The Triple Win Alignment
Align the business, the customer, and the employee — and take care of your people even if you're selfish.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 85%
Royce's leadership philosophy is to engineer a triple win: every decision should serve the business, the customer, and the employee simultaneously. Aligning all three sets of incentives produces a far better outcome than focusing on one or two. He rejects the industry's 'wet rag' mentality — throwing hires at the wall to see who sticks — arguing that even from self-interest you should take care of your people, because a bad boss can take years off someone's life and drive them to write bad reviews. His real obsession was never pest control; it was developing people and building the culture and systems that let thousands of employees and customers win together.
Origin
Royce's own great boss aligned everyone's interests, let him shine, and even invested in his first company. Contrasting that with the industry's wet-rag hiring culture, Royce made developing people his obsession — building lavish headquarters, global retreats, and real training so a pest control job became something people were proud of.
Core principles
- 01Align the interests of the business, the customer, and the employee for a better outcome than optimizing one alone.
- 02Even from pure self-interest, taking care of your people pays off — a bad boss can cost years of someone's life.
- 03Replace 'wet rag' hiring with real development so people don't leave and write bad reviews.
- 04The widget matters less than the game of developing people and building systems.
How to run it
- 1
Design for three winners
Before a decision, check that it benefits the business, the customer, and the employee together, rather than trading one off against the others.
- 2
Kill the wet-rag mentality
Replace throw-hires-at-the-wall staffing with genuine training and development so people succeed rather than churn out and leave bad reviews.
Watch out A bad boss can make employees three times more depressed and cost them years — treat development as a real responsibility.
- 3
Build culture that makes the job cool
Invest in experiences, facilities, and retreats that make people proud to belong, turning even an unglamorous industry into a magnet for talent.
Pro tip Royce toured Google, Meta, and Zappos, then replicated their culture — a basketball court, arena suite, and global retreats — inside a pest control company.
In the wild
Royce built a headquarters with an NCAA basketball court, a 30-person suite at the Jazz arena, and global retreats featuring skydiving and swimming with sharks. Visitors assumed it was a tech company and were stunned to learn it was pest control.
→ The culture made a boring industry cool, easing recruitment and retention of the mostly-college-age sales force.
Common mistakes
Optimizing for one stakeholder
Focusing only on the business or only on profit misaligns incentives and produces worse outcomes than aligning all three parties.
Treating people as disposable
The wet-rag approach creates a stream of people who have a poor experience, leave, and publicly damage the employer brand — the opposite of scale.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders scaling a people-heavy operation who need culture and retention to compound.
Not ideal for
Purely transactional, low-headcount businesses where culture is a minor lever.
From the transcript
“we wanted a triple win. One for the business, two for the customers, and three for all of our employees. And if you can align…”
“Even if you're self-interested, take care of your people. Like, I really found it to be a responsibility.”
From the episode
David Royce: How to Turn a Boring Idea into a 9-Figure Business
David Royce