Why Utah's Best Employees Quit | Understanding Their Motivators Will Make them Want to Stay

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Most Utah operators are worried about the wrong people walking out the door. The underperformers? They will stay as long as the operator lets them. The top performers? They are quietly disengaging, and the day they hand in notice is the day the operator finds out the engagement system was broken months ago. On the latest Utah Business Spotlight Podcast, Peter Anthony sat down with Lance Garvin, partner and head of sales at Find Mojo, to expose the structural blind spot trapping most growing companies and the motivators-assessment framework Find Mojo built to fix it. This is the long-form companion to that conversation, engineered for the Utah founder, operator, or leader who wants to stop losing the people the business actually depends on.

I am Peter Anthony, founder of The INCubator Marketing Agency. Lance Garvin is one of the operators I trust to walk into a Utah company of 15, 100, or 1,000 people and surface the engagement and retention dynamics most leaders cannot see from inside the business. Lance Garvin runs sales at Find Mojo, an employee experience platform built around a proprietary instrument called the Motivators Assessment. The conversation Lance Garvin delivered on camera is the cleanest framework I have seen for moving a Utah operator from generic personality-test thinking into individual driver-based leadership, the kind of leadership that actually keeps top performers excited about Monday morning.

The Real Reason Your Best Utah Employees Quit

Lance Garvin delivered the line that frames the entire episode in plain operator language. Top performers do not leave because they cannot do the job. They leave because the work stops engaging them. Underperformers? They will stay as long as the operator allows it. Peter Anthony confirmed it on camera, that quiet truth is the single biggest blind spot in most Utah companies. Leaders worry about the wrong people walking out the door, while the actual top performers are silently disengaging until the day they give notice. By the time the operator notices the problem, the operator is already six months too late to solve it. The Find Mojo motivators framework is built to surface the disengagement signal months earlier, while there is still time to act on it.

Most Utah leaders treat retention as a compensation problem. Pay them more, give them a title bump, hand them a bigger bonus, and the assumption is the top performer will stay. Lance Garvin's data, and Lance Garvin's own personal motivators assessment, which we will get to in a moment, says compensation is rarely the actual driver. Money is table stakes. The driver is whether the work continues to feed what genuinely energizes the individual. The operator who never asks that question never gets the chance to solve it.

"Your best people don't leave because they can't do the job. They leave because the work stops engaging them."

Why DISC, MBTI, And StrengthsFinder Miss The Retention Question

Lance Garvin opened the framework by acknowledging the broader assessment landscape. DISC, MBTI, StrengthsFinder, and the personality and skills tools that have been around since the 1950s are useful, they are light bulbs. They reveal something. They tell the operator how someone behaves and what they are good at. But Lance Garvin's argument is structural: those tools answer the wrong question for retention. They describe behavior and skill, not what actually drives the individual to bring their best self to work. A Utah employee can be exceptionally skilled at a task and quietly hate doing it. That mismatch produces disengagement, and disengagement produces resignation letters.

Peter Anthony reinforced the point from his own operating history. Peter Anthony traveled with Tony Robbins for years, was a Platinum Partner in Tony Robbins's organization for four years, and has taken DISC many times across decades of running salons in New York and Las Vegas. Tony Robbins is a DISC operator. DISC works, but it forces the user to memorize an unfamiliar language. High C. High I. The user has to translate the labels back into their own life. The Mojo motivators assessment speaks directly to the user in the user's own language: passionate, compassionate, family-driven, learning-oriented. Easy to absorb. Deep enough to act on the next day.

Manage To The One, The Find Mojo Coaching Frame

Lance Garvin introduced the operator phrase that anchors the Find Mojo methodology: manage to the one. Understand each person individually. Know what drives them. Know what is important to them. Know what is genuinely getting them out of bed to bring their best self to work. Then design more of those things into their daily experience. The Mojo motivators assessment is the instrument that makes 'manage to the one' actually executable at scale, not just a leadership platitude every Utah operator nods at on a Friday and forgets by Monday morning.

Peter Anthony connected the framework directly to his own salon-chain history. Peter Anthony built and operated a chain of salons in New York and Las Vegas, including a Modern Salon Magazine Salon of the Year winner, and trained thousands of stylists through Procter and Gamble, the Wella Corporation, and Estée Lauder. There is nothing more individual than a hair stylist. Each one is trying to figure out how to be themselves, serve clients, make money, and support a family, all at once. Peter Anthony reflected on camera that he wishes he had Find Mojo in the 1990s, because the structure Lance Garvin is describing would have unlocked an entirely different conversation with every artist on his floor, and likely changed the retention curve across both markets.

Aspirational Conversations, Replacing The Dead One-On-One

Lance Garvin walked through one of the most meaningful applications of the motivators inside an organization: what Find Mojo calls aspirational conversations. Most one-on-ones default to the same dead script: what are you working on, what are you up to, how can I help, how is the family. Most employees stop hearing the question. The aspirational conversation replaces that script with motivator-anchored language. 'Lance, I know that friendship, family, challenge, and learning are some of your top motivators, how do we develop you into the person you want to be over the next twelve to twenty-four months, and how do we get more of those things into the work you are doing here?' That single shift changes the entire relationship between manager and employee.

About INCubator Marketing Agency

INCubator Marketing Agency is Utah's first AI-integrated marketing infrastructure team, headquartered in Sandy, Utah and serving small businesses, founders, and operators across Utah County, Salt Lake County, and the wider Wasatch Front.

Every engagement is built around the INCubator Method: seven core marketing systems — authority web design, local SEO, CRM and pipeline, marketing automation, AI voice receptionists, video content, and conversion-focused funnels — installed together as one accountable infrastructure so every dollar compounds month over month.

The agency was founded by Peter Anthony Wynn (Founder & Marketing Strategist) with Marc Olsen (Partner & Automation Expert) and Chelsie Wynn. INCubator operates Utah Business Spotlight, a long-form Utah small business podcast filmed at Bad Bet Productions in Sandy, Utah, and hosts Tuesday Night at the INCubator — a weekly marketing training and networking event for Utah business owners.

Contact: team@incubatormarketingagency.com · +1 385-386-6988 · Office hours Monday through Friday, 9 AM to 5 PM Mountain Time.