The Dina Dwyer-Owens Interview With Matthew Kelly

Matthew Kelly:

Hi. I'm Matthew Kelly, and welcome to Profoundly Human. Today, my conversation is with Dina Dwer-Owens. Dina, welcome.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Thank you, Matthew.

Matthew Kelly:

Great to be with you.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Yes. Exciting.

Matthew Kelly:

Very serious questions to get started as always. Are you a coffee drinker?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I shouldn't answer it this way, but most people prefer I don't have coffee because I have enough energy and they're like, "No, don't give her caffeine."

Matthew Kelly:

Oops.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So I love the taste of coffee, but I am, and it's a decaf coffee, typically.

Matthew Kelly:

What would happen if you were mistakenly or purposely given regular coffee? What does that look like?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Well, honestly, I might have to run to the bathroom pretty quick. So that's just the truth of it, but yeah, my, I don't know if you call it hyperactivity, and hyper communication just goes up a notch and people are like, "I haven't even had my cup yet. Could you just chill?"

Matthew Kelly:

Now, do you drink decaf all day or is it a morning thing or what does that look like?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Typically one cup of coffee is fine, and I do it more for the flavor than I do for anything. I don't need the caffeine.

Matthew Kelly:

Okay. Very good. What about favorite food?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

That is a really tough one because I love food and I keep trying to tell myself I love healthy food. I try to plant that positive seed, but gosh, pizza's pretty dang good. I like pizza.

Matthew Kelly:

Favorite brand of pizza-

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Oh, now you're putting me on the spot-

Matthew Kelly:

... or restaurant?

Matthew Kelly:

... because I come from the franchising world so I better stick with a local.

Matthew Kelly:

You better stick with a local.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

My husband's pizza on the green egg. There you go.

Matthew Kelly:

There you go. Very good. What about favorite movie?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I've got a three-year-old granddaughter, and The Sound of Music has just come back as my all time favorite. So it come and gone, but it's back again.

Matthew Kelly:

Good. It's a great movie. What is happening in your life at the moment that you're excited about?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Gosh! I am the grandmother of three. So I know you've got a young family, but now I'm the grandmother, but I've got a three-year-old granddaughter, Millie, almost two-year-old grandson, Ryder, and a 15, 16-month-old granddaughter Dela Sofia. So they're just the love of my life right now and will be forever.

Matthew Kelly:

Yeah. What are they teaching you?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Oh, to enjoy life. Really, the things that they pay attention to is amazing. They also are teaching me to be a better listener. In fact, my little Dela, I can be holding her, the 15-month-old, and have not really engaged in the conversation she's having with me when she can't even really speak yet, she will move my face to look at her. So it's just amazing, just being engaged in who you're with, and hearing the birds, and noticing the sun, paying attention to the flowers and stopping and smelling them. I could go on and on. Just grandkids are incredible.

Matthew Kelly:

That's fantastic. Tell us about childhood. Where did you grow up? What was your childhood like?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Yeah. So come from a family of six, Catholic mother and a father. Most of my siblings were born in New York, so just outside of the city. I was actually born in Connecticut. So I was on the third. So there's Donna, Debbie, Dina, Donald, Darren, and Doug, so all Ds. My dad's Don and he likes the whole D thing. So raised in a very Catholic family. My mother was the one who really took the responsibility, though, of making sure that we went to mass on Sundays because my father was providing for us and worked a lot, traveled a lot, was in entertainment business initially, so that was a tough business to be in raising six kids. CCE, and all the right things, my mother made sure we attended as children growing up.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

My siblings are my best friends. My father always said that, "If we live in an environment where they have to play together, they'll be friends forever." We all still live in the Waco and surrounding area. That's where we ended up landing about 50 years ago, and we're all still in the same area, but really had a wonderful childhood with some challenges as we've all had, but my father was big on building people up to believe that they could achieve anything if they were willing to work hard enough.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So he always taught me that whatever the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve and put me in front of the greats, whether it was people like, in the old days, Robert Schuler, possibility thinking, just lots of Paul Meyer with SMI, Success Motivation Institute. He would pay me an allowance, in fact, Matthew, in late elementary school and junior high, "If you'll listen to this," and it was on the old tape recorders, "If you listen to this tape six times, you can answer my questions, I'll bump up your allowance."

Matthew Kelly:

Wow.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I'm thinking, "This is so stupid. This stuff is so stupid, but yeah, I'll listen to it," and I'll take the extra allowance. So I'd listen to it. That repetition is the mother of skill is what we learned later on. Boy, those seeds he planted at an early age really have benefited me, continue to benefit me today. So really, I was encouraged by my father. He didn't spend a lot of time with us when we were young, but he said, "I had a lot to offer them and I can put them to work."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So I went to work at the age of 12, worked at a car wash, on the front line. I had to pump the gas and sell the polish waxes and the detailed jobs because he wanted me to learn sales early on. I wanted to be on the back of the line with the cute boys doing the detail work and getting some exercise, but he wouldn't wouldn't hear of it. All of my siblings and I worked in his businesses. He was always very entrepreneurial.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So on Saturday mornings, I wasn't going to hang out with my friends and sleep in late. It was be at the car wash at 8:00 and get started. So I didn't always like him very much, but I loved him, but he was tough on us kids at an early age, but taught us work ethic that has served me well.

Matthew Kelly:

Yeah. What instigated the move from the East Coast to Texas?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Yeah. So he was in the entertainment industry, as I stated. He had a nightclub on Huntington, Long Island, and ended up being the manager of the band Steam, that produced the hit record Na Na Na Na. Everybody knows that song, right?

Matthew Kelly:

Yes, they do.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Still played at the football games or chanted at the football games.

Matthew Kelly:

Wow.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So he made it big there and decided to follow the industry out to California. So he moved our family to Thousand Oaks, outside of the Hollywood area, and quickly learned that raising your kids during the late '60s, early '70s in that area probably wasn't a good idea and got out of the entertainment business and got involved in Success Motivation Institute, so became a distributor.

Matthew Kelly:

Okay.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Then from there to Waco because he did so well that Paul Meyer, the founder of that company, invited him to be VP at one of his companies, the Leadership Management Institute company.

Matthew Kelly:

So when you get moved from California to Texas, you were how old?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Going into fourth grade.

Matthew Kelly:

How did you feel about that?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I was excited thinking about we're going to be in chuckwagons and lots of cowboys and tumbleweed, and it wasn't quite like that. We did live on a dirt road initially. So I had my brothers and sisters. So it wasn't a tough transition for me. Came from a very large elementary school in California to a really tiny country school called Bosqueville just outside of Waco. I think there were 16 kids in my entire grade.

Matthew Kelly:

Wow.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Coming from a school of 2,000 from K to sixth grade in California.

Matthew Kelly:

What about your mother, when you look back on childhood and your mother's role in your life, her influence in your life?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

She taught me and continues to teach me all the basics of what is good. I get emotional because she's special. So even the little things, please and thank you, as kids, she taught all of us how to say please and thank you to everybody and to appreciate people, respect them, show everybody dignity. Today, she still, 87 with dementia, still teaches amazing lessons. So yeah, she is special, and she's the one who made sure I attended mass on Sundays and just really helped me fall in love with our faith, our Catholic faith.

Matthew Kelly:

You mentioned your siblings a little earlier. What were you taught about being a sibling by your parents?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Well, we each, the three girls were the oldest and the boys were the youngest, so we each had a responsibility to one of the boys. So if we'd go out shopping or something, we didn't have leashes on them necessarily, but we were each responsible. She taught us responsibility. We also had chores. Back in those days, every kid had a chore. So Saturday mornings, no cartoons were coming on until, if you had dusting today or you had vacuuming, you were going to do that work. We really worked together well, and she did that. She really helped create the strength of our family. She's really the glue that held us all together, and she would take us to the farms. We'd have a wonderful outing after we did all of our chores and we get to go to a local farm and see the baby piglets, things that you just never forget.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

My mother helped me see the beauty of life and taking the greenhouse, and we had to all help pave the greenhouse with bricks and just the mortar in between the bricks, and we did that together, all six kids and mom, and it was the most beautiful greenhouse ever. There'll never be a prettier greenhouse in the world because we were involved in it.

