Adam Robinson's Blog, page 12

Two Critical Concepts for Entrepreneurs that are Hiring

Companies who can consistently attract and hire the right people generate a meaningful competitive advantage in their market.  Entrepreneurs who seek this advantage must first understand that recruiting is both an art and a science.

In my experience, the reason that companies struggle with attracting and retaining a high-performing team is that they’re usually good at one aspect of recruitment, but not both. The founders of the business may be fantastic with the art of recruiting, but don’t give the science side much credence. The human resources leader might be amazing with the science of recruiting, but struggle to deliver with it comes to the art.

How can companies be good at both the Art and the Science?

The Art

Recruiting is, at its core, a sales process. Your goal as the entrepreneur is to convince someone to leave their existing job for the promise of a better experience with your company.  In this sense, “better experience” could mean any combination of improved compensation, a better culture fit, more generous perks, a more interesting professional challenge or an enhanced career path, among many other factors.

The entrepreneur and the candidate are both working hard to earn the trust of the other person, and the stakes are incredibly high. If the entrepreneur makes the right hiring decision, they’re going to get an immediate lift in the business, and life gets better.  On the downside, a hiring mistake could cost the entrepreneur vital cash flow, disrupt the sales pipeline, hurt customer relationships and, with management misfires, cause an exodus of top talent.

This transfer of trust between you and your preferred candidate is subtle.  Entrepreneurs who excel at the art of recruiting are masters at trust-building during the hiring process. To assess whether or not you are successfully executing the art of recruiting, ask yourself these questions:

Does your employment brand speak to this candidate in a way that inspires them to action?
Do you make it really easy for someone to apply for your open positions?
What is the feeling the candidate gets when they step into your office and interact with you and your team?
Has the candidate had a positive candidate experience throughout the recruiting process?
Have you rallied them to your cause, and explained your vision for the company in a way that creates an intense desire to be a part of something special?

The Science

You may be exceptional at getting candidates excited to join your team, but hiring motivated team members who can’t deliver is not a formula for business success. That’s where the science of recruitment kicks in.

The science of recruiting is not unlike an insurance underwriting process.  Think about it: State Farm doesn’t need to meet you in person to know that if you have a 16-year-old driver in the house, a sports car in the garage and a spouse who’s had five prior accidents that you could cost them a lot of money.  They know that people with that risk profile are exponentially more likely to get into accidents and file insurance claims.

State Farm may bombard you with advertising that inspires you to do business with them (Aaron Rogers, anyone?) but they don’t simply sell a policy to everyone who wants to buy.  They get you excited (the art), but then they run you through an underwriting application that tells them whether or not you’re a fit for their business model (the science).

To determine whether or not you’re executing well on the science side of recruitment, ask yourself these questions:

Does your company have a standardized recruiting process, with defined steps?
Are you defining the specific, measurable outcomes that you want as a result of this person being hired? (i.e. generate $500K in new customer sales)
Are managers using scripted interview guides to ensure consistent measurement of candidate qualifications?
Do your candidates take a pre-hire assessment that measures their fit for that specific job?
Are candidates hired based on an objective, score-based criteria, versus “gut feel?”

The art of recruiting is what brings top talent to your doorstep, wanting to learn more. When you’ve mastered the art of recruiting, you’ll attract candidates who are as much as six times more likely to be a top-performer. The science of recruiting is what you leverage to make the right hiring decision. When you’ve mastered the science of recruiting, you can increase your hiring results by as much as forty percent.

When your company has mastered both the art and science of recruiting, you’ve created an operating advantage that few of your competitors can match.

 

Note: This post originally appeared on Inc.com.

The post Two Critical Concepts for Entrepreneurs that are Hiring appeared first on The Best Team Wins.

Boost Hiring Results by as much as Forty Percent with these Four Questions

As the leader of a high-growth company, you should be spending at least 50 percent of your time on people-related functions like recruiting and hiring; more importantly, it should be spent wisely. That means not rushing into an interview winging it – as a matter of fact, research shows that hiring managers make worse hiring decisions after an interview than if they just hired someone off their resume. If you’re running into interviews without a predetermined line of questioning, you’re actually doing more harm than good.

There are four simple interview questions that uncover whether or not your candidate has a high likelihood of being a top-quartile performer in any professional role, from sales to management to receptionist. Ask these questions in your next interview:

1. “When was the last time you were so frustrated at your job that you wanted to quit?”

Everyone gets frustrated at work. What differs from person to person is how they react and respond to negative events when they happen; this reaction is governed by their natural disposition towards the act of working. Research on workplace attitude indicates a person typically has either a positive or negative disposition towards working–and that individuals with a positive disposition are more likely to be top performers than those who don’t.

Someone with a positive disposition towards work will go out of their way to answer this question using positive language. You’ll hear an answer such as, “While the situation was frustrating, and ultimately led to my decision to look for new employment, I am grateful to that organization for teaching me this business.” Someone with a negative disposition towards work will say things like, “That place is a mess. I can’t wait to leave.” When you hear the negativity fly, pass.

2. “When was the last time you set a challenging professional goal that you failed to achieve?”

It’s okay that someone missed a goal. What’s predictive is whether or not they felt accountable for that outcome. In psychology parlance, accountability is referred to as the locus of control, and research shows that individuals with an internal–versus external–locus of control are overwhelmingly more likely to be top performers in their job.

A job candidate with an internal locus of control will answer this question by saying things like, “I should have done a better job allocating my team so that they were successful.” Someone with an external locus of control will tell you, “They didn’t give me the resources I needed to be successful.”

3. “When you go home at the end of the day, how do you know that you’ve had a good day?”

Individuals who have demonstrated the ability to work in an environment where their performance is actively monitored and measured by their supervisor are more likely to be a top performer in their next job. In short, if you’re being asked to hit a number or critical metric, and are successful hitting that target, you’re more likely to be able to do so for future roles.

Someone who is working in a role where their performance is actively managed will answer this question using a number, or some quantifiable outcome. For example, “At the end of the day, if I was able to set 3 new meetings with new qualified prospects, that was a good day,” is a great answer that demonstrates a clear understanding of the goal. Contrast that with an answer like, “If I set some appointments, I had a good day.” How many appointments? Did anyone care?

4. “What systems or tools do you need in order to be successful doing what we’re asking you to do?”

Less than 50 percent of what makes a person successful in their role has anything to do with their job experience. According to the research, the majority of the factors that lead to success are things like systems, tools and company scale. Does your company offer an environment similar to the one in which they’ve been a top performer?

What makes someone successful at a large organization? Often times it’s the fact that they have technology support, large teams to share the workload and proven defined business processes. In an entrepreneurial organization, success factors are often their ability to act as a utility player, to improvise and to “get sh*t done.” When you take someone from a large company and put them into a smaller one, you’ve removed all of the factors that supported their success. When you put the startup veteran into the large company, the bureaucracy can be frustrating and counterproductive. Understanding whether or not your candidate can be successful in an environment like yours is a critical element in the overall hiring decision.

These four interview questions will lead you to make better, more informed hiring decisions. Use them with confidence.

Note: This post originally appeared on Inc.com.

The post Boost Hiring Results by as much as Forty Percent with these Four Questions appeared first on The Best Team Wins.

No Such Thing as “Growth-Hacking”

I’m not a fan of the term “growth hacking“. The very essence of the phrase suggests there are shortcuts that startups can take that will propel them to wild success without having to figure out the block-and-tackle basics of executing a sales and marketing strategy.

Short-term tactics can put quick wins on the board, but to win your market for the long term you have to have a strategy for acquiring customers that is both scalable and capital efficient. In my experience, the approach with the highest likelihood of success is to grab the mantle of thought leadership and establish your company as the premier authority on the problem that you solve. It takes time, but once you’re there it’s extremely difficult for your competitors to dislodge you from the minds of your prospects.

Executing an effective thought leadership marketing strategy requires 3 three things: focus, exceptional content and face time.

Focus on a niche

The most important factor in determining your success in becoming the thought leader in your market is focus. Becoming the leading authority on cyber security in banking is an exercise in boiling the ocean; becoming the leading authority on mobile application security for community banks and credit unions is absolutely attainable. With the first topic, you’re going to have massive challenges in trying to be heard in a large and highly competitive content market, but with the second topic, you and your early-stage company actually have a fighting chance at establishing a reputation for thought leadership.

At Hireology, the company I founded in 2010, it didn’t take me long to determine that being another voice barking about recruiting and hiring was not going to get us anywhere–there were thousands of competitors out there vying for the same mindshare. Instead, we made the decision to focus all of our effort on solving the very specific problems of a large but untapped niche market. Had we not focused our message on a specific industry segment, I doubt we’d be in business today.

Create exceptional content

You won’t be the thought leader in your target market if you have bad content. Your writing and/or speaking must be clear, concise and valuable, and it must be all three of these things consistently over at least a twelve month period for your thought leadership strategy to take root.

One of the biggest practical benefits of having a refined industry focus is that specificity unlocks access to the network of trade publications that exists in every business vertical. Every one of these trade publications is starved for content that speaks to their readers’ biggest business challenges, and that’s where you come in. Reach out to these publications, and ask them if they’re willing to take vendor-written content. Many will do so if you ask repeatedly over a period of months. Most of your industry publications are for-profit enterprises and have defined pricing for vendors who wish to contribute content.

Be everywhere

For years, I’ve heard CEO/founder peers tell me that trade shows are a waste of time. Their reasoning is that trade shows are both expensive and time-intensive, and both of those statements are true. But compared to what?

If you’re in an industry where your ultimate decision-maker is nearly impossible to get on the phone or in a meeting, you’re already spending a fortune trying to reach them via traditional selling and marketing methods. How much time and money are you spending in an attempt to get one meeting on the books with your decision-maker that turns into a closed opportunity? For most business-to-business companies, it’s in the high-thousands of dollars.

