You've got a drunk driving problem globally.

So we began a dialogue with my team.

Can we go international?

And what will it take?

When I asked that question amongst my executive group, the answer very quickly converted from objections to, well, why not, why can't we?

And I'm proud to say that four years later, Lifesaver is now alive in 11 countries.

The people that I want to build a company around are the ones that respond to that challenge and go, you know, why not?

Are you looking to increase sales, grow your brand and share your leadership message?

Then check out our business podcast program.

Each week, more people listen to podcasts that have Netflix accounts.

And one third of the US Population listens to podcasts regularly.

So your customers and team are already listening to podcasts.

It should be yours.

Discover our five step profitable podcast framework and what results you can expect for your company by setting up a 20 minute call with my team@BenLeads.com schedule that's BeenLeads.com schedule schedule.

Welcome back to Lead the Team with number one bestselling author and in demand corporate trainer, Ben Fanning.

On this podcast, the world's most innovative senior leaders share their top success strategies to motivate your direct reports, cultivate your top leaders, and accelerate your career.

Let's get started.

Here's Ben.

Hey, everybody.

Welcome back to lead the team.

Today I have for you Michael Travers, who is president and general manager over at Life Safer, a trailblazer and the leader in in car Breathalyzer technology.

With over 30 years of leadership and a personal mission to make a difference, Michael has helped drive Life Safer success and restoring the freedom to drive safely and responsibly.

Since launching the industry back in 1991, Lifesaver sets the standard for reliable ignition, intralight technology, and compassionate customer support.

Their team guides drivers through every step, from device installation to license recovery, navigating the legal requirements every state with expertise and dedication.

Now, Michael is casting an even bigger vision for the company and you're going to hear all about it today.

Michael, welcome to lead the team, sir.

Thank you, Ben.

Happy to be here.

Yeah, let's dig in.

So starting out, how did you convince people to take on your bigger vision to expand beyond the company's core competencies?

Because, y'all, they're the industry leader, it's like, it's like, hey, they could just be celebrating that.

But we get over Michael, he's talking something bigger.

Michael, what is that?

Yeah, Ben, I appreciate that.

So I feel like full transparency here.

I was the chief Research and Development Officer, CTO cio.

I've come from a background of innovation.

I was.

My role as president in Lifesaver was my first full leadership role.

And when they tapped me on the shoulder four years ago, they said, hey, look, you've been at this company, you know the product at the back of your hand.

This mission aligns with you.

Why don't you just run?

Why don't you run Lifesaver?

Why don't you show you can, you can do this?

And I said, first of all, thank you.

I appreciate the opportunity.

But the reality is I've always thought bigger than that my whole career.

I'm not a play it safe individual.

So when they sent me that message, my first thought was, well, what else can we do?

And given my background in innovation, I started going, well, we have massive opportunities.

First of all, Lifesaver is only a domestic company.

Sure, we're top three in the U.S.

we went around the founder of this company was the founder of the entire ignition and lark industry, but you've got a drunk driving problem globally.

So we began a dialogue with my team.

Can we go international and what'll it take?

Now, I have to say that when I first did that engagement, there were definitely people in the company who said, we don't.

That's not our specialty.

We're domestic born and bred, were succeeding.

Why would you take on that risk?

Why don't we just succeed with what you have?

Why don't we prove ourselves in this market?

And I said, first of all, that's.

That's not my style.

I don't just want to coast and succeed in this.

In this small little pool.

And second, why won't we challenge ourselves?

Why shouldn't we?

And the thing that pleased me the most is that when I asked that question amongst my executive group, the answer very quickly converted from objections to, well, why not?

Why can't we?

And I'm proud to say that four years later, LifeSaver is now alive in 11 countries and preventing drunk driving.

Not just in the US but in Finland, in Sweden, in Australia, in France, in Spain, all over the place.

There's opportunity there, and it aligned with the core mission.

It moved things forward.

But what's interesting to me there too is so many times, like I think about sports a lot, where a championship team has a hard time staying there because they get complaints.

I went to the University of Alabama and Nick Saban's always talked about reading the rat poison or the rat poison of the press, giving you so many accolades.

You guys have been successful in your product and so you come in, you're like, no, no, we need to take more risk.

We need to go international.

We need to do all these, like, what's the playbook for leaders who feel like their team might be a little complacent when things are working?

Like, things are working.

Why do we need to start changing that?

Yeah, and that's, that's, that's exactly it.

It's very, very easy, and I would almost call it seductive to get caught in that rut.

Like, it's working every single day.