Matthew Kelly:

So then you get through high school, and what happens then?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Yeah. High school was a ... I want to stop there just for a second because I had the opportunity to lead in high school. My father always said I'd be a leader, but I was a cheerleader, and it wasn't the kind of cheer leadership that you might see today, which is tons of tumbling and competitive. It was truly about cheering people on and really caring about other people and showing you cared for them regardless whether it was the football team or it was the person sitting beside you in a classroom who was struggling.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So I became a ... I learned leadership lessons at a very early age in the role of being a cheerleader and also learned about sales. We had to sell ribbons. There's so many ribbons that had to be sold each week for the games. So I learned a lot about sales and, of course, I was competitive. So I had to always sell the most ribbons. So high school was good. It was another a very small country school. I didn't get very smart from being at that school, but I learned a lot about good people and hardworking people.

Matthew Kelly:

You are a competitive person. How has your view of competition changed over your lifetime?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Yeah. I compete against myself more than I compete against anybody else these days. Yeah. So it's interesting. Leaving high school and going to college, I didn't even know what the SAT test was. This is how small our country school was. We didn't have college counselors. I just thought it was another standardized test and so I did poorly, very poorly on it. Couldn't even get into a college. So my competitive nature started going, "Wait a second. What do you mean I can't get into college?"

Dina Dwer-Owens:

My siblings primarily didn't go to college except for one sister. She went to a local community college, and my father really wanted me to go to college because he thought it was a great place to learn, but to meet other people that you could network with for life, and he thought that was important.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Basically, we had to beg the president of Baylor University to allow me to go to the first six weeks of summer school and see if I can make the grade, the GPA. I'm like, "What's a GPA? I mean, really, Matthew, I didn't know anything about college. I struggled through that first six weeks and I did make it, but I didn't finish. I didn't complete college because I was working full-time for my father, 30 hours a week in his businesses and going to school full-time. It just wasn't fun. At that stage in my life, I wanted to have fun. So I finally just said to him, "What am I doing here? This is not good."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

He said, "Well, why don't you take a semester off from school, work with me side-by-side and then make a decision, but in the meantime, get your real estate licenses. So that's the kind of schooling you could do right now is just to get your real estate license," because he was building quite a real estate company.

Matthew Kelly:

Got it.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So I never went back, never went back to college other than going to teach classes on franchising and entrepreneurship at Baylor University without having had a degree.

Matthew Kelly:

Wow. Now, do you ever regret not finishing college?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I really don't. I learned so much from my father, and not that I always enjoyed working with him because he was very tough on me, but again, I'm grateful for those lessons now. Back then, it was hard.

Matthew Kelly:

Him being tough on you, how did that manifest?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Yeah. Well, it just made me a better person overall, a better leader. I mean, he put me in situations that ... One example is we went through the savings and loans crisis. So we had a lot of real estate, a lot of commercial multifamily properties, and the occupancies were 60% and we couldn't make our mortgage payments. He said, "Look," called me into his office one day, he said, "Look, I need you to go to the bank. Tell them that we can't make our payments so they can either take the property back or they can discount our mortgage by 50%."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I was mad. I said, "What do you mean? You agreed to pay this mortgage. You can't tell them you're not going to pay it."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

He said, "Well, what you don't understand is we don't have the money to pay it. You can't do that at a 60% occupancy rate."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I was furious and embarrassed that I had to go to the banker to have this conversation. Want me to finish that?

Matthew Kelly:

How old were you then?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I was 20, probably 22, 23.

Matthew Kelly:

How did that go?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Surprisingly well. The banker said, "Thank you for being honest with me. Let me go to our committee and see what we can do." Came back two weeks later, discounted the mortgage by 40%, not 50. He said, "But the other 10% we want you to put aside into a reserve fund. So if you've got roof leaks or you've got other maintenance issues that need to be attended to, that money is set aside just for that so we know that the property's being taken care of."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

What a lesson, but he just wanted me to be honest. I thought he was breaking our values by asking me to do something that was against what he had signed, but at the end of the day, he was just being honest. While other people were just giving their properties back, the bank didn't want another property.

Matthew Kelly:

Sure. What about your husband Mike? When did he come into your life?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Okay. I'm proud of this story, but it's a funny story. So I've always been a goal setter. In fact, I love your book, The Dream Manager, but always been a goal setter. My father raised us to set goals, and my girlfriends probably thought I was an idiot. One Thursday night, had been at school, had been working, ready just to go out and have some fun. Love to dance. Called a girlfriend and said, "Hey, you want to go meet at the little hole in the wall bar by Baylor University called At Our Limits?"

Dina Dwer-Owens:

As we're driving up to the bar, I see this really cool looking yellow Jeep and I'm like, "I'm going to meet whoever ..." This is my goal setting to an extreme, right? "I'm going to meet whoever drives that yellow Jeep." So we're sitting there and it wasn't even about drinking. It was just about having fun, laughing, and dancing. We love to dance. So this cute guy walks up and says, "Would you like to dance?" and I said, "Well, only if my girlfriend can dance with us because we're here alone. I'm not going to leave her sitting here." He says, "Okay." Brings us two buddies over. So then the five of us danced the rest of the night. Walked to our car and guess who walks to the Jeep? Mike. So there you go.

Matthew Kelly:

It's the yellow Jeep man.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

It's the yellow Jeep man.

Matthew Kelly:

Was Mike working for your dad when you met him or that happened after you met him?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

No, he was actually attending TSTC, a technical college in Waco when I met him, and then, of course, my father was a great recruiter of my boyfriends. So when he finished school, got his HVAC license. My father recruited him to come to work for our Rainbow International. It's a carpet restoration and cleaning company. Back then, it was carpet dying and cleaning. So yeah, he came to work after we met.

Matthew Kelly:

What did your dad think of Mike the first time he met him?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I think he liked him. He wasn't afraid of work. So my father loved people who weren't afraid of work.

Matthew Kelly:

What about your mother? What was her first impressions of him?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I think it was good. Not a negative word came out of her mouth. It's interesting, back in those days, we didn't have cellphones, we didn't have any of that. I said to my mom, "How did you let us just go and do the things we did?"

Dina Dwer-Owens:

She said, "Look, I did the best I could to raise you in a Catholic environment, and then just had to pray you're going to make good decisions knowing that you weren't going to always make great decisions. So I'm just going to trust your decision making and you learn from the mistakes you make."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So I think she felt good about Mike because I felt so good about Mike. He was on my goals list, too.

Matthew Kelly:

He was on your goals list.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I said that already, but I mean, I literally had him on the dream list, handsome, ambitious, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah guy.

Matthew Kelly:

Yellow Jeep.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So I got him.

Matthew Kelly:

32 years marriage, what advice would you have for a young couple just getting married today?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Boy, marriage encounter. Today, they offer programs right before marriage. In fact, I think required in the Catholic church and had to go through marriage prep, and I think dynamic Catholics got an amazing program that I wish I would have had when Mike and I were getting married. So I would say go through the program, go through dynamic Catholics marriage prep program because it's critical to really get to know each other before you get into your marriage, and then continue that.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So one of the best things Mike and I have done for ourselves, we did go to marriage encounter early in our relationship. We ran into some trouble in our relationship and went to marriage encounter, and it helped us learn how to communicate better with one another, but today, probably one of the greatest things we do together is we go to retreats. Mike would say, "Yeah. One of the greatest things we do together is go to silent retreats because Dina doesn't get to talk at those."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Seriously, though, it's just a time that we grow in our faith and we always grow closer. Every time we go to one of those silent retreats, we spend a lot of time hiking and walking together. We can pray together. So even though silent retreat, we do still get to pray together, and that's just really special. We didn't have that when we first got married. We weren't praying together. I was reading the Bible. He wasn't even a Catholic yet. So I would say, yeah, do the preparation work before you get married if you can. If you're already married, still, go through the programs and go to retreats. Make it a habit at least annually to go on a marriage retreat.