Once again, focus pays huge dividends: there are a finite number of industry conferences in your niche market, and your decision-makers are probably attending them. Pay for the booth, and put your best people there. Show up with printed articles and case studies, and engage with everyone that walks by. Better yet, apply as a breakout speaker at each of these conferences, and revel in the fact that you’re going to get a room full of your decision-makers opting in to hear you speak about solving their biggest challenges. Do this relentlessly, show up to everything, and benefit build your status as a thought leader who’s investing their time in advancing the industry.

Authority-based marketing is a powerful strategy because it’s proven and it’s hard to do well. You can’t “growth hack” being established as the leading authority in your market on the specific problem that you solve, but that’s a good thing. With focus, great content, and presence you can build a marketing asset for your business that will win your market and keep you on top.

 

Note: This post originally appeared on Inc.com.

The post No Such Thing as “Growth-Hacking” appeared first on The Best Team Wins.

Take Your Company’s Career Page to the Next Level

Your company’s “careers” page is among the most valuable digital real estate that you own, but most companies treat this vital recruitment asset as an afterthought.

Your career page is so much more than a listing of your current job openings. It’s your secret weapon in the war for talent, and it should be built with a singular purpose in mind: compel would-be job seekers to apply for one of your open positions.

The reasons to invest in your company’s career page are plentiful. Candidate leads that originate organically from a company’s career page:

Have a cost-per-hire that is seventy percent less than leads generated from a third party job board.
Are sixty percent more likely to be a graded “meets or exceeds expectations” in a performance review than candidates coming from a third party job board.
Experience twelve month turnover of nearly fifty percent less than candidates hired from a third party job board.

If you’re reliant on job boards for all of your candidate traffic, that’s an expensive talent acquisition strategy. A better approach would be to invest in your own employment brand, beginning with a dedicated company career page.

Building one that’s both compelling and engaging is well within your reach, and a successful company career page will always contain these three critical elements:

1. Career Path

“If I come to work for you, what’s in it for me beyond simply getting paid?” That’s the question that today’s job seekers are asking themselves every time they look at a potential employer online, and company Career Page should be laser-focused on answering it.

Fox Motors, a new car and powersports retailer based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, does an exceptional job explaining the WIFM– “What’s in it for me?”–on their Careers Page. (Full disclosure: Fox Motors is a Hireology customer.)

You can’t help but get a sense of what it means to be a member of the team, and the picture they paint of the growth potential is both real and compelling. In an industry that faces reputational challenges when competing for top talent, Fox Motors gets a leg up on their competition by making it about more than a paycheck.

2. Culture

“What’s it like working for you?” Your career page has to tell the story of what it’s like to be a part of the team, beginning with core values and extending to the company’s management philosophy and approach to running the business.

Fred Bateman, founder of Bateman Group, has a company career page that absolutely nails it when it comes to describing the culture. You cannot spend a minute anywhere on Bateman Group’s website and not read or see something about what it’s like to work there. There’s a reason Bateman’s company made Inc.‘s inaugural “50 Best Places to Work” listin 2016.

3. Video

“Show me!” Today’s workforce wants to see and experience your company before they decide whether or not to apply for your open positions. That’s why video is a must-have when it comes to content on your company career page.

When you’re approaching the production of your company’s Career Page video, it’s best to keep it simple. Keep it under three minutes, and make it all about your team by hand-picking your best internal advocates and putting them in front of the camera to tell the story of why they love working for your company. You don’t need a massive budget, either–you can shoot the video on a cell phone and use free video editing apps to produce the entire thing.

The difference between winning or losing in your market likely comes down to the team members whom you’re able to recruit and retain. Your company’s careers page is your best opportunity to speak directly to your target job seeker and make the case why they should consider your company as their first choice.

 

 Note: This post originally appeared on Inc.com.

The post Take Your Company’s Career Page to the Next Level appeared first on The Best Team Wins.

Avoid the Revenue Plateau

As you grow your business, you will find that there are several points in your trajectory when revenue will naturally plateau. The toughest test comes at the $5M annual run rate mark, and it’s at this critical juncture where your growth will stall because you have the wrong leadership team in place.

Most early stage firms are still led by a team of founders and first employees, operating more like a family than a true leadership team. Problem-solving discussions are fueled by emotion, and critical decisions lack an outside perspective.

The good news is that there are early indicators that tell you when your leadership team isn’t scaling with the business. These signals are obvious once you’re paying attention. It’s like what happens when a warning light on your car’s dashboard suddenly blinks on. You can ignore it, but sooner or later that small issue is going to cause major damage.

Here are three signs that you have the wrong leadership team required to break through the $5 million run rate plateau.

Sales efficiency starts to decline

Customer acquisition cost is an important measurement early indicator that your sales leader isn’t keeping up.

When your sales leader begins to miss targets, and their solution is always to add more reps or generate more activity–an approach I like to call “brute force selling”–that’s a sign that you might have the wrong sales leader in place. Brute force selling tactics include things like blindly adding sales headcount and coaching reps to send more emails and/or make more phone calls in an attempt to “make the the number.”

These sales tactics are the tools of an inexperienced sales leader who is in over their head. Increased outbound activity can’t solve problems like poor product-market fit or the wrong pricing model; these problems can only be addressed by thorough analysis and diligent execution, skills that are typically in short supply on a startup’s original leadership team.

When your cost to acquire customers is increasing over two or more quarters, it’s a symptom of larger strategic issues that can’t be solved by simply making more outbound dials.

Internal systems are inadequate

The early warning indicator here is what I call “no source of truth.” Your customer relationship management system doesn’t talk to your email platform, so you can’t track which campaigns produced results.

You store customer engagement data in one system, but your customer success team can’t access it, leaving them to wing it on customer calls. Your sales reps are forced to manually enter their own leads, reducing their productivity and resulting in duplicative data.

Your billing system exists on a digital island, so only your finance team knows whether or not customers have paid their invoices. And so on.

Since no single system is the source of truth, every department in your company arrives at different answers to the same question. As a result, the number of meetings required to run the business explodes because nothing can get done without putting everyone in the same room to compare notes. There’s only so much of that baggage your management team can carry around, and it prevents you from scaling the business beyond $5 million in run rate.

When nobody on your leadership team volunteers to own this problem, you probably have the wrong operations leader in place.

Good people start leaving

The road from zero to $5 million in revenue are the glory days when an “us against the world” mentality permeates the culture of your company. Being a part of a startup that’s crushing its early growth numbers is among the most exciting professional experiences to be had.

There comes a day when the easy sales have all been made when the low-hanging fruit of early adopters have all been harvested. Things get more difficult: You begin losing deals to competitors, and legacy customers start to churn. Frustration at the leadership team level begins to show up for the first time because there are no simple answers and trickles down into the broader organization.

When your best people resign, that’s the third early warning indicator that you have the wrong leadership team in place. Good people don’t leave jobs where they believe in the vision, so when it happens you can be certain that people inside the company are losing faith. Your most promising sales reps leave for greener pastures; a lead engineer leaves for that next startup. Each of these events is your company begging you to take action.

The transition from founding team to professional management is a make-or-break moment for most early-stage ventures and their CEOs. These three early indicators will serve you well as you evaluate whether or not it’s time to make changes to your leadership team so you avoid the $5 million run rate plateau.

 

Note: This post originally appeared on Inc.com.

The post Avoid the Revenue Plateau appeared first on The Best Team Wins.

How CEOs Should Spend Their Time

When you’re the CEO of a rapidly growing company, one that’s growing revenues at 25 percent or more per year, your single biggest challenge is time management. Where do you invest your precious time in order to generate the most possible value for your business? What do you choose to delegate–or ignore entirely?

There are three critical areas of focus for a high-growth CEO: people, strategy, and cash. If the task before you is not directly related to one of these items, there’s a good chance you shouldn’t be spending any time on it.

People (50 percent of your time)

Ideas without execution aren’t worth much. As you navigate the steep trajectory of your growing enterprise, the key to your success–or the cause of your failure–will be your ability to find, hire, and retain the best team possible. I’ve learned the hard way that people are your only real source of sustainable competitive advantage.

Your product will be copied, your service will be copied, but nobody can copy your team. Leveraged properly, they are an unstoppable force for growth and success.

As CEO, you should be spending around 50 percent of your time focused on the people side of your business. You’re out in the market, looking for that next great hire. You’re spending time with your leadership team, coaching them to success.

You’re hyper-vigilant about identifying bad hires and making quick decisions when it’s obvious that you’ve made a hiring mistake. You’re present and available to your company, leading from the front.

You’re responding to feedback on employer review sites, protecting and enhancing your employment brand. You’re monitoring and analyzing critical people metrics.

Strategy (35 percent of your time)

You probably don’t have it all figured out yet. You’re growing the business, but you’re not sure if your go-to-market approach is the right one.

Perhaps your product has found traction, but you have to make critical and difficult choices about what not to build. Maybe your service offering is compelling, but the way that you staff projects presentsmajor risk to the quality of your customer experience. Or, you’ve achieved early success targeting a specific industry vertical but are seeing signs of a looming sales plateau.

In short, you’re still searching for your best business model. CEOs of high-growth companies spend roughly a third of their time thinking about business strategy, making adjustments, taking calculated risks, and communicating these decisions throughout the organization.

You’re providing adequate time for you and your key managers to step back and work on the business. You’re staying close to the details so you know when it’s time to double-down on an idea or kill it outright.

You’re speaking with key industry players and your largest prospects to stay on top of your market. You’re meeting with and listening to your top customers to ensure that the strategy you’ve employed is delivering real value for them.