You have a routine, and I'm a big believer in routine.

I wear polo shirts everywhere I go.

My wife likes to joke that I have two colors of shir and look.

Make, make that aspect of your life easy.

But I, but I have to say, the best people, the people that I want to build a company around are the ones that respond to that challenge and go, you know, why not?

Like, why, why be afraid to go to Spain?

And.

But I also am a big believer in the life philosophy that people find time for the things that excite them.

You might have somebody who believes that they're busy in a full time 40 hour work week, but then they get excited about the opportunity to save more lives, to go to more countries, to growth, to grow beyond themselves, to get a promotion or a career.

And that motivation really drives productivity, it drives morale, it drives this culture of energy around, not just being stale, but being excited to go to work.

And being able to instill that in my team has been huge.

You don't have to name names here, but was there one employee who maybe had been at the company a long time and you come in and maybe they seemed a little reluctant, and then you cast these vision or talk, it sounds like you talked about what the personal opportunities could be for them.

And then, and then did you see a transformation?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And we're not naming any names here.

Not, not today.

As a matter of fact, I've.

I have something more exciting than just international that I want to make sure we get to.

But definitively, there are those people out there who have been caught in that net of complacency.

And that does not mean they're not amazing people.

That does not mean they're not highly intelligent.

It just means that they've gotten stuck in that routine and they do take a little bit of nudging guidance.

I like the word culture because it's something that feeds on itself and grows on itself.

And I'm a huge believer in making sure people don't get caught in that isolation, in that firm belief, flying people around, forcing in person time, forcing dialogue.

But I have to say that I also value those people.

I don't want to go so negative as to call them naysayers.

I call them my guardrails.

Right.

I like having the energy to ask what if?

And then I like having trusted people in the room that will tell me that's wrong.

They can say that's stupid.

They could say that's a reach or a stretch.

But those guardrails, those are the people that prevent larger mistakes because they challenge the idea.

And so what do you do to foster that?

They're in their room.

But I mean, where do these people come from?

Because you came into a company, well, you did get promoted through the ranks, right?

And then you took over.

But I'm just trying to imagine leaders are like, yeah, I don't, I don't have a lot of naysayers in the room.

People don't know me as the kind of person to have naysayers in the room.

What do you do to sort of cultivate the devil's advocate or the naysayers when you're already.

Because, because there's all.

Obviously there's also the authority thing, really?

Hey, you're my boss.

I'm supposed to say yes, and how can we go faster versus I think that's a bad idea.

Yeah, no, that's a fantastic question.

I think a huge part of it is approachability.

So let me rewind for a second because when I joined Lifesaver, it was actually going through a series of mergers and we had exactly the problem you describe, where we had three different cultures being brought in, three different companies being brought in.

And even though that role was a CIO role, not a presidential role, it still had the same problem for the people I was meeting.

I was a total stranger.

I was the boss coming in the door.

And the.

I have seen a lot of people who make that mistake of surrounding them with people that agree with them.

And inevitably those people crash and burn because they don't get a chance to hear what could go wrong and to adjust and tune the plan.

But it's hard.

Like, you walk in the door, you've got people who have incredible pride, who've been working there for decades, who founded this life saving industry and your brand new in the room.

And I have to say, if I was speaking to the next generation, right, the person that would get my job one day, I would tell them, you have to make it friendly and personable.

You have to.

When somebody Objects receive them with respect.

The objection could be stupid.

You could already have a vision that overcomes the objection.

But you have to listen.

And something I'm horrible at here because I'm bad at pausing, but you have to give them the opportunity to say why it's an objection, and you have to let everybody else see that you gave them that opportunity.

Do those things, and word will spread that you receive your employees with the respect, and you will engender a culture that allows for a feedback loop back to you.

Yeah, great call that in those meetings, people are observing you, and if you let the one person explain themselves thoroughly and you are you and they do perceive you to be the listing leader, they're going to be much more likely, much more likely to share their points versus.

Oh, man, Ben, just shut that person down in the meeting.

You should have seen it.

But, yeah, people are going to be less likely to speak up.

So, yeah, I like.

I like how that.

Leading by example and that now you mentioned that you're thinking, you know, beyond just a breathalyzer technology in automobiles, what are you.

Where are you thinking?

And where is this industry going?

And thank you, Ben.

The five years ago, when Lifesaver's product was fully launched, fully vetted, very, very proud product, I began a journey to say, okay, what is next?

What can Lifesaver do to save more lives?

So I wasn't even in the role of president yet, although, candidly, I suspect this is what put me on the path to become president of the company.