Matthew Kelly:

What's one of your favorite qualities about Mike?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

He likes me just the way I am. He's always been so supportive, Matthew. He's never been critical of me through the busyness of being a CEO of a large company, and trying to raise two kids at the same time, trying to keep our relationship strong in our marriage. Mike has always loved me and been supportive. Never, never criticized. I mean, criticizing stupid little things like around the house, but never criticizing me in my leadership role as a mother or as somebody leading a company.

Matthew Kelly:

With your kids, how do you approach them differently? They're also unique, right? It's one of the things I'm learning, and you can't really be the same father or mother to each of them. You have to adapt. How do you see that with your own children?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Yeah. When they were younger or now or through the whole gamut?

Matthew Kelly:

Either way.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Yeah. When they were young, it was interesting. My son and I were so, so close. I mean, he was really, I don't say mommy's boy because my husband spent a lot of time with him too teaching him how to fish and hunt and those kind of things, but yeah, Mikey and I had a very special relationship. Now, he's become such a man. He has got a beautiful wife and a wonderful little boy and is doing just an amazing job as a husband, as well as a father.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So we spend time together, but not nearly as much. Normally, it's like, "Mom, can I go take a nap while you play with Ryder?" because he's busy. So we still get to do a lot of trips and things together, but the relationship is a little bit different now. He's a man. It's his life and he's independent. He's running it.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

My daughter and I, we were very close too when she was young, but she was very independent as a young girl. In fact, I remember the time she said, "Mom, I need some help with my ..." Probably it was English because I'm not very good at English, "Need some help smell with my English," fourth grade, and I said, "Okay. Well, can I study the chapter first and then I'll be able to help?"

Dina Dwer-Owens:

She goes, "Oh, forget it. I'll just figure it out." So very, very independent. Today, of course, we spend a ton of time together with the two granddaughters. We just have a lot of fun. Beautiful. I'm just blessed with two wonderful children.

Matthew Kelly:

They're both close to home?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Very close, minutes.

Matthew Kelly:

How did becoming a grandparent change your life?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Wow. So one of our favorite movies, the kids growing up, is The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. So the best way to describe grandparenthood that I can think of is at the end of the movie when the Grinch' heart's busting out of his chest. That's how it feels to be a grandparent. I mean, you love your kids, but a grandbaby comes along and it's just this amazing ... It's hard to describe, really, but the best visual I can give you is just your heart just beats out of your chest, and it's just an amazing gift.

Matthew Kelly:

When you're holding your grandkids and you think about what's happening in the world today, where does your mind go there?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Prayer, right to prayer, just praying and also recognizing it. A priest was very good to me about two years ago. I went through a transition in our company and I was struggling with a few things, and this was one of the retreats, silent retreats. I had more time with the priest to really get even a bit of spiritual direction. I said, "I'm just not sure what I'm supposed to be doing with my time right now. I love being a grandparent and I love spending more time with my husband because I've got the time, but am I supposed to be out promoting values in leadership? What am ..."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

He said, "Look, do you understand the vocation of being a grandparent? It is ..." Today, it's even more serious than ever. It's always been serious, but he said, "That vocation, especially when they're young, is so crucial." It was like permission that it's okay for me not to have to go down and get busy doing other things, but just to focus on really playing the role a great grandparent should play in the lives of these young children.

Matthew Kelly:

What about faith? You talked about how your parents shared the faith with you and how did you in turn try to share the faith with your children and how do you hope to try and share the faith with your grandchildren?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Yeah. It's just praying. So one of the things that I did early on with our kids is every time we'd get in the vehicle, we'd start with a prayer and it has to be fun, right? When the kids are young, it's got to be more fun for them to buy into it. So it was the, "Thank you, God, for a wonderful day. Amen," and then, "Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom God's love commits me here," and we'd say us, "ever this day be at our sides to light, to guard, to rule, to guide," and then a really big Amen at the end and sometimes an Hallelujah.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So my kids growing up, we did that, and they've retained that habit. As far as I know, they retained the habit, so have their friends, which is interesting, right? You get the kids who come in the car with your kids who are having to hear the prayer, and then eventually, I invite them to do it with us. I remember the one football jock who gets in the car, 16 years old or whatever. We were busy. I failed to say the prayer at the beginning of getting in the car and he's like, "Ms. Owens, we didn't say our prayer." "You're good."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So now with my grandkids, actually, Millie was the first. She's the one who's three now. So I've said that prayer in the car with her since day one, since the first time she was in the car seat in my car. Maybe she was five days old, six days old. We've said that prayer and my grandmother name came from that because at the end, when she could mumble a few words, at the end would say, "Amen," then sometimes Hallelujah, and she'd say Alelula," So my name became Lula. So that's the grandma name. So it comes from Hallelujah.

Matthew Kelly:

That's awesome.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Yeah. That's fun. So just really, in the way I live my life primarily, though, and I read Allen Hunt's book on being a great grandparent, and some of the lessons I got out of Allen's book have really hit home with me like if you're going to kneel to pray, kneel to pray and let your grandchildren see you kneeling to pray. So it's just doing those kinds of things. So some of the most precious moments I have is when I'm on my knees with a grandchild who's spending the night with me or just spending the day with me, and we pray or we're in the car and we hear an ambulance go by and we pray for the people that are somehow being affected by whatever's going on with the emergency.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So it's constant. It's a constant thing, Matthew. Just like with your children, always being aware of praying throughout the day with them, going to mass. I've brought my little Millie to mass since, again, she was an infant. I remember the time she looked up at Jesus in a stained glass window in blew him a kiss. I thought, "Oh."

Matthew Kelly:

In your life as you look back, is there a moment where you're able to say, "That's the moment where the faith became mine rather than the faith of my parents or the faith that I was raised in. This moment, the faith became mine"?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

It's interesting I think people's testimonials around that question. I remember I've always struggled with my weight. So as a heavy sixth grader, 125 pounds on, what was I? 4'10? It was pretty, what did they say? Too short for my weight? My sister was going off to eighth grade school trip. She's like, "I'm going to bring you a gift home," and I thought, "What a cool sister. She's going to bring a gift home." So what she brought home was a magnet that said, "Fat is where it's at." Devastated me, Matthew. I just went up to my room and just cried, looked at the mirror, "Poor pity me," and I'm looking at myself in the mirror just going, "She's right." From then on, I really started to read the Bible.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I don't know what happened. It was just every night I would just pick up this little Bible that my brother I think had given me, and I would just read it and read it and read it and read it and I just thought, "God, you need to show me that my body is your temple. I need to take better care of my body." Through that summer, it was transitional. I mean, I started exercising. I started eating instead of a big Mac and the supersized fries and the shake, I just ate Happy Meal. I just changed my habits, but it was my relationship that I was building with God that made me take better care of myself. So that's where I remember the shift happening. It's like, "I've got to own this and God's here to help me. He's a merciful God. So I'm going to count on him."

Matthew Kelly:

So then you've had this incredible life, this incredible career in business, and have there been times where you were less interested in faith or distracted from your faith or neglected your faith?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I wouldn't say less interested, but distracted I think is a good word to describe it, getting busy, being busy. Again, another phrase I think I've stolen from you is having that. You called it something of urgency. It'll come to me.

Matthew Kelly:

It's the tyranny of the urgent.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Tyranny of the urgent, and just things that just were not urgent, making them urgent because I had such a list of things to get done as the CEO of the company that I started forgetting the things that were most important like going to mass. So I began to go to daily mass once a week. I would go to the mass that my children attended. They went to Catholic schools. So I started going to that mass and I thought, "Wow, what a difference this makes in the middle of my week on Wednesday morning to go to daily mass."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So I got pulled back in, thankfully, and my kids were teaching me prayers I didn't even know at the Catholic school. I did not go to a Catholic school. My parents couldn't afford to send us to Catholic school, all six of us. None of us went. So my kids are coming home and teaching me prayers that I had never learned. I'm thinking to myself, "Wow! I really have to get back into my faith life," and then going through some challenging times as a CEO of the company brought me closer to my faith too because I just realized the best place to go for help is to God, and every time I've done that, it's always worked.