Cash (15 percent of your time)

A business model in its most basic definition is the process by which a company converts a customer’s pain into cash in the bank. Your customer has a need, they buy your product or service, you deliver it, and you get paid.

It’s simple to explain, but it’s anything but easy to do. And if you’re a venture-backed company, you’re also dealing with the ups and downs of fundraising cycles every eighteen to twenty-four months.

CEOs of high-growth companies forever deal with cash-related challenges; roughly fifteen percent of your time should be spent here. You’re watching customer acquisition costs and sales efficiency metrics. You’re monitoring customer churn.

You’re analyzing your pricing model, your payment terms. You’re watching collections like a hawk. You’re managing your relationship with your bank, your partners, and your investors.

These three critical areas of your business–people, strategy, and cash–are the secrets to your success as the CEO of a high-growth company. And like you, I’m still learning–so let’s tackle this together.

 

Note: This post originally appeared on Inc.com.

The post How CEOs Should Spend Their Time appeared first on The Best Team Wins.

The Ten-Year Journey: an Interview with Omowale Casselle, CEO and Founder of Digital Adventures

Omowale Casselle is the Founder and CEO of Digital Adventures and before starting his company he was the founder and director of SAMPLEit, a subsidiary of Redbox, and a product leader at Ford Motor Company. Omowale shares his experience in building companies and teams for the long-haul, how he makes his core values and company vision real for his employees, and more on this episode of The Best Team Wins Podcast.

 

Follow Digital Adventures on Facebook, Yelp, and Youtube.

Connect with Omowale on Linkedin and Twitter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Transcripts:

Adam Robinson:
Welcome to The Best Team Wins Podcast, where we feature entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, and for the next 25 minutes I’ll be your host as we explore how to build your business through better hiring. Today on the show, Omowale Casselle is the co-founder of Digital Adventures, with locations in Willamette, Illinois and the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago, with big plans to expand to additional locations. Digital Adventures was founded in 2015 and is a profitable bootstrap business.

 



Prior to Digital Adventures, Omowale was building and managing teams as co-founder and director of SAMPLEit, a subsidiary of Redbox. Omowale, we are so happy to have you on the program today.

 


Omowale Casselle:
It’s good to be here, Adam. Thanks for having me on.

 


Adam Robinson:
We’re here to talk about the people side of your business, but before we do that, let’s set the stage. Give us 30 seconds on Digital Adventures.

 


Omowale Casselle:
Sure. Sure. Digital Adventures, essentially we’re an early stage education technology company that’s focused on unlocking the creative problem solver within kids through a series of coding classes and tech camps. We’ve got state of the art learning studios where we prioritize learning by doing. We’ve got a great group of instructors that teaches kids how to construct robots, model structures in 3D, build mobile applications and websites, create virtual reality worlds, design video games, [inaudible 00:01:39], and make movies. Essentially, how do we get the next generation of kids to have the skills they need to make an impact in our digitally-driven world?

 


Adam Robinson:
Very cool. If listeners want to learn more, what’s the best way they can do that?

 


Omowale Casselle:
Well, the easiest thing would be they can either come by and visit us at one of our learning studios. We’ve got one, like you mentioned, in Lincoln Park, at 701 West Armitage. We’ve also got one up on the North Shore, at 406 Linden Avenue in Willamette. They can also check us out online at www.DigitalAdventures.com, or they can take a look at our reviews on either Facebook or Yelp.

 


Adam Robinson:
Okay. Let’s talk about the people side of Digital Adventures. You’ve got a couple of locations now. I can imagine your experience working for a fast-growing subsidiary of Redbox, that’s the DVD kiosks, informed your approach to team building. When you started the business, philosophically, what did you expect as far as building the early organization, based on what you had done previously?

 


Omowale Casselle:
Well, I think I’ve been very fortunate in my career that I got some early experiences hiring both at Ford and Redbox, so going out on my own and being separate from a larger corporate entity, I think that’s something that I was really interested in kind of understanding or hiring for, is people who could be creative about developing solutions from the ground up without a ton of guidance or understanding on what the entire box, or what the endpoint looked like. Something that we tried to really get to is that, “Is there creativity when someone is developing a solution?” And, “Do they have any experience in maybe jumping into a more ambiguous situation?” Those are some of the things that we initially thought through when we tried to identify that first few employees.

 


Adam Robinson:
Tell us the story. How did you hire your first full-time official employee?

 


Omowale Casselle:
Essentially, we opened our first studio in April of ’15, and so we actually incorporated the company in July of 2014. Between that period in July and starting the first studio in the spring of ’15, we basically had to find someone who understood education, understood technology, understood kids, and so what we did is we looked out at a lot of different things. We did a lot of searches on several social media sites. LinkedIn, and some job boards and things like that. What we were really looking for is someone who had done it before, but hadn’t been so far along the path where they felt like they knew it all or they felt like they really couldn’t do anything additional.

 



The first one we found was a fellow named Jim, who had worked at another camp, a coding camp that was primarily delivered their programming during the summer. What he really demonstrated to us is that he could take kind of the loose idea, he bought into the vision of what we were trying to do, and we just had him essentially develop a series of lessons that said, “Hey, we’re trying to teach kids how to code. We want it to be fun. We want it to be educational. We want to make sure they enjoy it. Take those kind of very loose and vague guideposts, and develop a couple lessons based on how you think we would accomplish that.” We were just blown away by the quality of the lessons that he developed, and then I did some beta testing on my kids with him. Had him kind of go through and take them through it, and they just loved it. We were very, very fortunate to find Jim, and he’s still with us today, leading the North Shore studio.

 


Adam Robinson:
Oh, that’s fantastic. What’s it like getting the kids involved in testing the product? In a way, they’re part-time QA testers for you. How does that work?

 


Omowale Casselle:
I think it’s really cool. I mean, they’re kind of one of the big reasons why Digital Adventures was started. I studied engineering at the undergraduate and graduate level, and what I was finding is that my kids, as they were coming home, they were getting iPads from schools. They were playing on mommy and daddy’s iPhone at home, but what I was just struggling with is it didn’t feel like they really knew the background, or had an understanding of how you actually build stuff using technology.

 



The very, very first lesson was actually done by me at the dining room table toward the holiday period in 2014, where I just took them through something really basic to see how they might take to it, and as it’s continued to evolve and grow, Digital Adventures is one of the favorite places that the kids like to go, either for classes or camps. It’s kind of cool. Based on the evolution, we’ve hired additional instructors. Since then, we’ve brought on new platforms, whether it be robotics or virtual reality headsets, and just seeing how they are able to take through things that I think that at older ages, and people who are a little more set in their ways, might struggle with. They’re able to pick things up so quickly, and that’s something that makes me very, very proud as a company owner.

 


Adam Robinson:
Yeah. I can imagine. Talk about your leadership team. Who’s around the table with you as you grow and scale the business?

 


Omowale Casselle:
Yeah. Essentially it’s two folks. It’s Jim, like I mentioned. He’s in charge of the curriculum and instruction, and then my other partner is Arjun, who really heads up the technology and the product portion of things. What he does is, basically Arjun tries to make things that are a lot easier online. One of the guideposts that we have is that as a company that’s focused on technology, and specifically the education of technology, we want to make sure that our website actually looks like people who know what they’re doing from a coding standpoint. I give him a very hard time in terms of the feature set and the functionality of the website, and then the backend processes that really make things more sticky for our customer base.

 



It’s been a great, great mix of folks. From my side, I focus more on the business aspects of things. We’ve got Arjun focused on the technology and product, and then Jim focused on the curriculum and instruction. With those three, kind of that trifecta, or the Three Stooges, whatever you want to call us, I think that we’ve been able to make some great, great progress in trying to develop a great solution for the marketplace, for both the parents and the students.

 


Adam Robinson:
Sounds like the team is really working well together, and I’m sure that has everything to do with the success that you’ve had. What quality do you think is the most important quality when a founder is looking for a leader? Where a founder is looking to bring someone on to help lead the organization? Both from your experience at Digital Adventures, as well as prior experience. What’s the one most important thing you would say you look for?

 


Omowale Casselle:
I’d say probably the thing I try to understand or dive into most is empathy. I think that when you’re developing a solution, whether it be at Ford Motor Company or at Redbox, or now at Digital Adventures, you really have to be able to understand customers at a deep level, and then use that knowledge and insight to develop a solution that exceeds their expectations. What I really try to get at during the interview process, or during the discussions that we have when we’re discussing bringing on new team members is, “How good are they at understanding others? How good are they at understanding someone else’s perspective?” Because it’s very easy to say, “Oh, I know how I think about things, and I know how I would approach it.” But can you take on how someone else thinks about it? Then can you kind of massage that and develop that into a solution that the customer is going to be very, very excited about? I’d say empathy is number one in my mind.

 


Adam Robinson:
Is there a particular approach you take to ensuring your screening for empathy in the hiring process?

 


Omowale Casselle:
Yeah. I think it’s a lot that goes into the questions, right? There are things that you can dive into when you’re having discussions around people’s resumes, and kind of their stories. One of the things that I like to focus in on from an empathy perspective is that if someone’s ever failed at something in their career, whether it be a startup that went south, or maybe they didn’t accomplish as much as they thought they were going to accomplish at a larger corporation, what I really try to get into is, “Yes, failure. Sometimes that’s unavoidable, but what did you actually learn from it? What are the things that you were able to take away?” Because that to me suggests that you’re able to kind of get outside of yourself and find something that was at a level that maybe you didn’t understand when you were going through it in the trenches, but now that you’ve come out on the other side, you’re able to say, “Hey, you know what? We didn’t quite get that right, and here’s what I would have done differently.”

