Tag Archives: Hire

How Do You Beef Up Talent to Drive the Company? Three Questions

Situation: There is no secret that hiring is more challenging now than it was two years ago. A CEO is finding it difficult to attract and bring in the right talent to achieve her growth objectives. What are others doing to bring in new talent, especially high performers who will help to bring in new accounts and work with key customers to develop new business. How do you beef up talent to drive the company?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • What has worked best for others?
    • Hired low and developed home grown talent. This means building the capacity to train new talent to meet the company’s needs.
    • This may not produce entrepreneurs like the company’s founders but can produce solid performers.
    • Some sectors are by nature risk averse. Individuals are not dollar driven as much as by security with an acceptable salary. Good candidates who are hungry for growth are more likely to be found outside of these sectors.
  • How do you hire to match the company’s objective?
    • The objective is rapid growth – the mold of the original founders who were risk-taking entrepreneurs atypical of the sector.
    • Look for candidates who are driven by growth. The right candidate will jump at the opportunity to take a $5M book of business and grow it to $10-15M in 3 years with appropriate corporate support and compensation.
  • What has been tried or investigated in the past?
    • Looked for successful smaller businesses similar to the company as possible acquisitions. The challenge was that the people running these companies liked their independence and didn’t want a boss.
    • Looked at individuals from corporate backgrounds in the same sector. Some worked, some didn’t. Frequently, these people were not entrepreneurs or builders.
    • Talk to private equity companies. Ask who they have bought or sold in this space. Gather names of drop-in CEOs and key staff who turned companies around and did well.

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How Do You Grow Knowledge Workers into Servant Leaders? Three Methods

Situation: A company’s staff is made up primarily of knowledge workers. These are highly skilled individuals who excel in their roles. The CEO wishes to shift their focus to servant leadership – where the focus is the growth and development of the company. How do you grow knowledge workers into servant leaders?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • One option is to create a different set of incentives. Offering key managers the option to invest in and hold shares in the company will change their perspective. This, in turn, can change their behavior because servant leadership will improve company performance and the value of their shares.
  • Another option, used by Accenture and many Fortune 500s, is to hire a lot of the best and brightest individuals that they can find out of college and see who rises to the top.
    • The ratio in large firms is generally 15 hires to produce 1 high performer. Another CEO at the table is now shifting to this model at his company.
    • Create an entry level position for recent graduates that will allow for this sifting without disrupting the company’s culture.
    • Speed identification and retention of the best talent through annual evaluations of the company’s talent. This includes ratings by employees’ supervisors of both how the individual is doing and their ultimate potential within the company.
    • Be aware of the downsides to this model. One is that the two groups that tend to leave of their own accord are the best and the worst employees.
  • A third option is to create two career tracks within the Company.
    • One track is upwardly mobile. This is the track that identifies, develops and grooms future servant leaders.
    • The other track is a specialty track, which can produce servant leaders along a different dimension – breadth of experience and expertise in key skills of value to the firm.
    • This second track also allows for growth, characterized by levels of title, salary and recognition that reward the acquisition and perfection of skills in key disciplines.
    • Several “kinder, gentler” environments such as 3M have used parallel tracks with great success.

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How Do You Foster Channel Development? Three Topics

Situation: A company has grown successfully designing and producing products for larger companies. In the process they have enhanced their own reputation in the industry. The CEO wants to boost growth by designing and marketing their own products. This will require the development of new marketing channels. How do you foster channel development?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • What are the initial steps?
    • Hire a commissioned salesperson with deep experience and contacts in in the company’s industry. This individual’s objective will be to seek new business opportunities.
    • Have top management, including the CEO, take a sales course – for example Dale Carnegie Sales Training.
  • What are the company’s objectives as it seeks to grow?
    • To feed the company’s ability to develop, produce, and sell their own proprietary products.
    • To create the capacity for the company to grow without relying on the efforts and success of current customers.
    • To develop pride in building a solid and lasting company that makes important contributions to technology.
    • To increase profitability and company value to benefit owners and shareholders.
  • What can be done right now, as the early steps are put into place?
    • Find ways to include pictures of company’s products in all company collateral – whether the company’s own or products developed and produced for others.
    • This may mean creating a small variation to an easily recognized existing product – without the customer’s logo – so that it becomes clear that the company is the source of these ideas and products without voiding existing agreements with key customers.