But in vehicle, in road safety, alcohol was the leading cause of deaths before ignition interlocks came along.

And a lot of groups, a lot of people are very proud to say that that ignition interlocks have made it no longer the leading cause of death.

But there's two.

There's two other factors that are ubiquitous.

One is distracted driving.

We all have a cell phone somewhere.

Beeps and whistles and flashing lights all pulling our eyes away from that critical road.

And the other, speed.

So I began looking at both of those and going, look, if Lifesaver's mission is to save lives, what adjacencies, what can we expand into?

Because we should be saving more lives.

Yes, I want to run a solid company.

Yes, I want to build a company that gives people careers and progressions, but I want focus on the core mission, which is reduce deaths.

So I looked at distracted driving, and I said, you know what?

There's some extremely smart people working on this.

Those are people I would like to partner with in the future.

There's ways to go there.

But then I looked at speed and I said, you know what, speed is everything.

If your car is going fast when you're drunk, you're going to get, you're going to injure more people, you're going to be more injured.

If your car is going fast when you're just driving, you'll have less reaction time.

I said, you know what?

I'm going to look at the speed problem.

And I went out there and started doing some research, started doing what every, every, every person should do, which is I started looking for people smarter than myself.

I said, somebody else has to be looking at this.

There, there's people out there we can go talk to.

And I, I was fortunate enough to stumble across this corporation that had a potential solution to the speed problem.

This corporation, like us, has been around for multiple decades, but they have been focused exclusively on fleet efficiency.

How do we make big rigs go the speed limit, how do we prevent, how do we do fuel efficiency, especially in those long haul truckers?

And I sat down with the found who is not just not just smarter than me, but maybe one of the smartest people I've ever met.

His name is Dave Sturdy.

And I said, how would you like, how do you think about this?

And he said, michael, I've been thinking about that my entire life.

The only thing I've lacked is somebody with a national distribution center to take that to market.

So he and I had some very good meals and some very, very long conversations.

But eventually we came to the conclusion that if we approached the speed problem the way we approached the drunk driving problem, which is to not try to mandate it in every car, to not try to force it in all new cars, but to take the very worst drivers and give them a control mechanism, we could have the same impact on reckless and repeat speeders that we did in drunk driving.

So walk us through how that would appear in a car.

So someone's like a, gets a ticket, speeding ticket or.

Yep.

So I'm actually proud to say four years later that Washington D.C.

this year passed the first in its nation law mandating that if a driver gets a certain number of speeding tickets in a year, instead of getting their vehicle impounded, which is a massive, massive penalty to them from a social and economical perspective, instead of, instead of suspending their license, which data shows in the drunk driving world makes no difference, they drive anyway they can.

The Washington D.C.

is mandating a intelligent speed assist device or a speed governor be installed in their vehicle for 12 months.

Wow.

So what happens?

They're they're going 55 and a 35 or they can't even get to 55 and a 35.

Right.

They can't even get there.

Exactly right.

This is it's first in its nation.

I'll tell you though, that I, I'm not infallible, but I predict in five years we're going to see states cropping up with these laws everywhere because many, many, many jurisdictions are struggling with the same problem.

They have these drivers that are tearing through neighborhoods 25 mile an hour.

They're going through 65.

And they've tried and they've tried and they've tried.

The judge is like, this guy shows up every Friday, he's got another speeding ticket.

And inevitably those things result in horrific tragedies like the one in Vegas a few months ago where someone was plowed through an intersect 120 miles an hour and just destroyed a family.

And they have no solution because the only solutions are impound vehicle, which is horrific to the individual, or suspend licenses which unfortunately they can get out just by driving.

So people are looking for a socially responsible solution.

They think, think like drunk drivers, right?

These are people who've shown because they repeatedly speed that while they, while they know how to drive, while they have a need to get to work, they have, they, they struggle with the ability to be responsible.

Would you or your CEO be a good fit for this podcast?

If you know a uniquely talented leader who has a story to share and a message to deliver, then we'd love to host them on the show.

Go to benleads.com apply to fill out a quick form where you can let us know a little bit about yourself.

And my team will take a look to see if we're a good fit.

That's been leads.com apply.

Well, how many lives do you estimate today that Lifesafer, like your technology, saves today versus what this could do on a national level from adding the speed piece of it.

I would argue there's nonprofits out there that have done a way better job at this than I have.

But tens of thousands of lives are saved by ignition interlocks.

Lifesaver participated in a study a couple years ago that showed that it had prevented millions of attempts to drive drunk over the 30 year life of its company.