 



That’s something that I really try to get to is, A, “Did you understand the problem, or did you understand where you fell short?” And then, “What would you have done differently? And tell me why you think that would have led to a different outcome.”

 


Adam Robinson:
Learning from prior mistakes is, you think, something … At least for your hiring process, failures in the past are desirable experiences for folks to have in your estimation, if they’ve learned from them.

 


Omowale Casselle:
Absolutely. I think success is one of the poorest teachers out there, right? If you’ve gone through … There can be so many things that could be reasons why people have been successful, right? If someone happened to join the right company at the right time, or if someone had a great manager that happened to find favor with them. There’s so many reasons why you could have been successful that was outside of your control. Similarly, not to say that failure is always the ultimate responsibility. I think moreso it’s, “Do you actually understand that whole situation and all those externalities that were included?” And then, “What would you have done differently?”

 



I think that that’s the key to it, because I think that failure is somewhat unavoidable, but within that process, if you can kind of get a good sense of what went on and what you would do differently, I think that those are people that are showing a level of intellectual maturity and empathy that I think is very valuable, given the rollercoaster ride of most startups.

 


Adam Robinson:
Let’s talk, then, about how you provide coaching and critical feedback to the people in your organization. When someone’s not getting the job done to expectation, or perhaps they’ve missed the mark due to a misunderstanding, how do you approach those situations?

 


Omowale Casselle:
I think the first thing is that philosophically, we have in our mind that if someone’s not meeting expectations, and it initially goes back to the leadership team, right? My thought is that whatever you thought was true about someone in the interview, and in that overall hiring process, is still true. What did you initially do to maybe not onboard correctly, or was there some misunderstanding of expectations? Or things like that. Once we’ve taken that internal hard look at ourselves and really understood if there was some deficiency that we might have enabled or allowed for that poor performance, then I think it’s being very honest and direct to say, “Hey, you know what? These are certain expectations that we have around performance. You’re currently not meeting them. Here’s a couple suggestions that we would love you to take on.” Right?

 



Because when you think about our environment, we basically function on a monthly subscription, so people come to classes or they come to camps, and if they’re not happy, they can basically stop in a subsequent month. Without the retention and the growing of the customer base by keeping the customers happy, that’s something that can be very, very harmful to the business. What we’ll usually do is we’ll give people the opportunity to listen to that coaching, listen to that feedback, and then see if they improve upon it, and then if there’s continued degradation or lack of improvement, at that point you make that difficult decision to say, “We can’t move forward with you.” Those are some of the hardest things that you can ever make as a leadership team or as a company overall, is to say, “Hey, you know what? This just isn’t going to work out. The fit’s not quite there.” We don’t take those decisions lightly. Like I said, we try to start with, “Is there something that we did wrong?” And then we try to provide that coaching and feedback, and still if that gap continues to be maintained, then we end up parting ways.

 


Adam Robinson:
Other side of the coin, then. How do you reward folks for great performance?

 


Omowale Casselle:
I think that there’s many things, right? The team is, overall, they’re incentivized primarily through both a base, a bonus, and an equity component for their compensation, so in the short-term, there’s the base, which kind of pays the bills, keeps the light on. Then there’s bonuses that are associated with how the company grows and how the company performs from a monthly active user standpoint. It’s something that’s very important to us, is, “How many kids are coming to the studio on a monthly basis? How many kids are being retained?” And then kind of the longer pull is the equity piece of the thing, right? What I’ve told people is that we’re going to go on a 10-year journey here. “If you give me 10 years, I promise you that we’re going to build something pretty meaningful by the end of this.”

 



People are incentivized in those three ways. In the near-term, needs are met. Over the medium term, you get that bonus component that incentivizes you to make sure the company is doing well with those medium-term goals, and then the long-term goal is that if we build a company that has lots of customers that are very happy, then we’re all rewarded by that. From a compensation standpoint, that’s how we think about it, but I think that in-between those times is where I think that you can make a lot of difference as well, is just reaching out to people and telling them, “Hey, you know what? I think you’re doing a great job. I think that the lessons that you’re creating, or the way you’re able to connect with some of the difficult students is really impressive. I want to see more of that.”

 



Or if we’re going through a website design and we’ve got a pretty tight timeline, and we’re able to make the coding magic happen and get something very impressive out, I think that having those conversations and really letting people know that they’re appreciated and they’re making an impact on the company I think is very, very important, because sometimes those conversations can be almost absent of or independent of the other compensation pieces.

 


Adam Robinson:
You talk about the equity component in this 10-year journey, and I love that framing when you’re recruiting people for the long run. What are you expecting of them on a daily basis that helps focus them on that 10-year journey? I know you’ve got to get done today what needs to get done today, then there’s this vision for the future. Talk about how you manage expectations from all the things that need to get done today, through to maintaining focus on what’s out there to keep people motivated.

 


Omowale Casselle:
I think first and foremost, it starts with the customer journey, and that development of, “Are we really developing a solution that the customer is really interested in?” I think that beyond the customer journey, 10 years is a very long time, right? But I think that it’s a short period of time when you think about how companies have evolved over prior decades and generations. When you think about a Marshall Fields or a Sears-Roebuck, people used to put their names on buildings because they knew they were going to be around for the long haul. If now you look at the dynamic within corporations and companies in general, companies used to exist for, call it 60 years, and a recent study came out that says we’re not at 20 years. Even 10 years in my mind is a pretty short period of time, but I think that something that we try to do is we say that the 10 years allows us to not take shortcuts when we’re trying to figure out the model.

 



I think that sometimes if you’re looking for an early liquidity event, call it one, three, five years, you’re looking for an exit. There’s some things that you can do to kind of generate exponential growth and do things that might not be the long-term best thing for the company, and so I think that by having that focus further out, and saying, “Are we always looking through this from the lens of ‘Is this the right thing for the customer? Is this something that we’re going to be proud of if we put this into the marketplace? Is this something that we’re taking a short-term benefit versus a long-term gain?'” Those are all lenses that we are constantly looking at and looking through.

 



I think that that’s where the initial longer term framing came from, is that you can get people who say they want to do a startup and say they want to get involved in the early stage building, but there’s very few people who when you say 10 years, that the roller coaster … And we try to be very, very clear on what a startup is like. “It’s the hardest job you’re ever going to do, and there’s going to be ways that you push and you challenge yourselves that you didn’t even think was possible.” That longer-term framing, and then collapsing it back to the daily decisions through the lens of the customer, I think has been most helpful for helping us work through that.

 


Adam Robinson:
Have you developed core values for Digital Adventures?

 


Omowale Casselle:
Absolutely. Absolutely.

 


Adam Robinson:
Take us through those, if you would.

 


Omowale Casselle:
There’s a couple things, right? What our number one goal is, is that we’re trying to exceed the expectations of our clients. We think about those as both the students and the parents, and we think that there’s a couple ways that we actually accomplish that. It’s through innovation, right? The education technology landscape is ever-changing, and so it’s never acceptable for us to sit back and think that our solution is going to continue to meet the needs of our students. What we try to focus on from an innovation standpoint is constantly investing in developing new solutions that we can incorporate into the platform to meet the changing needs of the industry.

 



The second one is creativity, right? There’s many ways to solve problems, and our goal is for our coding classes and technology camps to be creative while also developing the problem solving skills all students need for tomorrow. In our mind, our students are unique, and we plan to always utilize creative approaches when we think about, “How do we differentiate instruction?” And, “How do we maximize our individual potential?”

 



Third thing is ownership. The success of our students is directly connected to the ongoing success of our company, right? We’re just as committed to helping our students be successful in life as we are to helping them through overall coding projects, so we basically task our instructors with working closely with students to figure out what type of projects they’re going to enjoy working on, what areas they continue to strengthen and develop their expertise, so that over the long-term these are going to be students that are able to really make their mark on the world.

 



Results. We think a lot, a lot about results. We think that if our students aren’t developing their computational skills, their engineering logic, and their ability to solve problems, then we’ve failed. What we do is, we focus a lot on keeping track of progress. Not necessarily through a traditional grading progress process, like a school, but really through capability assessments, and really saying, “Can you work within a set of boundary conditions to accomplish a given outcome?”

 



Then the final thing is really accountability. In a relationship, there’s always this opportunity or potential for misunderstanding, miscommunication, or disappointment. Anytime a customer feels like we’ve let them down, we always ask them, “Is there anything that we can do to make it right?” In our mind, there’s literally nothing worse than a customer who is unsatisfied, and so oftentimes they give us a chance to make it right, and we basically say their success is our success, and if you look at our reviews, we’ve got fantastic reviews across Facebook, Yelp, and at the five-star level, which is something that we’re very, very proud of, given the number of kids that have walked through our doors over the past two-and-a-half, three years.

 


Adam Robinson:
That’s fantastic. To bring this home here for our listeners, what are some ways you make those values real or reinforced in the workplace to make them authentic in the lives of the people who work for you?

 


Omowale Casselle:
I think it’s really about the lenses, right? I think it’s really about, when we’re coming to key decision points, are we [inaudible 00:23:05], for example, from an accountability standpoint. We have a $19 trial that we offer, so that if people aren’t quite sure about our platform, they can do a $19 trial. Sometimes we’ll reach out and basically say, “How was your experience during that trial? Did it go well? Did your child enjoy it? How did we do?” Sometimes parents will come back and say, “You know what? It wasn’t right. You guys fell short for whatever reason.” We’ll instantly refund that. Those are real costs that we’ve incurred, but the much greater cost is that we haven’t done a good job at actually delivering on what we said we were going to do, which is offering an amazing experience within our studio.

