving. Success requires operational excellence, safety vigilance, and strong customer relationships. All of these depend on people—their attention, their judgment, their commitment, their care. And people perform at their best when they feel their best about where they work and who they work for.
So here’s the reflection I’d invite you to consider: The next time you’re walking the yard, watching the operations, interacting with your team, ask yourself this simple question: What’s the “feeling” my team is getting from me today? Is it the feeling I want them to then give to our customers and to each other?
Are they feeling trusted or monitored? Valued or tolerated? Invested in or extracted from? Respected or infantilized? Partnered with or simply directed?
Because whatever feeling you’re creating internally will show up externally. It’s not a matter of if, but when and how obviously. The internal customer experience becomes the external customer experience. The culture you build inside becomes the brand customers experience outside.
Let’s not just build great customer relationships. Let’s build the kind of leadership culture that makes those relationships inevitable. Let’s recognize that the greatest leverage point for customer loyalty, safety performance, and operational excellence isn’t found in our equipment or our procedures—it’s found in how we treat the people who come through our gates every day.
The genuine effort starts here, with us, directed at them. Everything else flows from that.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this—where you see it working, where the challenges are, and what questions it raises. This is an invitation to reflect on a powerful idea and explore how it might unlock even more potential in what we’re already building together.
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