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Do You Need a Formal Marketing Function? Four Points

Situation: A small company serves a specialized, targeted group of customers. The founder/CEO seeks advice from the group on whether it is time for the company to create and staff a formal marketing function or can this be outsourced. Do you need a formal marketing function?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • The company services a specialized and targeted group of customers. However, they target the high end of this market, so the target market is smaller.
    • A highly targeted promotional and marketing strategy will work best.
  • There are two principal functions within marketing: providing direction to guide product development efforts and creating awareness of the company’s products through promotions and advertisements.
    • To serve a narrow market, the information and insight gathered from trade shows, technical meetings, the company’s sales and design engineers may be sufficient to drive product development efforts.
    • It may not be necessary to do more than this unless the company is planning for substantial growth and wishes to diversify the product offering in a short period of time.
  • To handle promotions and advertising there are two options: hire an individual to do this or utilize the resources of an outside agency.
    • The marketing plan should be refreshed and updated on a regular basis – at least annually.
    • A good task for the company’s marketing committee is to become aware of local resources that could help.
    • Identify marketing themes to guide advertising in specialty magazines, supported by trade shows, technical conferences, and on-site training session for key customers.
    • Create and maintain a calendar of marketing activities and assure that that messaging is consistent across promotional events.
  • If the strategic plan calls for substantially increasing the revenue base or broadening the product offering, consider a merger with a competitor that already has the ability and resources to meet these needs.
    • Just the planning exercise for a merger will help the company to evaluate the issues involved in market expansion.

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What is Your 3-Year Plan? Six Suggestions

Situation: A founding CEO wants to cut back to 1-2 days per week with someone else overseeing day-to-day operations. Her timeline to accomplish this is 3 years. Currently she splits her time between engineering and sales support, managing operations, overseeing the CFO and managing the company. How do you accomplish this transition? What is your 3-year plan?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Advertise for and hire a General Manager/engineer who can understand the company’s applications and develop unique solutions.
  • Advertise for and hire an understudy for the sales person. This could be someone in their 40s who is experienced, and who can act both as the sales person’s back-up and develop additional accounts to diversify the business.
  • As the company continues to grow it will take more time and effort to manage all the activities. Plan the company’s organization chart and infrastructure to account for this.
    • Be careful not create an infrastructure during good times that is unsustainable during down times.
  • As the new GM gains familiarity with the company, this individual will and should start to take control. This automatically means that the founding CEO will have to agree to release some of her control. Prepare for this.
  • Consider several alternatives for the GM:
    • Super President – $400K.
    • GM with engineering talent – perhaps a consulting or engineering sales background. Hire at $150-200K and develop into the President.
    • Given the 3-year lead time this individual could be a Technical Lead or Project Engineer. The objective will be to develop a very talented person into the GM or President. This alternative opens a larger pool of talent, at lower initial cost.
  • Where are these people found?
    • Trade association contacts.
    • A high-quality engineer that another CEO won’t be hiring over the coming months. Talk to friends and industry contacts.