 



Not only do we refund it, we’ll invite them back and say, “You know what? We heard your feedback. We heard your concerns. We want another chance. Give us a chance to make it right.” Oftentimes we find that we’re able to more than win back the folks that weren’t quite happy with what we initially delivered. I think that that’s the way you make it real. When people see that, from an employee standpoint, that we’re willing to refund trials and basically give a double benefit for our customers, I think it’s very hard to say that they don’t have individual accountability.

 



From an innovation standpoint, we have monthly brainstorming sessions where we try to go through and say, “What are the ways that we can improve on our product for the customers? What are things that we haven’t even thought of? Things that are not right in front of us, but are maybe three or five years out, that we can start to back-solve for?” I think that making it real by talking about it on a daily basis and actually putting it into play really helps make those values real for our employees.

 


Adam Robinson:
Outstanding. Final minute here. What book is on your nightstand right now, and would you recommend it to our audience?

 


Omowale Casselle:
Yeah. Something that I’ve recently dusted off was How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. I think that I certainly recommend it. I’ve read the book many times myself. I think it’s just such an important book on figuring out how to get outside of yourself and really demonstrating empathy for others through a series of things that really shows … A series of his anecdotes and stories that shows that it’s not always about you. Sometimes it’s super, super helpful to take on someone else’s perspective and not to be so critical and judgmental. Definitely recommend it. How to Win Friends and Influence People.

 


Adam Robinson:
Fantastic. Fantastic book. For me as well, one of those early reads in my career someone handed to me and said, “This is really most of what you need to know to be successful in business and life.” They were right, and that’s such an outstanding classic that holds to this day.

 



If you were to come back on this show a year from now, and report to us whether or not you successfully tackled the single biggest opportunity in front of you in the business, what will you be telling us happened?

 


Omowale Casselle:
I think I’d be talking about that we’ve successfully figured out how to develop the next generation of student talent, as well as the next generation of instructor talent. When you think about coding, and programming, and digital solution development, a lot of this stuff people didn’t necessarily see as they were coming up, which is what we’re trying to solve for. On the one hand, we’re developing a series of projects, hardware and software projects for kids, but we’re also developing a group of instructors that’s able to deliver this next generation of education in a way that kids really enjoy, in kind of this really state-of-the-art environment in our learning studios.

 



It really requires, I think, a lot, a lot of both intellectual horsepower and stamina. We’re open six days a week now. We run a very, very heavy load during the summers, and winter breaks, and holidays, because at the end of the day, we’re a retail-based business. Figuring out how to take the educational aspects, incorporate the retail, and then develop that next generation of instructor that can actually deliver it, if we’re able to solve for that, I think that that’s the current limiting factor to our growth, and we’re really excited to figure out how to get on the other side of that.

 


Adam Robinson:
That’s the final word. You’ve been learning from Omowale Casselle, co-founder at Digital Adventures, based in Chicago, Illinois. Thank you so much for being with us on the program today.

 


Omowale Casselle:
Absolutely, Adam. Really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.

 


Adam Robinson:
That’s a wrap for this week’s episode of The Best Team Wins Podcast, where we’re featuring entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, and I wanted to thank you for joining. Check out the book The Best Team Wins, www.TheBestTeamWins.com, available in all formats and through Amazon. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week.

 

The post The Ten-Year Journey: an Interview with Omowale Casselle, CEO and Founder of Digital Adventures appeared first on The Best Team Wins.

How to Give Feedback and Have Difficult Conversations

Giving feedback to employees is critical to their success and, quite frankly, your business’ success. Especially now that Millennials have made it clear that coaching, feedback, and personal growth are an integral part of their desired employment experience, companies must get better at giving feedback–positive as well as negative.

This is one of the top issues facing managers today: how do I give feedback to someone who isn’t meeting my expectations? What does that conversation sound like? How do I help my employees get better?

We’ve gathered some great advice from top entrepreneurs and business leaders on how to have difficult conversations and give positive and negative feedback in a quick, sixteen-minute episode.

            

 

You can also listen to this episode of The Best Team Wins Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Can’t find it on your preferred site? Let us know.

 

The post How to Give Feedback and Have Difficult Conversations appeared first on The Best Team Wins.

When You Do Good Things, Good Things Happen

Before Facebook and Twitter, there was Arkadium. CEO Jessica Rovello and her husband started Arkadium in 2001 as a gaming platform and have grown their business to 100 employees who provide interactive content for top-tier clients. Arkadium is committed to work/life balance for all of their employees and it shows through the way they’ve chosen to run their business– it’s even one of their core values. On this episode of The Best Team Wins Podcast, Jessica shares her experience in building and growing her team at Arkadium and how things have changed over the last fifteen years.

 

 

Listen to this episode on:

                    

iTunes                   Google Play              Soundcloud           Stitcher

 

 

Follow Arkadium: Twitter | Facebook | Linkedin

Connect with Jessica: Twitter | Linkedin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Transcripts:

Adam Robinson:
Welcome to the The Best Team Wins podcast, where we feature entrepreneurs and business leaders whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name’s Adam Robinson, and for the next 25 minutes, I’ll be your host as we explore how to build your business through better hiring. Today on the program, Jessica Rovello is co-founder and CEO of Arkadium, a firm she founded in 2001. Arkadium is a 100 employee company based in New York City and has been named a top 50 Best Place to Work by Inc. Magazine. Jessica herself has been named a 40 Under 40 by Crain’s New York among many other accolades. Jessica, thank you so much for being on the program. We’re really excited to learn through your experiences today. Welcome to the show.

 


Jessica Rovello:
Thanks so much. I’m excited to be here, and I love talking about people and culture so especially excited for that.

 


Adam Robinson:
Well, we’re here today to focus on exactly that. Before we dive into the people side of Arkadium, set the stage for us. Give us the 30-second pitch on who you are and what you do.

 


Jessica Rovello:
Sure. Arkadium creates visual interactive content for over 500 of the world’s leading publishers. Basically what the means in practice is that we work with companies like the Washington Post, LA Times and CNN, and create interactive content that tries to keep people on their websites for as long as possible. Traditionally, we were in the gaming space, the casual gaming space, so you may know us as the company that created the crossword puzzle that you play every day. We also created the Solitaire that comes shipped on every Windows operating system sold around the world-

 


Adam Robinson:
You’re kidding me.

 


Jessica Rovello:
Yeah, so responsible for a lot of people’s wasted time at the office. We like to think of it as stress relief.

 


Adam Robinson:
Every time I’m on a flight, I will think of you for the rest of my life.

 


Jessica Rovello:
Good to know. Then, we recently started branching into more data-driven interactive visualizations that can work on essentially any of our publishing partner’s article pages.

 


Adam Robinson:
Amazing. If listener’s want to learn more about your business, what’s the best way for them to do that?

 


Jessica Rovello:
They can simply go to our website, Arkadium.Com, and there’s lots of great information there.

 


Adam Robinson:
All right, very good. Let’s talk about the people side of your business. Take us back to 2001 and the founding of the company, and the moment it got beyond just you and, I believe, your husband as your co-founder, when that first employee came on board. What was the moment where you thought “Okay, this could be something. It’s time to go hire somebody.”?

 


Jessica Rovello:
That’s a great question. You know, when we started our business, we always believed it would become bigger than just the two of us. I mean, that was corridor belief system in starting the company, and I think as an entrepreneur, when you’re starting something, you have to have that belief in your model, in yourself, in the potential for the future because there’s just too many obstacles that if you don’t have that dogged belief, you’re doomed. Even thought it was just us at the beginning, we always knew that we would be bigger. Our first two employees, actually, we didn’t pay. I don’t know how we got away with that at this point. We were not being paid ourselves. It was the year 2001, the tech bubble had burst and there was not capital to be had, so we were essentially as 25 year olds funding the company from our own bank accounts, which was not really anything.

 



The first two employees we had, one of them had worked with us at a prior organization. He was a great designer. He’s still with us to this day, and I think we just sold a great dream and he was willing to take the chance and come onboard. Our second “employee”, also still with us, now a VP and on the management team at our company.

 


Adam Robinson:
I assume they’re getting paid now?

 


Jessica Rovello:
They do get paid now. They do get paid now.

 


Adam Robinson:
What a deal.

 


Jessica Rovello:
Yeah, we’re not that dynamic. The second, it was his first job. He had just graduated from Princeton, and he really wanted to break into the gaming industry so we said listen, we can give you a metro card, which allows you to ride the subway and maybe we’ll pay for your lunch every once in a while. Thankfully, we did things the right way and he stayed on and now is doing phenomenally well. Yeah, those were our first two. It took us about three years before we could start paying ourselves, and I think we started paying our employees before we could pay ourselves but it was a long time before we could draw a salary.

 


Adam Robinson:
How did you convince someone … Clearly, you found the right two people … How did you convince them that hey, I have this great idea. You can come work for us for free for an unspecified amount of time and we’re going to go change the world?

 


Jessica Rovello:
I think that, for some people, they’re attracted to infectious enthusiasm and energy and we definitely … We didn’t have any money, but we had that in spades. It’s funny looking back on it because it is fairly standard, I think, these days for people to start businesses and get a seed round, or get a Series A, or have an equity structure and all of these things in place whereby they can attract employees, even if they are just starting out. Back in 2001, it was before Google. It was before Facebook. It was before what we now know of as startup culture. It was a little more freewheeling I would say, and there was no playbook in the same way that there is now. I think they understood that we were insanely driven, that we were going to find a way to make this happen and thankfully, they took the plunge. I still thank them most days for it.

 


Adam Robinson:
That’s great. The rest is history. Let’s look at now. 100 employee business, that’s real scale. You’ve got people cycling through now. What informs your hiring process today?

 


Jessica Rovello:
You know what? Can we pause just for a second? I have somebody talking really loudly outside my office and I just want to tell them to keep it down.