Matthew Kelly:

So if you run into a friend or someone comes to you and they're struggling in their life and they've stepped away from their faith, is there a way you encourage them to reengage or a step you encourage them to take?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Well, now I'm at the point where I'm okay praying out loud with a friend. For years, I wouldn't do that. We wouldn't pray at meals and restaurants. So today, I'm very, very much more comfortable with that. So first, ask if I can pray for them, and then I would invite them to join me, whether it's on a retreat or even just sponsoring them. Maybe they're somebody who's financially troubled and they can't afford to go to retreat, giving them books. I have found that dynamic Catholics books have just been an incredible resource for my friends, regardless of their denomination. They've been a real gift, and I can always seem to find the right book at the right time as long as I'll go back and read it.

Matthew Kelly:

Do they read it?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Many of them do, and they come back to me and they give me the feedback on how it helped them. Some of them don't at the time that I give it, right? Sometimes it's years later that they read it.

Matthew Kelly:

Absolutely.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

That's okay.

Matthew Kelly:

Yeah. When you think about your life as a Catholic, do you have favorite Catholic moments in your life?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Oh, probably one of my most favorite, well, two most favorite, I never was really around somebody who would just talk about giving God the glory. That was just not a term I was familiar with. My mother was very devout, but it wasn't a term that we used around our house. I remember this small lady, who ran our choir for the children at school, and she just did such a beautiful job at it. We've never had such a beautiful choir because she loved the Lord so much you could tell in her singing. So she brought the children into that love.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So one day I just said, "Thank you so much for your beautiful gift to singing," and she said, "God gets all the credit." That was just a real transitional time in my life. I probably was early in my stage of being the CEO of the company and I thought, "Giving God the credit, wow. Never really thought about it that way." So that was an eyeopener for me.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Then another time was at my Undercover Boss experience. Wow. Getting CBS to agree to letting me go to church and then them wanting to follow me into church and coming home from that journey. Maybe we'll talk about that in a bit, but at the end of that Undercover Boss journey, they said, "We'd like for you to be able to come back to church if you'd like."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I'm like, "What do you mean if I'd like? Yes, I want to," but the overwhelming sense of being home when I walked into the church after being on the road for 10 days filming this particular episode was just overwhelming. The love I felt walking back into the church and just giving God the glory for allowing me to lead such an organization with so many people's lives at stake under my leadership, it just was a real transitional moment for me.

Matthew Kelly:

So your dad started Dwyer Group in '81, and you became CEO in?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

'99.

Matthew Kelly:

'99.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Mm-hmm, because he passed away in '94, and there was a bit of a transition time. Yeah.

Matthew Kelly:

Okay. So when you became CEO, what were the dominant thoughts?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Yeah, first of all, I never had a goal of being CEO. Just he always said I was going to be a leader of the company and we worked as hard and didn't pay us very much, right? He would talk to all my siblings about that, "One day, you'll thank me." That's another story, but I didn't ask to be the CEO. So we're a publicly traded company, traded on NASDAQ, and our outside board of directors just felt like we had the right people on the bus but not in the right places. So they decided they wanted to put me in the role of acting president and CEO. So I'm 35 years old, had never run a company that size, had run a real estate company and been involved in franchising all of my life side-by-side with my father, and I thought to myself, "Okay. I can do this if I have the right mindset and remember that I'm only good at a few things, and I've got to surround myself with people."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Some of the lessons I learned from those motivational tape programs I listened to as a child, I've got to surround myself with people that are stronger than I am and be okay with that, but always inspect what I expect, and all those lessons that you learn in leadership. I was actually up against a battle. So all the businesses of the Dwyer Group now Neighborly are primarily home service businesses that had been led by men, mostly male-dominated trades businesses. I had a group of Mr. Rooter, one of the brands, one of our larger brands, and a group of leaders in the Mr. Rooter organization actually got together, and there was a head leader who did a vote, straw poll vote, "Should Dina be allowed to be the president and CEO of this company?" They didn't really have a say in it, really, other than they were our franchisees and they're critical to the life of our organization, and they voted, "No. She shouldn't be the president and CEO." So that's the first thing I faced.

Matthew Kelly:

Wow.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Right? So I think to myself, "Okay. So what do I do with this?" One of the things I've learned by working on my faith is to accept truth when there is. There's truth always before us and to accept the truth. So I decided I needed to meet with this gentleman, and a big guy, plumber, but a good businessman, really good businessman. The interesting thing was that the whole time I was meeting with him, he was just sweating thinking, "Who is this little girl challenging me?" and I wasn't challenging in a disrespectful way.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I just said, "Look, I understand you did a straw poll, you and the franchisees. It sounds like you voted against me being in this role and I'd like to understand why." He said two things, "You're not a plumber and you never run a company this size."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So I had to look inwardly and say, "Hmm, okay. You're right. Number one, I'm not a plumber, and I'll probably never be a plumber. Number two is I haven't run a company this size, certainly not a publicly traded company."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Again, the Holy Spirit works in beautiful ways, right? Because I didn't think about this by myself and I said, "But you know what I am? I'm a customer. So when your techs go to a customer's house, who typically answers the door? It's the woman of the house. So I'm thinking, who better to run this company than somebody that understands what the customer wants, and all I'm asking you to do is to give me a chance. You know what? I want the best person to lead this company. So give me six months. You cannot say anything negative about me or my leadership for six months. In fact, you got to stand right beside me and you got to cheer me on and do whatever I need to do to help me because I'm going to have to learn a few things from you because you're smarter than I am in certain areas of the business that I don't know."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

He said, "Okay. Fair enough," and he was terrific, along with an amazing team of people, including Robert Tunmire, who had been the CEO, strong Catholic. You know him, Matthew. He went from being my boss, the CEO, to working for me, and he did it like such a man would do it. I mean, he's a hero of mine because he was such a man in the way he handled that transition and gave me incredible support.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So to end that story, I had a lot of challenges early on, but once I got the buy-in of the team and the franchisees and I had the right people on the bus in the right places, it's probably one of the happiest times in my life that I had the opportunity to lead that company.

Matthew Kelly:

So he said, "You're not a plumber and you've never run a business this large." Your father wasn't a plumber and he didn't say, "You're not a man," but how much of it was that?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

A lot, and he had a wife and two daughters. So he was honest and he said, "Look, I'm up against all these women," but I don't think he believed that a woman could run that company.

Matthew Kelly:

Interesting.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

We became very close friends. Unfortunately, we lost him to cancer, but we became very close friends, and he probably became my greatest cheerleader.

Matthew Kelly:

So your dad died in '94. What was your role at that time?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Yeah. I was actually helping him sell some of the real estate. I was in-charge of the real estate company and he wanted me to be more involved in the franchising side of the business. So he invited me to, "Let's get a lot of the real estate sold that requires a lot of leadership and management, and let me get you involved in franchise development." So that was the initial place is really understand the sales part of franchising. He had just taken the company public. So took it public in '93, dies in '94, had heart attack at the age of 60.

Matthew Kelly:

Wow.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Young man. Nobody expected it. He certainly did not expect it. So the company had a lot of challenges that we were faced with because he was a driven entrepreneur, handled a lot of stuff by himself, had not really surrounded himself with a good professional team of people. He had a few.

Matthew Kelly:

Never happens with entrepreneurs.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Yeah. That's right. Had a few good people around him but not enough good people.

Matthew Kelly:

Okay. So what happens between? What are you doing between '94 and '99 and what are you wanting to do?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Yeah. So I'm having kids. I'm becoming the vice president of operations for the company.