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How Do You Replace Aging Talent? Four Options

Situation: A CEO is concerned that all her key personnel are over 50. This includes software engineers who are experts in languages which remain at the foundation of many customers’ databases, but which are no longer formally taught. How do you replace aging talent?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Look at which areas potentially limit the company’s growth. Is it technology and software expertise, or marketing and sales? Based on this assessment, rank the critical positions to be filled and start hiring staff who can grow into the most critical positions.
  • Take a cue from the Japanese. For years their aging workforce was predicted to limit the country’s growth. Instead, they chose to retain employees through their 70s and this has helped them to maintain both productivity and employment.
    • Many Baby Boomers are finding that they don’t have the savings to retire and are working well past the historic retirement age.
    • Other Baby Boomers retired but found themselves bored after a productive career and have returned to the labor pool.
    • These factors may delay the company’s need to replace aging talent.
  • The bigger question is what to do if a key player is lost. Focus on hiring back-ups to key personnel and allow several years for them to come up to full speed. Current employment trends suggest that numbers of experienced people are returning to the labor pool. Look for a few good people to add to the team.
  • What are the plans of the company’s key clients? Do they plan to stay with the company’s products and expertise, or to sunset these and replace them with new technology? Adjust operational objectives, as well as the exit strategy, to achieve desired growth given customers’ timeframes.

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How Do You Build Consistency and Reliability as You Scale Up? Three Keys

Interview with Greg Hartwell, CEO and Managing Director, Homecare California, Inc.

Situation: Fast growing companies find it difficult to manage consistency and reliability of service as they scale to their next level of growth. They need to systematize what works and leverage technology to enjoy the benefits of scale. How do you build consistency and reliability as you scale up?

Advice from Greg Hartwell:

  • Invest time and effort to build an experienced management team. As a small company building a new service delivery model, it is helpful for the founders to know all roles so that you have a sense of what’s needed for each role.
    • Be open to hiring people from other industries. This brings a fresh perspective and broadens the pool of talent. There’s value in industry experience, but attitude and cultural fit are key.
    • The split between tactical and strategic skills is 80 / 20. Basic skills are necessary, but specialized knowledge can be learned.
  • Institutionalize how you recruit, screen, hire, train and retain. How do you do it like Disney – attracting and hiring the best of the best?
    • Know your market and the personality of those who will excel. This greatly simplifies the screening process.
    • Work hard on training. Our customer-focus starts with our employees. We complement natural talent with training that focuses on soft skills, and on consistency and reliability of service.
    • Find great advisors who can help build a training and retention system that works for you.
    • Minimize turnover by compensating people well, and treating them even better. Build a culture of recognition and shared experience that emphasizes the importance of the team and its members.
  • Embrace technology which enhances your ability to scale.
    • Don’t wait for something bad to happen and then rush to fix it. Anticipate and prevent mishaps.
    • Leverage communication technologies to tighten the bond between client and provider agency. Provide added services that are valuable and affordable.
    • Hand-held device technology is developing rapidly. Leverage this to increase consistency and reliability of service, enhance case reporting, reduce human error, reduce the ratio of supervisors to caregivers, and increase productivity. Be at the head of your industry class!

You can contact Greg Hartwell at greg@homecarecal.com, www.homecare-california.com

Key Words: Fast, Growth, Consistency, Reliability, System, Technology, Benefit, Management, Requirement, Talent, Recruit, Hire, Train

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Do You Hire for Character or Skills? Four Thoughts

Situation: A small company has a candidate who seems a great fit for their culture and comes with excellent references. However, this candidate has little experience in their industry. They are struggling to assess which is more important – the quality and character of the person or their experience and skill set? What is your opinion – do you hire for character or skills?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Overall, personality, character and values consistent with the firm’s values outweigh skills. However, if the individual needs significant training to attain the skills required for their new role, you must assess the ability of your firm to provide that training. Either that or bring them in at a lower level and let them grow into their eventual role.
  • If the candidate will fill a business development role, put them across the table from you and others, one-on-one, in a sales role play. Can they sell you on hiring them for the position? If the candidate will have to develop their own leads, make selling you on their ability to do this part of the role-play exercise.
  • Open up the search to other possible candidates, and assess the current candidate vs. others who may want the position. See if this individual rises to the top in a competition for the position.
  • Large company experience may not be relevant to the needs of a small firm. Better to find an individual with experience in a firm more similar to your size than with only big company experience.

Key Words: Hire, Candidate, Character, Culture, Skills, Experience, Training, Business Development, Compete, Large, Small

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