 


Adam Robinson:
Of course.

 


Jessica Rovello:
Okay, thanks. Hey guys. I’m on a podcast [inaudible 00:07:13]. Okay, I’m back.

 


Adam Robinson:
I wouldn’t be surprised if that happens on my end, too, so we’re all good. All right, we’ll go again. 3, 2, 1. 100 employee business today, that’s real scale. You’ve got people cycling through the business now, and you got to have some kind of systems and process for picking the right people. How is your hiring decision informed today versus what you did when things were early?

 


Jessica Rovello:
Yeah, yeah. Totally different. I think this is one of the benefits for being in business as long as we have, and making mistakes along the way. I would say early on, a lot of my hiring decisions were guided by gut instinct, and I don’t want to play that down because it actually is still part of my method when I hire people. I would say I just rely on it a whole lot less. We employ a couple different things. First and foremost, for every position we have, we create what we call a scorecard, which not only lays out the competencies that you need to be able to succeed in that role, but also best case scenario expectations of what success looks like in that role over the course of a year or more. With that scorecard in hand, it becomes really quite easy for us to create and craft an interview around finding out if a person is the right fit for a role.

 



It’s very easy to tell if someone doesn’t have the competencies you need, or hasn’t had the outcomes that you need to be able to succeed in a role, so a lot of what we do gets based off the scorecard. We also, as much as we want to be agile, and quick, and nimble, we do try to follow a process, and that process generally involves a phone screen, an in-person, a panel interview with peers that you might be working with and in some cases, a final assignment or task depending on the scope and level of the role. Then, we also just recently started introducing a behavioral test, a two minute behavioral test, that’s become part of our process.

 


Adam Robinson:
Tell me about the motivation to add the testing? I’m a big believer in it, and certainly the research and science of hiring shows that the right test can be hugely impactful in predicting success, so talk about with our listeners how you came to make that choice and how you’ve implemented it.

 


Jessica Rovello:
We’re also trying to, especially having our roots in gaming, agile development is part and parcel for what we do as our postmortem’s. We’re constantly trying to improve every process that we have, and being a very people-focused company, that often involves a lot of our people-centric processes. Interviewing and onboarding being a huge part of it. I think I read a statistic at some point that said that even if you’ve done literally thousands of interviews in your life as an employer, that statistics show that still 25% of the time you’re going to get it wrong because there are people who are just great interviews, or you think you’re asking the right questions but you’re not. The desire for the behavioral test really came from two places. One was even if we can shave a percentage point off of that getting it wrong, it saves the company undue amounts of stress, right? Anytime you have to replace an employee, it is extremely difficult, not only for the employee but for the business. Especially a business, again, that tries to be as people focused as we are.

 



It’s always a difficult thing to handle if you have a tight knit culture. It’s difficult on the culture. It’s difficult on your bank account because you have to fill a role, and you have down time. Again, the point of adding the behavioral testing was just so that if we can, again, shave one to two percentage points off of the success rate, then we’re doing a better job. That’s one. Number two, our company culture is really founded on our three primary values as a company. Our values are fierce drive, positive energy and living a full life. We found that with some really quick and easy testing, those are things that you can find markers for. Sometimes, somebody can do the job but they’re not necessarily going to be a culture fit. For us, culture fit is not “Do they like to play the same things that I do? Do they live in the same neighborhood that I do? Do I want to go out for a beer with them?” It’s really more “Do they genuinely believe in the same value system that we do as an organization? Do they really value work-life balance?”

 



For us, it’s not a judgment. It’s just that if you’re going to work here versus working at a place that you’re working at because it’s going to go public potentially and you want to get rich, those are two very different choices, right? Those are two different values, and it’s not how we’ve built our business. We’re looking for people who do value wanting to work really hard and really smart, but not have it dominate every aspect of their life. That’s just another way we can suss that out in the interview process.

 


Adam Robinson:
At what point in your history did you develop these three core values? I love how authentic, and real, and tangible those things are. It’s easy to describe. They’re very well defined. When did you do that?

 


Jessica Rovello:
You know, like everything in the business, that was definitely an evolution. I would say that we always functioned around those values. In terms of when we articulated them, I would say probably six, seven years ago. We’ve had them for a while now.

 


Adam Robinson:
What’s been the impact, then, in terms of day-to-day operating the business of having those defined and published internally?

 


Jessica Rovello:
Oh, it is a game changer. When I talk to entrepreneurs about the things that they may not be paying attention to that could be hugely impactful to their business, this is one of the things that I always go back to. To have those central values, it aligns not only all the people in your company around what you stand for, but it really helps clarify in the decision making process if you should go one way or another. I find that to be incredibly helpful. Everything from making a budgetary decision to a decision about an employee, it always goes back to the values. You’d be amazed when you put the lens of those values on things, how much more easily and more comfortably you can make a decision and live with the decision.

 


Adam Robinson:
Let’s talk for a second then about the leadership of the organization. It sounds like the core values are set, you’re living them, they’re authentic, that informs hiring decisions at the line level. Talk about your leadership team. When it comes to the people side of the business, what do you think you’re great at, and where do you think there’s room for improvement?

 


Jessica Rovello:
The leadership team, I would say, is very strong in that we’re incredibly aligned. We have a very solid mission. We have a very solid vision for the next three to five years as an organization. We’re all growing in the same direction, and that is really truly what you want most from your leadership team. You want that alignment. You want that transparency, accountability and collaboration with your team. We’ve worked very, very hard to achieve that and I think that we have. One of the things that we’re constantly trying to get better at, and I think even the best performing organizations always have room to get better at, is candid feedback and transparency. That’s just something we’re constantly trying to hone more and more and more. Our entire staff knows what our revenues are every single quarter. We’re about to rollout dashboards for complete transparency into all of our finances. Every single individual in the company can see what any other individual in the company is working on and what their goals are on a quarterly basis.

 



They can recognize them, if they’re doing a great job, through software tools that we use. Then, on the performance management side, that’s something that we’ve really started to hone more and more over the last year and really turned on its head. Much of it revolves around feedback and candor, both from managers to employees, and then back from employees back to management. Even so, I think that’s something that just takes constant cultivation, reminding, training, because it’s not a normal, natural thing for most people. It’s not a normal and natural thing for most people, who either have a professional history or don’t, to want to criticize or give candid feedback to their boss or to the company. What we found is if you’re not trying to constantly trying to cultivate that, then what happens is that feedbacks happening anyway. You’re just not hearing it. It’s being said behind your back, and then you’re in for a big surprise.

 


Adam Robinson:
Let’s stay on that topic of feedback. What’s your philosophy, then, on delivering feedback or coaching when the jobs just not getting done?

 


Jessica Rovello:
Yeah. We try to center all of our conversations, and I guess our ethos around people, really in, I would say, care for the individual, without sounding too cheesy. What I mean by that is if you really truly care for someone as a human being, and you ultimately want what’s best for them, then you really start to see feedback … Critical feedback and positive feedback … as a component to which you are caring for them, right? If they are screwing something up, and you are not being honest with them about it, then you’re really not caring for the outcomes that are going to happen to them as a result. The way we try to approach things is one, we train people to provide feedback on the spot, or as quickly as possible, when they see something happening. Again, this goes for both critical feedback and positive feedback. Positive feedback is, by far, the one that’s the most powerful, I find, because it encourages people to repeat great behaviors, but it’s something that people always forget to do.

 



I tell people if you see somebody running a great meeting, say “Hey, Jim. Can I give you some feedback? That meeting you just ran where you had an agenda, you stayed on time. I felt like everybody was really collaborating well. Great job. Keep it up. Do that again.” I find that to be much more powerful than the opposite, which is just like “Hey, Jim. Can I give you some feedback? That meeting was less than stellar.” Blah, blah, blah. That’s something you constantly have to remind people to do. Generate that positive feedback. That’s one thing. Do it in the moment. The other thing is we force moments on people. We work like many companies do with a weekly one-on-one schedule between manager and direct, and in the software tool that we use, we have a specific section on feedback. What feedback can you provide to your manager, and what feedback can they provide to you? If for some reason, they didn’t provide feedback in the moment, or didn’t have the opportunity to, we’re honestly trying to elevate and bring awareness to the fact that you should be doing it.

 


Adam Robinson:
That’s great. Let’s look at the other side of the ledger, then. It sounds like you’ve got some real intention behind feedback. I think positively and negatively, which I love that you called that out. What’s your philosophy around compensation and rewards for success?

 


Jessica Rovello:
This is something that we took a really fresh look at this year as an organization. Again, so we could be really intentional with what it was that we were doing. We decided to do a couple things. First and foremost, as an organization, we had never done across the board bonuses for people. That was just something that if we had a good year, we’d issue a bonus. What we actually decided to do for the first time, and this ties into the transparency with the company, is create a portion of everybody’s total compensation as a bonus based on company performance making up the vast line share of the bonus, so company performance accounts for let’s say 95%. Then, department and individual kicks in a little bit more. The goal behind that was really to hammer home the concept that we want to operate as a unit, and not as a set of individuals. Where can we collaborate more? Where we can we help each other more? It’s not about an individual trying to claw their way ahead of other people. It’s really us operating and succeeding, or failing, together as a unit.

 



That’s where the philosophy behind our bonus structure came in. Then, on the compensation side, for all of us who are employing people right now and a 4% unemployment rate, and especially people working in tech, we know that it is a highly competitive market. What we’ve done is we just did market assessments in our region, in our country, in our industry to really benchmark what every salary is for every position, and then we made our decision based on what we felt we had to offer from a total comp perspective of where we wanted to be on that spectrum. I think every company should try and do the same. Do you pay at 100% of market? Do you want to be the highest payer in the market? Do you want to be at 50% of the market? Do you want to be at 20% of the market? There really is no right or wrong answer there. I think it’s more of a holistic approach to … If you’re offering 401k, if you’re offering health benefits, if you’re offering work-life balance, how does that factor in to the total comp decision that you make as an organization.