Matthew Kelly:

For Neighborly?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

For Neighborly, yeah, back then Dwyer Group. I finished selling off the real estate. So I did get that accomplished. So I'm really learning the business of supporting franchisees because I'd never been in the support role. I'd been more in the development role since I was younger and he had me involved in some other development opportunities, but really had to learn the support role and really learn from other leaders in the company. So the few that he had I really relied on to help me become a better leader.

Matthew Kelly:

Okay. Then what about when you become CEO, what did your siblings think about that?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Yeah. So five brothers and sisters, a couple of them and couple of them took the opportunity to get out of the business once my father had passed away. They never really wanted to be in the business, but he thought we all should be involved. That was his dream, but it wasn't everybody else's dream. So there was a lot of support.

Matthew Kelly:

Yeah. What was the first franchise?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Rainbow International, which back then was a carpet dying and cleaning company and today is one of the largest restoration and cleaning companies.

Matthew Kelly:

What came after that?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Mr. Rooter, which is the plumbing and drain cleaning company, and then we started up Mr. Electric, Aire Serv Heating and Air Conditioning, Mr. Appliance. My husband Mike actually started the Mr. Appliance brand for us because he had that technical background working with his father as an appliance repairman and then going to the technical school. So he had some stuff to offer and help get that brand launched.

Matthew Kelly:

So if an alien came down from some far off distant planet and did not know anything about franchising, how would you describe franchising to the alien and what would you say the benefit to franchising are?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Yeah. Being in business for yourself but not by yourself would be the benefit. What franchising really is is we take what's working and we systematize it. So it's taking those things that are working, we systematize it, and then we train the franchisee to those systems so that they too can have success. So it shortens the learning curve. If you, in fact, as a franchisee, take those systems and apply them, it shortens the learning curve to achieving hopefully financial independence, whatever your definition of success is because every franchisee might have a different definition, but typically, they've got to make money first, right?

Matthew Kelly:

Sure.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

That fuels everything else that they want to do in their lives. So I hope the alien got it.

Matthew Kelly:

I think the alien gets that.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Okay. Good.

Matthew Kelly:

What do you think people's misconception of franchises are?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Yeah. Hmm. Unfortunately, there have been some negative connotations of franchising, and I think there's some truth to that. I think there are some franchisors that weren't about helping their franchisees be successful, it's about helping themselves be successful, but the truth is a franchise organization cannot be successful unless the franchisees are successful.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So I think for anybody to believe that they can do it differently, they're going to fail in the end, and unfortunately, their franchisees will fail too because we have to help our franchisees achieve success. That's the only thing that drives our success in the long run. Just pretty simple. People complicate it sometimes, but it really is pretty simple.

Matthew Kelly:

Sure.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Not easy, but pretty simple.

Matthew Kelly:

Understood. I think through the '80s-'90 we went into a period of time in business in America and around the world where people began to believe that it was no longer possible to be ethical and values-driven and be successful and profitable in business. Today, there are organizations that are seen as the champions of this philosophy or disproving this philosophy, namely organizations like Chick-fil-A, but from a values-driven, ethical business model, your father was a pioneer way, way, way before it ever became popular, in fact, right at the heart of when it was unpopular. When did you first realize how important values were to the success of business?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Yeah. He really was ahead of the game there, but he loved studying leadership, and when he studied great leaders, whether they were church leaders or business leaders, what he learned was, military leaders, they were clear about their values and they made the idea of the values present every day in the organization and they held themselves and the people around them accountable, and that could be the people that worked for them. That could be the people that became the franchisees. That could be the banks that they worked with to help build their businesses. So he got that early on.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

His original value statements were I would say more beliefs, right? Things like loyalty has meaning to our lives. The one that I still today I have to remind myself of is so important is we must rear in our positions every day in every way. He would say celebrate the victories of yesterday, but don't gloat over yourself on those. Learn from the mistakes yesterday, but what are you going to do today to make a difference in the lives of the franchisees, the employees, the customers, at that time the shareholders that are part of this business. So that just really, really stuck with me.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

When he passed away in 1994, one of the things that we knew, Matthew, that we had to keep front and center in our business was the foundation of the values because that truly was the foundation to the success of our company because he held us accountable to his beliefs, his values, but when he died, we're like, "Okay. He's not here anymore. How do we live the values now when the guy who's held us accountable is no longer here?"

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So again, getting back to what's good about franchising is you take what's working and you systematize it. So we actually got the help of the consulting firm and they came in and they said, "Why don't you operationalize the values since they really aren't black and white." Hard to say how do you judge somebody who's been loyal. You and I know how you judge somebody who's been loyal, but it's not really a black and white thing.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So we took the original code of values that my father had founded the company on and we operationalized them into today what we call the leverage values, and RICH is the acronym for the four core areas of our values, respect, integrity, customer focus, and one of my favorites, having fun in the process. So we took those and we added additional values or you might call them accountability statements below each one of those core areas.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Every meeting of three or more team members, this is one of the systems we create. Let's keep it simple. Every time three or more of us meet, let's slow down. It's like a prayer before meeting, but we can't always pray in corporate America. So it's that deep breath before meeting, and we live our code of values by, treating others we'd like to be treated. We live our code of values by. In our case, in the trades businesses, speaking calmly and respectfully without profanity or sarcasm. Customers don't want to hear our techs cussing. So we had very specific, again, I call them values, but you might see them as accountability statements that we trained ourselves to live by.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So when you're ran into a tough situation, my goal was is for people to know the values by heart, with heart. So you're running into a tough situation in business or maybe even at home, what are the values? Which values do you need to apply to the situation? Man, it just became so natural to just look to the values for the solutions.

Matthew Kelly:

Yeah. Do you find that the values drove clarity around decision making at every level in the organization?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I would say yes, even the toughest, especially the toughest decisions. Yeah. I think I shared a situation I went through in a challenging time in the growth of our business, where we were in a mediation and the franchisee was accusing us of not living up to three of our core values. People will do that. They'll attack you, right?

Matthew Kelly:

Sure.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

You try to do what's good and right, and unfortunately, people will attack you. There's a Mother Teresa, I guess it is a poem, It's Not Between You and Them Anyway. It's a wonderful poem for people to go find, but they will attack you. He was attacking us, but the truth is there were two of the values we had not completely lived up to. I told our attorney, "I'm going to have to own that."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

He said, "Wait a second. You're not going to admit that you guys failed those two values. That's cost you money in this mediation."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I said, "Yes, I am because it's the truth. We didn't do it on purpose. We're humans running this organization. We made mistakes. They weren't intentional, but we did make mistakes. So we have to own it."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Cost us a little bit. You know what? I slept at night. That's a beautiful thing to get a good night's sleep.

Matthew Kelly:

I've always wondered, have attorneys, HR, these types of people ever recommended, "Hey, we could talk about the values, but let's put the code of values aside. Let's not start every meeting with it. Let's not because we're exposing ourselves to situations," like the one you just described?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Yeah. I think that there are certainly attorneys, primarily outside attorneys, that we would hire to help with specialties that might encourage us not to spend a lot of time talking about the values, but you know what? When we sat down in those meetings with those attorneys, the first thing we would do is we would review our values. So we had to hold true to those, and you're going to be attacked, and you're going to make mistakes, and you're going to have to own those, and it's going to cost. It's going to cost you sometimes, but you know what? It's just money. It's not your integrity. It's not your company's reputation. It's just money.