And while not every time you drive drunk does it save a life, that still shows a substantial decrease in drunk driving.

We feel the exact same way about the, about the ISA or the intelligence fetuses program that it could save.

It could potentially save thousands of lives.

Every year, by taking the worst 1 or 2% of the drivers, we could double the amount of lives we save.

Because the speeding problem is equal to or maybe even greater than the drunk driving problem.

Well, yeah.

Can you put it on a, on teens?

Can parents put it on the teens without the government, without government approval or whatever?

Hey, I mean, do you see families putting on teens vehicles proactively?

Absolutely.

It's funny you say that because that, that's, that's an area we are working in now.

And the response from parents.

Now, candidly, our biggest challenge is awareness, right?

Like this is a, this is a technology that's existed in commercial fleets for decades.

But parents aren't thinking about that.

Right.

They're not contacting an 18 wheel commercial shipping company and saying, hey, what do you do to keep your big rig safe?

I could use that in my teenager.

But we are installing this in teenage vehicles today and in a very, very small scale.

Right.

If I permit myself to rewind for a minute, one of the biggest challenges in converting from an innovator to a president to running a whole company is that you suddenly become hyper aware of operations of scale of efficiency.

But taking that mindset of when you develop a new product, you put it in five, then 50, then 500.

We're doing the exact same thing with teenage drivers.

We're taking the approach of put it in five vehicles.

If it's successful, put it in 50.

If it's successful, put it in 500.

But I have a vision here where this could potentially be part of graduated driver's license programs, where the first six months every teenager puts this in a car while they learn how to drive.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense there.

What do you.

And on the business side of this, you're talking about, like you said, Washington D.C.

is beginning with this program.

You're going from a small group to a big group very quickly.

You said scalability.

If you have two or three, how are you thinking about this?

If two or three states go through with it or go forward, how can you scale up quickly enough with that with your company, with your current resources?

Great question.

It's like you're sitting in our planning sessions because that's what we challenge ourselves with every day.

What happens if the dam breaks and all of a sudden people become aware, wow, yes, I want this.

And constituents scream for it.

One of the reasons I pick this adjacency is that Lifesaver in particular is already scaled.

We install hundreds of thousands of ignition interlocks.

We already have a distributed service Network.

We already have a.

We already have a shipping and a hub and spoke model.

We have everything you need to scale.

Now, that doesn't mean there's not significant challenges, but I specifically sought out for lifesaver, a product that could be injected into its umbrella.

Oh, nice.

So you've already built the infrastructure to handle a lot of this.

And for leaders who were looking for growth, looking for innovation.

Michael said the word adjacency adjacent.

Right?

And that's when you were really going out and like, hey, what can we put through our distribution footprint that we already have?

And then you don't have to go reinvent the wheel whenever these.

These people need to turn on this, the.

Turn on the whole program for their.

Their state.

What.

What is the biggest misconception you think people have about life safer and this technology?

Because I'm assuming there's probably something related to Big Brother, a vigil, a vigilant, or they call a visual, a state sort of controlling everything.

How are you thinking about this?

That's a.

That's a good question.

I would, as a counterpoint, illustrate what the other potential solutions are and invite.

Invite people in general and invite your listeners to think about the difference.

So there's.

There's two ways to solve the speed problem.

One is to put this in every new car, so every car has a speed governor every single time.

And the other is to use it as a punitive measure only for those who've shown that they need the help.

And you alluded earlier to teen drivers, new drivers.

Right.

Parents, and I'm a parent.

I have three girls.

Parents these days expect that as their children take risks, they'll have the ability to monitor them.

So whether that's a cell app or a tool, I am a huge believer in the fact that using this in that training tool in the punitive sense is not only significantly better for society because you're addressing the root cause of the problem as opposed to spreading it across the entire population and diluting it, but you also are only putting it in people who've shown they need to be tracked.

Right.

If I use a GPS analogy, putting a GPS tracker in every citizen in the United States would be egregious.

But putting a GPS tracker on someone who's out on bail is acceptable because they've shown that you have a reason to keep track of them until they show up for their court case.

And to continue that analogy, putting this in a car allows significantly more freedom than impounding the vehicle.

So it's a better alternative to impoundment a cheaper alternative to impoundment, while still, not, to your point, going full Big Brother on the broader population.

Yeah.

So good.

And I mean, it's a great way to think about technology in general as we can use it as an enabler and to help monitor, but not control the whole population, but really use that enabler to help those who are having alcohol problems, who are reckless driving, because they're kind of giving up their freedom a little bit anyway.