 



I think the important thing for us, however, is just being crystal clear that we are now going to operate within those confines. We were not going to be a company that if someone was like “Hey, I got an offer and they’re doubling my salary,” we would say okay, we’ll double your salary, too, because we didn’t have the framework or the research to be able to make the decision. Yeah, it’s been a fairly big change for us over the last year, but one that I’ve been really happy with.

 


Adam Robinson:
Let’s tie all this together then, and ask for your overarching philosophy as you approach the next phase of growth for your business. Philosophy toward the people side of the business, if you could sum that up. What’s your approach and what do you think it will need to be as you continue to move the business ahead into the next 15 years?

 


Jessica Rovello:
If I had to give you a soundbite that encompasses everything as far as our thinking goes and our approach towards people, and our approach toward partners, and our approach toward product, I would say it’s this, and I say this to my kids all the time. When you do good things, good things happen. I think that that’s how we’re trying to approach what we do. We fundamentally believe that if we keep our people, if we do good things, if we operate as great employers, if we give people the opportunity to stretch and grow their careers, if we give them an opportunity for ownership in the business, of transparency in the business and empowerment in their roles, then only good things can come from that. Good things will happen. They will happen spontaneously and joyously. That’s what we’re really focused on. How do we constantly get better so that we can make those good things happen.

 


Adam Robinson:
Final question for you here, Jessica. If you were to come back on this show a year from now, and report to the audience on whether or not you successfully tackled the single biggest people related issue or opportunity that you have in front of you in your business today, what would you be telling us you were successful doing?

 


Jessica Rovello:
Hmm. I need a minute to think about that one.

 


Adam Robinson:
Sure.

 


Jessica Rovello:
Essentially, what’s my biggest people problem today, and if I could come back in a year and say I tackled it and here’s what I did, what would I be saying to you?

 


Adam Robinson:
It could be opportunity, and if you wanted to speak more broadly about the business and what you’re trying to accomplish, tie it to some growth goal that you set or 10 year target, it’s all fair game. There’s no wrong answer here.

 


Jessica Rovello:
For me, personally, I think what I am really passionate about, driven to do both through my business and to share with the larger entrepreneurial community is that there is a different path. What I mean by that is that I feel that for the last six or seven years with the economy on the upswing, with startups and startup culture becoming what it has been, with funding and capital being more accessible than it’s ever been before, that many businesses have fallen into the mindset, and the trap, of thinking that there is one way to build a business, especially a tech business. That is to grow at breakneck speed, to bring on as many people as quickly as you can, to raise revenue year over year in any way that you possible can, even if you’re not profitable and to do that, I think, to the detriment of people’s sanity in many cases.

 



If I could accomplish anything in the next year, it would just be to start getting the message out to people that there are other alternatives to that way of doing business, that there are more sane, more 21st Century, more organic, more sustainable … Just like we have in many other aspects of our life, whether it be in food or the environment, or anything else, bringing that to business, making more people aware of that would be a great accomplishment, I think.

 


Adam Robinson:
That’s the final world. Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been learning from Jessica Rovello, co-founder and CEO of Arkadium. Jessica, thank you so much for being with us today.

 


Jessica Rovello:
That’s a lot.

 


Adam Robinson:
That’s a wrap for this week’s episode of The Best Team Wins, where we feature entrepreneurs whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, author of the book The Best Team Wins, which you can find online at www.TheBestTeamWins.Com. As always, thank you for tuning in and we will see you next week.

 


Speaker 1:
Thanks for listening to the The Best Team Wins podcast with Adam Robinson. You can find out more information about Adam and his book, The Best Team Wins, Building your Business Through Predictive Hiring, at TheBestTeamWins.com. Thanks again for listening, and we’ll see you next week.

 

The post When You Do Good Things, Good Things Happen appeared first on The Best Team Wins.

Creating an Environment Safe for Dissent

For the last fifteen years, Paul J Daly has been building two businesses in Syracuse, NY: Image Auto LLC, a reconditioning services company, and Congruent Story, a media firm. Paul describes himself as a people person and is all-in on the human side of business, stating “I believe that if you put the people first and they see that, and they know that you will act in a sacrificial way to protect their interests, everybody wins.” In this episode of the podcast with Paul, we’re learning about building companies after bible college, servant leadership, and a new way to think about mission, values, and purpose.

 

Listen to this episode on:

                    

iTunes                   Google Play              Soundcloud            Stitcher

 

Connect with Paul J Daly on Twitter, Linkedin, and Instagram.

Check out Image Auto LLC  on their website.

Connect with Congruent Story on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and Instagram.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Transcripts:

 

Adam:
Welcome to The Best Team Wins Podcast, where we feature entrepreneurs and business leaders whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, and for the next 25 minutes I’ll be your host as we explore how to build your business through better hiring. Today on the program, Mr. Paul J. Daly is the founder, CEO and creative director for the bootstraps Image Auto and Congruent Story, both based in Syracuse, New York. Image Auto was founded in 2003 and currently employs 35 people.

 



Paul, the best learning happens through the experiences shared by fellow entrepreneurs, and we are excited today to learn from you. Welcome to the show.

 


Paul:
It is a pleasure and a privilege to be here with you.

 


Adam:
Image Auto was recently named one of the best places to work in Central New York by the “Central New York Business Journal.” You guys are doing great. Congrats on a great year so far.

 


Paul:
Oh, thank you. It’s definitely been one to remember. You know, it hasn’t been an overnight thing, as you know. We’ve been working at this hard for 15 years, and we call it the 20-mile march in reference to a book, “Great By Choice,” and a little bit every day consistently over time is how we got here, and hopefully we’ll do it again over the next 15.

 


Adam:
I don’t doubt it. We are here today to focus on the people side of your business or businesses, really, but before we dive in, let’s set the stage. Give us 30 seconds on Image Auto and Congruent Story. What are you guys up to?

 


Paul:
Sure. Image Auto, started it as a wheel repair company, just servicing dealers. I got out of bible college, decided I was going to start a business instead to be flexible. Still wanted to serve the church, but I also wanted to make a living. A friend of mine was doing wheel repair. I was working as a service advisor at a Chevy dealer, first time I’d ever been in a new car dealership. I worked there for 60 days. My friend showed me this wheel repair, saw the opportunity.

 



Talked to my boss, who was the dealership principal, about it, and he started … my first people lesson. He said, “When you really care about your people, you do what’s best for them, not what’s best for you.” He said, “I think you should start the business. You’ll be great at it.” Got me a $400 Chevy off the wholesale line, leaking everything from everywhere, and off I went.

 



Fifteen years later, we offer a lot of reconditioning services to auto dealers after the detail, so paint repair, aluminum wheel repair, interior repair, and we service about a hundred dealers and dealership groups across upstate New York, so Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, down to Philadelphia, and in the interim, communicating our culture to our own people.

 



We use media to do it. Started developing that, and a few years ago we actually launched a creative marketing and branding agency where we work primarily for non-automotive people, helping them tell their story. An interesting path, but that’s us today.

 


Adam:
That’s fantastic. If listeners want to learn more, what’s the best way to reach you for both businesses?

 


Paul:
Yeah, for both businesses, the best way to reach me would be my personal website. It’s PaulJDaly.com, and it has links to Congruent Story, which is our media branding agency, and Image Auto and all the other things that I find interesting on my social media feeds.

 


Adam:
Very cool. All right, jumping right into the people side of your business, Paul, you started Image Auto with, as you said, a wholesale Chevy Astro leaking everywhere, and at some point you needed to hire somebody. Talk about the experience of realizing it needed to be more than a one-person operation, and what you did to bring that first person on board.

 


Paul:
Sure. When I started the business, I started with the understanding that it was going to grow. Not having any business background or pedigree whatsoever, I just knew that there were certain things that I observed that other people did that had team members, employees. When I structured the business, I said I’m going to structure it as if I had one employee. I’d get dressed up every day, I’d go downstairs to our rented place, and my wife would look at me dressed up in the morning, sitting with no business yet, and you know, QuickBooks showed up in the mail. I was like, “Great, now I can do this.” Company name, I got it. You know, EIN, I know what that is, right? Then it said chart of accounts, and I was like, “I don’t know what that is.”

 



Then I realized there’s this thing called accounting that goes with running a business, so I made my way through, but all that to say I started to realize there’s all these regulations when you need to hire someone. I started in on that a little bit early, and it was about three or four months in when I felt like I needed to hire my first person, because I needed to concentrate on expanding. It was probably the least informed, worst hiring process ever, which is I just asked if anybody needed a job.

 


Adam:
Okay, that’s one way do it.

 


Paul:
It served the purpose, and I hired my first person on the agreement of … I’m sure an illegal wage agreement. You know, a fixed wage for whoever knows how many hours of work. We didn’t count, we didn’t care, we didn’t know. That was my experience of my first hire.

 


Adam:
How’d that work out?

 


Paul:
It ended up working out okay. That person stayed for a number of years. Actually the second hire that I made was slightly more informed, and his name is Peter Schultz and he’s still with me today, so that wasn’t far after.

 


Adam:
What was the difference between the first and the second? You said you went from uninformed to informed. What does that mean?

 


Paul:
I think one of the biggest changes, when I hired my first person, I realized there’s a whole level of accountability that comes with having somebody else you’re responsible for. I think I interviewed a little bit more. I looked a little bit harder for a relevant skill set. I looked a little bit harder for job history, but again, even back then … we’re talking 15 years ago when I was really, really, really green … much different than it is today.