Matthew Kelly:

So over the last 30 years, the business has been astoundingly successful, and under your leadership, these values have thrived. How do you think the trajectory of the business would've been different without the code of values?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I don't believe we'd be where we are today for a lot of reasons. Number one, we wouldn't have such clarity about who we are and we wouldn't have retained great employees. We wouldn't have attracted and retained great franchisees. People are attracted to good, right? They want to know what's expected of them.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I remember my daughter interned at the company one summer. She did not work directly for me. She worked for one of our other brand presidents. At the end of the summer I asked her. I said, "So what do you think about the values? I want your honest opinion."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

She said, "Mom, don't ever get rid of them.," she said, "because," the only few other jobs she had had she said, "I didn't know what was expected of me. Here, I knew exactly what was expected of me, and it's nice to know what's expected, and I like being part of that."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So yeah, the values are just crucial to the success of the company and they continue to be crucial, and I'm grateful that we have a leadership team at the organization that gets that. They get it and the franchisees get it. In fact, again, it's the reason certain private equity companies came to us because our company has grown very rapidly over the past call it 18, 20 years in particular because of partnering with the right private equity groups, but they understood it, too.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

In fact, at first they thought we were weirdos right from Waco, "What is this code of value stuff? This is weird. What are you guys drinking?" Once they got engaged in the relationship, even in the courting phase of the relationship they're like, "Wow! You guys aren't kidding. You really mean this stuff."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

One of my highlights of my career is that two of those private equity groups actually then took their principles. One group had principles already, but they really took them to the next level, and the second group had no written values and actually began to work on them within six months of our relationship. When they understood just how important these were, they called us into their offices in New York and said, "We want your help. This is who we think we are. This is what we stand for, but did you experience this with us in the process of us acquiring you?" It was beautiful.

Matthew Kelly:

There must have been the people over the years who just want to do their job, not interested in the values, like you mentioned, thought you're crazy or that sort of thing, but now they're working in the business. What happens to people like that or what has happened to people like that in the business over the years? Do they get converted for one of a better word or do they just realize, "This isn't a place for me"?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Yeah, both. So some people get converted. Maybe they just do the sales job when you're interviewing them and they say, "Oh, yeah. I love these values, yeah," because it's part of the discussion during the interview phase. So some people full listen to believing that, yeah, they really are engaged with the values and then you see their work ethic and you quickly realize, and it's not so much that the leader has to realize that. It's their peers. The beautiful thing about it, when you have clarity of your values, and in our case, making them a system, so every day we're reviewing the values, it's just not once a year whenever we go over the strategic plan or we update it and then it gets back on the shelf and nobody touches it again for five years. It's an everyday thing.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So a team member sitting beside another person in a cubicle that hears them using profanity on the line with a franchisee or a customer hopefully will peak around after the call and go, "Hey." We beep each other. So that's the verbal cue that you've just violated a value. It's just a simple beep. So today, they might not be beeping as much, but hopefully they're going to have a conversation about, "That is not in line with our values. That's going to hurt our reputation. Man, I don't want you doing that."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So the thing is people self-select out because they do get in, and when they realized that we mean it and we did play a game, actually. It was called the beep game. So we were gamifying things way back when.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So we took the new values and we said, "Look, we need your help, team members. For the next 90 days, we're going to practice these values as a leadership team, but we haven't done this yet. So we need you to give us feedback. Anytime you catch one of us violating a value, just give us the verbal beep," right? It was like the road runner, if you remember the road runner. It's like the road runner was racing through our buildings. It was just beep, beep, beep, beep, beep right and left.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

But bringing the team back together and saying, "What do you all think? Can we do this? Are we committed as a whole because if everybody's not committed to this," 125 employees back at the time, "it's not going to work."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

They added a value, actually, Matthew, now that I think back, and that was a long time ago. That was in the mid '90s. They added the value that we should never say anything about anyone that we would not say to him or her. That's hard. That is, I mean, that's a Catholic thing, right? We should never say anything that anyone would not say to him or her, and that's probably one of the toughest ones that we have on our list today?

Matthew Kelly:

So I remember the first time I heard the code of values I thought, "Wow, it's brilliant," and one of the things that I've always wondered is do other companies try to borrow them, steal them, adapt them. What does that look like?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Yes, all the above. So there are some that have called us and said, "Can we use your values?" and I encourage them through Values, Inc. I encourage folks not to do that. But I encourage them to create their own. It really needs to be personal to who you are as a leader and your organization, what's really important to your organization. Some have taken them. In fact, some competitors have taken our values word for word and copied them, put them on their website and the whole bit. So you have to decide, "Is that big of a deal that we're going to go chase them down or not go chase them down?" but all the above.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I think that the most beautiful thing about it is I can't even count how many companies have now created their own core values and systematized them. So that's really the key. You can have values all day long, but if you're not practicing them and have a system for keeping them front and center amongst your team, they're not going to help you. They're not going to do anything for you. In fact, they can hurt you, right? Like in Enron years ago said, "Hey, here's our values. Everybody in the handbook signed off that I'm going to follow these values," and then the leadership team completely violated those values. So it's a beautiful thing when people realize it.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

The thing that I've been faced with the most is a lot of leaders, a lot of CEOs of big companies would say, "That's nice, but it's that warm and fuzzy thing that doesn't translate into financial results, and we've got to make a living here."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So again, the book Values, Inc. was written to really help them identify that, "Oh, yeah, you can be profitable and not have values and not lead with values. Yeah. You may not last very long." The companies that are most profitable and are sustainable are the ones who truly live their values. At Chick-fil-A, right? Yeah. So you can be a good company, you could be making a nice profitability, but there's other companies that are leading with their values that are going to make over time more than you're making and they're going to outlast you.

Matthew Kelly:

No question. As I look at the code of values, I do wonder, do you have favorites?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I do.

Matthew Kelly:

Tell me about what's one of your favorites.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Well, the favorites are the ones that I have to work on the most. So I could give you a whole list. I think we've got 15 all together, but they're two in particular that have stood out for me over time, and that reminds me, Matthew, even at the beginning of our annual board meeting, at the beginning of the year, we would go around the table and ask for every board member to give their New Year's values resolution, "Which value do you need to most work on?"

Dina Dwer-Owens:

The funny thing was is everybody, not funny, it's wonderful, they were all honest because we're all shaking our heads going, "Yup, yup. That is the value you need to work on." So my two are listening with the intent to understand what is being said and acknowledging that what is said is important to the speaker. I'm busy thinking about what I want to say next sometimes, and I'm not really listening to what the person has to say.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

My other favorite one, and I got a lot of pushback when I was leaving the company on this one from new people coming into the organization, and it's everyone has the right to their own perspective. I've had people say, "No, I'm not going to agree with somebody else's perspective." I mean, if you think about the world we live in today, and there's so many, there's always been diverse perspectives. The world would be boring if there weren't, but man, today? So when faced with a tough, let's call it a political discussion, you may have a very different perspective than I do. How do I show respect to your point of view? I listen, right? I ask good questions and I become curious.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So instead of being defensive, defensive posture just usually takes place right away when you don't agree with somebody else's point of view, instead, opening up your posture and saying, "I really do want to understand why you think the way you think," and it's fascinating what you can learn about why somebody has a perspective that's so different from yours. What I've discovered is no matter what, I always learn something. I still might not may not come around and agree to their point of view, and that's okay.

Matthew Kelly:

Understood.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I'm not saying you have to agree. It's just recognize that they have the right to their own perspective. They were raised in a different culture, possibly, different environments. Who knows what they've lived with? It's a beautiful one. It's a hard one, but it's a beautiful one.

Matthew Kelly:

Yeah. Having fun in the process, talk to us about that.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

That came from during the phase of me becoming the CEO of the company, I told you we had a couple of key leaders on the team that had gray hair already, right? They'd been around a while, very wise. I'll never forget asking David Bethay. He was a leader of I think two other brands at the time. I said, "David, I need leadership advice. I've got so much to learn."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

He said, "Dina, you got to love what you're doing. You got to have fun doing it. Otherwise, it's going to be hard for you and for all the people around you, but you also have to realize when it's not fun anymore, it's probably your time to exit the business."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So we made having fun in the process a value as a result of my conversation with David Bethay, who was just so honest, so honest about it. People, when they would join our organization or we'd go through the values at the beginning of a first meeting with somebody, maybe that's going to be a vendor, they were like, "Wow! It's just not normal that you would have a company talking about fun in their core values."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

We're like, "It's just critical." Good, moral, ethical fun, but we all should be having fun with what we're doing. Yeah, there's tough stuff we have to deal with, but man, we should be enjoying what we're doing mostly, and you have to incorporate that, though, right? Because you can get busy, you can get busy in the busyness of running a business and forget that we've got to bring fun into this.