When you, when you sort of begin to infringe on the freedom of others.

Exactly.

And that.

Exactly.

That resonates heavily with me.

Man, that's so, so good.

So when you think about Save Lives and creating a company around this idea, how do you, I'm curious how you think about your culture and hiring for this.

Because you're not a nonprofit, right.

There are non profits, there's Mothers Against Drunk Driving, there's other organizations like this.

And you guys are for profit with a technology.

And I don't know if you're pulling from the same pool of people.

Not necessarily.

But are you hiring for more of the culture first or the technology capabilities?

How do you think about that as a leader?

I actually want to do a call out here, if you don't mind.

Some of the best people in the world, the people I respect heavily are those non profits that are championing public safety.

I've had the opportunity to work with many people who've lost a loved one, a child, a significant other due to drunk or speed related issues, and it tears my heart apart that that happened.

But the good that they have managed to bring out of that by advancing safety, by championing for preventing that from happening again.

Families for Safe Streets, you mentioned mad, which is a huge ally in the drunk driving world.

Families for Safe Shoots is a huge ally in the speed world and trying to reduce deaths related to speeding.

My heart goes out to them over and over and over and over again.

I attend their events as a, as a, as a social outreach.

And I would attend their events whether I ran this company or didn't, because I believe in that mission.

That said, at the end of the day, similar to my comment earlier about having guardrails and having people in the company who serve a purpose.

I want an engineer who's an engineer.

Now I do make sure when I go through the hiring process that I talk about, this is a company with a social mission.

Our goal is road safety.

Our goal is save lives.

That's a huge part of my interviews.

But the reality is I'm hiring for someone who's going to build the best possible device, the best possible software, the best possible tool, because I view that as the way to ensure that this works every time.

So.

Good man.

And how big is your.

How many, how many employees today are y'all leading?

Where do you think it's going to grow to?

I feel like.

I feel like a stereotype when I say that Lifesaver is going to double, but I suspect it's actually going to be significantly larger than that.

The international growth alone will probably double Lifesaver in five years.

The speed product is.

I don't want to overstate this, but it's going to be significantly larger than that.

With all of the different venues you.

You alluded to the teen drivers.

Of course, the offender space is one I'm focused on because that's that recidivism and training program.

But those two markets alone are massive.

Doubling the.

My role.

I don't, I don't think about revenue and EBITDA when I talk externally.

I think about doubling the lives we save.

But at the end of the day, I have a responsibility to my shareholders, to my investors to make sure they get a return.

And so if I'm able to give them a return on investment and save lives, well, that's why I work.

I love it.

It reminds me of the.

What do they call it?

Triple net, bottom line.

Am I thinking about that?

Yeah.

Lives, profitability, sales.

I don't know.

Is that how you'll think about it?

I'm pretty close, yeah.

And that's.

It's actually built into the credo.

Right.

Like we want to deliver a good quality product.

All of the other things matter.

If I called out the.

I could call it every department, Lifesaver, but.

And I'm proud of every single one of them.

And it ties nicely back to what you said earlier about that culture.

Right.

Moving.

Moving a company.

Forward.

Lifesaver was a very successful company.

It saved a lot of lives.

But the transformative difference between when I took over the role of president four years ago and today, the energy in the halls is palatable because people are seeing not just there's a path here to do more, but they're also seeing that personal development, that career development, they're seeing that excitement.

You know, there's a map on one of our hallways that shows all the countries and the ever increasing expansion of dots.

I mean, those things get people excited because they see that the company is going upwards and they're going with it.

And I love that.

Been a very fun interview today, Michael.

What's your parting thought for our listeners?

I would actually emphasize the two points that matter the most to me.

One is listen to the people that object.

They usually have a good reason.

And the other is even when you have disagreement, never ever leave the room, get alignment before you end the meeting.

Listen to the objections, have the dialogue, have the conversation.

I have seen way too many companies fail when the executives leave the room and they don't have agreement and you end out with that poison pool where, yeah, okay, I said to his face, yes, but I go down the hallway and I'm not going to actually do those things.

Get buy in from your lieutenants.

Get alignment from your lieutenants.

If there's one thing every leader should do, it's that one.

Yeah.

So good alignment's key is one thing to get to talk about the strategy, but you want to make sure everybody's rolling in the same direction.

Michael, thank you for coming on.

Lead the team.

Absolutely.

You take care, Ben.

Good to spend some time with you.

Want to boost your productivity and decision making.

Get vital insights from each episode delivery directly to your inbox.

A great resource whether you've listened to the episode or not.

Go to benfanning.com insight.