Matthew Kelly:

So then comes the time you go on the television show, Undercover Boss. What was that like?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Yeah. So people got to have fun in the process on my behalf because I was really, really bad at the jobs. So the backstory to that is Undercover Boss had two seasons already, and two of my friends in franchising had been on an episode, and I thought, "Now, wait a second. What a wonderful marketing opportunity." I mean, our company couldn't afford to get that kind of coverage on national television. So I thought, "Let's approach them." I have a great publicist, Monica Feid, who reached out to, back then, the particular production company and said, "Look, we think we have a story you'd be interested in. We have a woman running a primarily male-dominated business, and one of the things that she really cares about that is the foundation for the success of the company are their values. In watching your previous episodes, none of the bosses really talk about values," which is pretty much the norm, right, Matthew? Most companies don't have clarity of values.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So they go through 80 people to pick one boss, and that's primarily because most bosses say, "No way." They want to go after the big Fortune 500 companies and get those bosses, and they themselves, the CEOs or their boards are going, "We're not going to do that. There's too much risk. We don't know what might be exposed. We have no idea what might come out of that."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

You must recognize, though, Undercover Boss would not be in its, whatever, 13th season if it wasn't fair to the organizations and not revealing something that maybe could have been super damaging to a company, but regardless, you had to be fairly good on TV, right? You got to have a decent presence on TV. So one out of 80 bosses got chosen, but they came to Waco. They did what they call the casting interview.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

A little bit more backstory. So I'm sitting there at church, daily mass that day, thinking about this interview that's coming up. You don't know what to expect, right? They're coming from LA and the priest is talking about our responsibility as Catholics to evangelize. How often have we heard from the pulpit about our responsibility to evangelize? At that time, I had not heard it before. Never had I heard it, and Father John's talking about our responsibilities, Catholics, to evangelize any opportunity you get.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So that's what I left mass with. I go into this casting interview and the guy starts asking me questions. I'm like, "Evangelize any opportunity you get." So he is talking about my day, "So we know you're a boss. We know what you work hard, but what do you do before you go to work? What do you do when you come home at night? We want to know who Dina is."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I said, "Okay. So before I get out of bed in the morning, I count my blessings. I have so much to be grateful for. I've got a big day ahead. Every day's a big day, but I want to slow down and take that deep breath and just be prayerful about all the amazing blessings that I have. Get out of bed, go downstairs, make my family breakfast. Husband and I chat over in the newspaper and head to mass."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

He said, "You do what?"

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I said, "I head to mass."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

He goes, "Wait. You're telling me before you go to work, you go to mass? Why would you do that?"

Dina Dwer-Owens:

My response was, "Why wouldn't I? What a gift that I get to go to mass before I go to work and be grounded." I said, "It's just the most important part of my day. It grounds me for what's ahead in the day and keeps things in perspective, and that's really helpful to me."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

He said, "Do you think we could follow you to church?"

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I said, "I don't know. Let's ask."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So Father John did not ask the Bishop. So it was one of those things, beg for forgiveness later, but he said, "Absolutely," but I couldn't tell them exactly what was going on, but he said, "Sure. They can follow you into church." So it was their idea, Studio Lambert's idea to follow me into church initially, and then we got the green light. So took about a three-week process before CBS basically said, "We absolutely want to have the Dwyer Group on Undercover Boss," and it's just weeks before the filming they call me and they say, "Okay. So now you got to come up with your name. You got to have an undercover name that you're not going to forget because we've had bosses that have just totally messed up a day of filming because they say their real name instead of their undercover name."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So I'm thinking, "Okay, God. What name?" Thought about a few pretty names that I thought, "I've always liked the name," whatever, and then I thought, "Okay." I was very prayerful during this time, Matthew. Again, it's where my faith also had a very, a big turning point, and I prayed that I would be humble not, "Let's go to my head," because you know what an opportunity to get on national TV, promote your brand, but I was also going to be very vulnerable. Who knows? I was going to look stupid. I knew I was going to look stupid on a couple of occasions because I'm not good at hands-on stuff.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So I'm praying about the name and it just comes to me, Faith. Faith will keep me grounded and hopefully keep me humble on this journey, but it's also a name I'm not going to forget. So I went back to the CBS folks and I said, "Look, I've got ..." I had to have four potential names because they have to do a background check and make sure none of them are real life people that will come sue them because I'm portraying them. So it Faith Brown, Faith White, Faith Black, Faith Jones, whatever. I came up with four Faith names.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

They're like, "Okay. So we get it. You like Faith," and Faith Brown ended up being my undercover name. That was really cool because it was just, I don't know, just helped again keep me grounded in why was I doing what I was doing, yes, to help get the company some wonderful exposure, right? Expose the good of our company and share the importance of values-based leadership, but it was also an opportunity for me to really spend time one-to-one with employees of our franchisees.

Matthew Kelly:

What surprised you the most about the show?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Ooh, technically, what surprised me is how hard it is to stand around while you're doing filming. I mean, it was painful, and the team that was involved, and thanks to the team here who's making this happen, but the team that was involved in the production of that, 16 some odd people, I think, but if the airplane's going by and you had just done a take with your raw emotions of what you just experienced, "Sorry, we got to redo that one because the plane just went by."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So technically, that stuff was really hard, but what really surprised me is the ... I've always loved our team. I've always loved people. I've always loved building people to be taking your word is the best version of themselves. I didn't know those words back then. Thank you for bringing that into my life, but how much fun I had getting to know the people. I forgot the cameras were even around me because we would spend a full day with everyone of what they call contributors. They weren't actors or actresses. They were truly employees of our franchisees.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I would just get so engaged in getting to know them that I would forget, but it really reminded me about the hard work that our frontline team members are responsible for keeping us comfortable in our homes. Wow. Again, I've always respected them and appreciated them, but it just took me to a whole new level of, "Wow! They have to go into places and spaces that are gross and dirty." These guys with these big hands can't even get their hands into the plumbing that they need to fix, and somehow they pull it off. So it was a real eye opener for me. So those are two things on the journey, but the other thing on the journey was how God was with me the entire time, the entire time.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I told the crews that I wanted to go to mass while we were out filming. They're like, "Dina, we can't go to daily mass. We just don't have time for it." I said, "Well, I've got to go to Sunday mass. It's an obligation and it's something that I will not miss. So you got to figure out how to make that work." We went to mass, and my publicist is also Catholic, and we're sitting at mass during the petitions and they have no idea. We're just there by ourselves. There's no crews with us or anything, just the two of us. The petition was, "We pray for more wholesome and inspiring entertainment."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I'm sitting here going, "What? When have you heard that as a petition to mass?" Just things get ... These amazing signs and sayings just kept showing up all along this journey, and then at the end for CBS and Studio Lambert to say, "We'd like to go back to church when we get back to Waco. Are you good with that?"

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I'm like, "Of course, I'm good with that," and I totally fell apart. At the very end, I just fell apart coming back into the church because, again, I felt like I was just home and I was so grateful for the people who trusted me to be in the leadership role that I was in, but also this weight of responsibility on my shoulders as a leader, right? It's easy to forget how many lives were responsible for.

Matthew Kelly:

Yes. The frontline people that you filmed with, what were they told was happening?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Yeah. They told we were filming a pilot reality show called Keep Your Day Job. So it was a ruse because you'd think, "How long can Undercover Boss really go on?" So they were told that, "Would you like to participate in teaching this gal, Faith Brown? She's currently is," so we had to lie a little bit, "secretary of her husband's business and she really wants to get out of the office and work with her hands. She wants to really learn her trade. So at the end of the week, contributor, plumber, electrician, appliance repair person, you're going to weigh in on could Faith actually do your job or does Faith need to keep her day job?"

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So it was really a fun, it was a fun ruse, and the sad part is they just teased the heck out of me because I was so bad at the job. So they've got everybody waiting for the finale of filming them telling me whether I should keep my day job or not, and two of them said, "There is no way she could do this work."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I'm like, "I just need more training. Give me some time."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

One guy said, "She's just too old for this."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I'm like, That hurt."

Matthew Kelly:

Wow.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I really wasn't good at the jobs, but I did love being with the people. The beautiful thing is it proved that the values really worked. They all, even though none of us are perfect, they all cared about making sure those values were implemented in their relationship with the customers and with their team members. So that was a beautiful thing.

Matthew Kelly:

Powerful.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Again, it was their franchisees' responsibility to make sure that they trained their employees to the values. It wasn't mine. It's what we asked them to do, but they did it and they did it successfully. So it can be done. So if anybody's out there thinking you can't bring values into a very large organization that's got multiple layers, you can, but it takes real commitment, right?

Matthew Kelly:

Yeah. You're recently named to the hall of fame for the International Franchise Association. You are the first solo woman to be named to the hall of fame. Obviously, I mean, enormous organizations involved, McDonald's, Marriott, Subway, et cetera. What does that feel like?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Yeah. It was surreal when I received the call that I'd be receiving that. I don't need that kind of recognition. I just am so grateful that I'm at a place in my faith life where the worldly things just aren't important. Yet, there is always a society that says, "What? That's kind of cool. That's kind of nice," but when I got the call, I thought, "This is it. God's got a plan here because why else am I receiving this?" Really, there are so many other people who are so much more deserving at this recognition than I am. So I just was very prayerful about, "God, what's the plan here? Why am I receiving this? This is incredible," and my father had received it after he had passed away, which was a beautiful thing to celebrate. He deserved it, but I didn't feel as deserving as I felt he was.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

So God had a plan and I think it all ended at the actual annual convention in San Diego just this February, where I had the opportunity to just say a few words. Thanked a lot of people because none of us get to where we are in life without the help of a lot of people, and you can never remember, I could never remember all the people that have helped me. So I did my best to acknowledge those folks who I believe were instrumental in helping form me, but at the end of the talk, it was really all about the wisdom, the wisdom that I gained in the 39 years of working with amazing people and working at the International Franchise Association with incredible people, and some of the most intimidating, what could be intimidating leaders of very large organizations were the nicest people, I found to be some of the nicest people you could ever meet.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Everybody's got a heart. Everybody's got a heart, and if you just give time for people to show you their heart, it's amazing. It's the everybody's got their right for their own perspective thing. So my words at the acceptance was, "I've learned three key things that I need to get better at, and I'm still working on these things today. One is to be more generous, and then to be more humble. I've been prideful. Sometimes I think I'm the one who's made this happen and it's the furthest from the truth, and then to be more loving. I love St. Thomas Aquinas' definition of love. It's to will the good of another. I love everybody. That's the definition I'm using. As much as some people have hurt me, I still love them because I want the best for everybody. I only want what's good for people, and then thanks to you."

Dina Dwer-Owens:

I wrapped it up with a fourth. I said, "If you really want to get good at those three things, which I want to get really good at, you got to spend some time in the classroom of silence," and I encouraged them, "Just the 10 minutes, the 10 minutes is what I learned from you that your mentor taught you 10 minutes of the classroom with silence and pray," and I shared that my favorite prayer is Thy Will Be Done, "Constantly praying, 'Thy will be done, Thy will be done,' and that's how I closed my talk.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

You and I are both speakers. My goals is always if I can just somehow touch one life in this room of 3400, then it was worth this opportunity to say a few words. I had more people than one come up and I'm grateful for that. One person came up to me who said it was exactly what she needed to hear, and she was just in tears. She was from another country, and it was a blessing. It was a real blessing, but God had a plan. I don't know. I don't know who else might have been touched by those pearls of wisdom that I gained from other people.

Matthew Kelly:

40 years in business, raising a family, grandchildren now.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Chief grandmother officer. I don't know what I'm called now.

Matthew Kelly:

Chief grandmother officer. What are you looking forward to in the future? What are your hopes and dreams going forward?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Oh, gosh. Well, this is not to just build up the beautiful organization that you've created here, but I am most excited about my role in helping spread the good news through dynamic Catholic and the work that you do. You've helped me touch lives in ways, again, that I only even know by sharing the books, by inviting people who aren't even Christian, in some cases, to read the books and become a better version of themselves as a result of the books. I'm involved in Young Catholic Professionals, and I'm so excited about these young people who want to keep their faith alive in the workplace.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

There's hope. There's so much hope in our world, Matthew, when I think of this, and I think of it my grandkids. So I'm very excited about the role I get to play in helping form their lives to the extent that my children and my daughter-in-law, my son-in-law allow me to be involved in that, but it's a beautiful opportunity. I know it's a critical time in their lives to lead by example and share things.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

When my little granddaughter who's three now says the prayer in the car by herself that I've said in the car since she was a baby, "Thank you, God, for a wonderful day. Amen," she said, "Lula, I want to do it by myself. I want to do it by myself," and she's proud to pray for us in the car by herself.

Matthew Kelly:

Beautiful.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Yeah. It gives me chills. It's fun.

Matthew Kelly:

You look back on your life, what's some of the best advice you've been given?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Oh, gosh. One is, and this was the Dr. Robert Schuler. I just never forget the possibility thinking cassette tape series where he said, "The best leaders surround themselves with people that are smarter than they are, that complement their weaknesses, and be okay with that, be really okay with that." So that's a big lesson that I've carried because I really am only good at a few things, a very few things, and then I've just had this amazing team of people in my life, in all areas of my life who've just helped me.

Matthew Kelly:

What do you think stops people from surrounding themselves with other talented people?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Fear, fear of somebody maybe taking their position, which is so sad, but it's just the reality of ego. Ego really can get in the way of that, thinking they're better, thinking they're smarter, thinking, "I don't have the time to teach them to do this because I can do it faster than they can do it." It's always flabbergasted me. It's like, "What? Are you kidding me? It might take you a little while to teach them, but once they've learned, how much more can get done in the organization because they're doing it now instead of you? Now, you can do what you're best at doing." Those are a couple things that come to mind.

Matthew Kelly:

Yeah. Your father obviously had an enormous influence on you.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Yes.

Matthew Kelly:

Sadly, we live in, in many ways, a fatherless society now. More than 50% of children are being raised separated from their biological fathers. What do you think your dad would say if he were here today?

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Yeah. Well, he was in the process of getting ready to write another book. Like you, he felt books could really create a movement, and his next book was going to be The Family Dinner Table because he was seeing it happen already. In the early '90s, he was seeing how broken the families were and how these young boys and girls not having a father figure was already affecting families. So he saw that long ago. So gosh, what would he say today? "Fathers, step up. Step up and be the spiritual leaders in your families." I think that's one thing he would say and he would say it very boldly because I think he'd say, "I wasn't the spiritual father I should have been when my kids were younger." He did so much good for our family, so much good, and he was such a provider. We didn't have a lot of money growing up when our family was young.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Money was success to him in many ways. That's how he defined success, ut in his heart, it really wasn't, but I think he'd say he didn't do everything he should have done at an early age because my brothers, they missed him. They missed having him, but then he offered work. So at the age of 12 or 13, everybody got a good dose of dad, and that was good for my brothers, too, but I would think he would talk to the dads in the world today and say, "Step up. Be the spiritual leaders of your families because the women are taking the lead." I see it everywhere I go, Matthew.

Matthew Kelly:

Beautiful. Dina, thank you so much.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Yeah. Thank you.

Matthew Kelly:

Really enjoyed our conversation. I hope you'll come back again.

Dina Dwer-Owens:

Thank you. Keep up the God work you're doing here. It's amazing.

Matthew Kelly:

Thank you.

Watch the full interview!