 


Adam:
You’ve got 35 employees now. What’s your process today? How has past experience informed your approach?

 


Paul:
Yeah, so about a year ago, a year or two, the approach kind of morphed over the years. I actually got a lot of success because I went to bible college. I had somewhat of a network of pastors and churches, right? They’re all over the place, so us being in a fairly specific area of, you know, Lehigh Valley, Eastern Pennsylvania and Upstate New York, I was able to just search out and find churches that I knew that I could relate to, and I would start calling pastors and emailing pastors and specifically the care pastor, because they usually have an understanding of the people’s needs who might be looking for work, who might be qualified, and we had a lot of success with that over the years.

 



We had leased our staff with a staff leasing agency for a while. We used to process payroll in-house and then we went to leasing, and then we switched to a payroll processor. The hiring process kind of evolved through that, you know, friends, family, relationships, referrals, and really over the last year we found ourselves now … we’re looking to scale our growth and we have been on the upswing over the last six months, and we plan on scaling fairly quickly over the next 12. We realized we needed process, and we had no process. We brought in a business manager who has kind of whipped our HR into shape. We actually became Hireology customers. Hit the bell. [Bell rings] I was waiting for that.

 


Adam:
There we go.

 


Paul:
It was kind of we backed into the Hireology relationship, because I had just connected with you at NADA just from an entrepreneurial side, and meanwhile we’d learned about Hireology and it was a perfect fit for what we needed.

 


Adam:
NADA being the National Auto Dealers Association conference, the mega-conference, 18,000 people.

 


Paul:
Right. Yeah, in New Orleans. It was overwhelming for me. I went down there, connected, and Hireology, the process was exactly what we were looking for. We needed structure, because now we are … we have to do it like everyone else in the sense where there’s a labor pool, and we have to try to find the best fit from the labor pool of people we don’t know. The first ones were pretty terrifying, like, “I don’t know you and I’m about to trust you with a lot,” but we’re probably six months into that journey and we’re starting to get our feet under us. I think I’ve seen the light that it is possible to find good fit.

 



Our culture speaks for itself. We’re a very people-centric culture in general, and there are people that want to be part of something, regardless of what you do. We always say … you know, I say nobody’s passionate about dyeing a carpet from dark gray to darker gray. If they tell you that, they’re lying, but I do believe that whatever you do, if you do it with purpose and you know you do it with other people for an end.

 



I say, “You know, our job is not our hobby. No one does this for fun. We do it because it has meaning and purpose beyond what we just do,” and people want to be part of that culture and we communicate that well. We’re having some good success through the Hireology process and just that hiring structure.

 


Adam:
Just talk about your leadership team and how that’s evolved, from you doing it all to now you’ve got 35 people. Who helps you run the business?

 


Paul:
We are a director-run organization. I function as the CEO and then I have directors that operate different geographies of the business, and then also a business manager. Basically we have a director of fixed operations, a director of reconditioning service in the northern territories for us, which is New York and then one in Pennsylvania, which we’re considering the south right now. Which it’s funny, because the northern guy, he’s from New Orleans, so he hates the fact that he’s the northern guy, you know.

 



Then our business manager handles … he’s one of the most creative and talented, people-oriented MBAs I’ve ever met. He kind of keeps us on track with finance, HR, and also even some of the creative media side. That’s basically the structure, and then we have general managers that handle scheduling, route development and things like that, and then we have our front line, which are our technical experts that perform the repairs, that have face time with our customers every day.

 


Adam:
For your directors, were those outside hires or did you bring them up?

 


Paul:
We brought them all up. Everybody has been brought up.

 


Adam:
Was that by design?

 


Paul:
It was by design. You know, hiring and trusting the culture to somebody that I don’t know has been … I don’t know that anybody could have gotten it, because we came up the way we came up. I know a lot of people probably say that, and maybe it is or isn’t true, but for us, our culture is held so closely that I couldn’t imagine putting someone in those seats that hasn’t been part of that journey. At this point, moving forward, as we go, I don’t know if that’ll be continually the way we go, but I know it’s been effective to this point. I know that every one of the directors cares for the men and women on our team just like I do. They practice servant leadership, and a huge amount of value in there.

 


Adam:
That’s great. Do you have core values for the business?

 


Paul:
Yeah.

 


Adam:
I’m assuming you think a lot about this.

 


Paul:
Yeah. Yeah, I do, and sometimes I probably think too much about this, if that’s …

 


Adam:
I don’t think that’s possible.

 


Paul:
I would say that’s never possible, but you know, some people would probably have a dissenting argument. I’m a people person. I believe that if you put the people first and they see that, and they know that you will act in a sacrificial way to protect their interests, I think that everybody wins. We do have values. We have eight values, and basically the way we teach it at our company is that we have a situation, which is over the horizon. You know, we’ll never get there, it’s the direction we walk.

 



We have a mission. The mission is how we carry out our vision, and then we have values which act as the boundaries to which we walk about it. You can say, “I want to lose weight,” right? That’s not really anything. It’s not a goal, it’s not a mission, it’s nothing. Or you could say, “I want to be in shape,” for instance, right? I want to be in shape.

 


Adam:
I do want to be in shape.

 


Paul:
Me too. Doesn’t everybody? Come on, let’s just be honest. Everybody wants to. You can say, “I want to be in shape,” but until you start to define the criteria by which you will be in shape … what does “in shape” mean? Well, being in shape means I will be within this weight range, this heart strength, and then how are you going to get there? You know, are you going to starve yourself? Are you going to take supplements? There are a lot of bad things that you can do to look in shape, right, but then you have your values that act as the boundaries, so I’m going to eat healthy, I’m going to work out regularly, and so on and so forth.

 



For us, our vision is Provision4Life. Everybody knows that provision … in our company when you say that, you know it’s our professional vision, but also it’s what provides. Not just for practical needs like money, everybody needs that, but also for relational needs, emotional needs, like we’re people. That’s our mission, and we march toward Provision4Life. There is no end point. It’s undefinable.

 



The mission … and basically we’ve distilled it down to two words, which is “consistent provision.” We show up every time. Our industry is really plagued by people that are fly-by-night, that look all different ways, drive old vehicles and create a scene on some of our customers’ property, so we say we always show up, we always deliver value. For us, the consistency is huge.

 



Then we have values. There’s eight of them, so there’s a lot, but we always tie them back to, you know, any measure that we take within the company, whether positive reinforcement or negative consequences, we say, “Well, there was a failure of this,” and those are integrity, consistency, accountability, unity, gratitude, growth, and grace is our last one. That kind of is the umbrella value. We’re a Golden Rule company, treat others like you want to be treated. I think it’s very similar to your No Assholes value here at Hireology. It’s kind of a catch-all, right? You know it when you see it, you know? That’s kind of how we operate.

 


Adam:
That’s great. How do you discern whether or not someone is going to live those values as you’re going through a hiring process? Is there one series or battery of questions you like to ask, or are you having people do various roleplays or anything like that?

 


Paul:
Yeah. No, roleplaying is an interesting suggestion. We’ve never tried that. We do have questions. With Hireology, the survey that goes out as soon as someone responds to our job interview, we’ve crafted those questions to kind of highlight some of those things, to get a feel for are these an others-first type of person or is this an “I’m going to get mine” kind of person, so we try to weed it out a little bit.

 



One of my favorite questions to ask is, “What does success look like in five years for you?” If you could paint a picture of your life in five years and you would say, “You know what, I feel like I’d be successful,” I feel like that tells me a lot.

 


Adam:
Yeah, it’s a great question.

 


Paul:
We just interviewed a young man, and he said … and this was for a technical position, so it’s a position that really is best filled by someone who probably didn’t go to college, but they have a really good … they grew up around, you know, fixing things or putting things together, and they tend to be just a simple, simple American Pie breed. He said, “in five years, I’d like to own my own home, I’d like to marry my girlfriend and maybe have a dog.” I was just like, “I understand you. I understand you.”

 



I like that question a lot, and that’s not the only right answer. You know, some people have ambitions to, you know, climb a mountain or be a songwriter or things like that, and all that stuff is great, but I think that one question gives me personally a lot of insight into what’s important to them.

 


Adam:
Yeah, that’s fantastic. What’s your philosophy around employee feedback, or someone isn’t getting it done? What do you do?

 


Paul:
Yeah, so we try to cultivate an environment. We call it Safe for dissent, and I kind of picked that from Dave Ramsey and his EntreLeadership stuff. That culture, we always tell people like, “Look, if you have a problem or an issue, we have a strict no-gossip policy. If you have a problem or an issue, you need to feel that it’s safe to bring that up to somebody.” That right away takes away a lot of excuses on why someone may have acted out on an issue that was ongoing, because we’re saying, “Look, if there’s a safe environment, then you have no excuse not to bring up an issue.”

 



Now, when somebody does fall short of the mark, grace is one of our values, so we exercise grace whenever possible, as long as it doesn’t hurt somebody else or tragically hurt the company, because that’s protecting the interests of everybody.

 


Adam:
Give me an example of grace in practice at your company.

 


Paul:
Sure. A while back we had a team member. We have GPS monitors in all of our vehicles, and they make sure that we visit our customers regularly, that we’re abiding by the speed limit under liability issues, and so we always kind of know what’s going on throughout the regular day. We noticed that one team member who had been a really reliable, really reliable guy, and just is a good person in general, it appeared that he was milking the system a little bit and parking the vehicle, leaving it running for a couple hours at a time. Meanwhile, we were also having several other indicators, saying his supply ordering was off or his reporting was off, and so we reached out.

 



Usually that would be … for us, that’s a disciplinary offense, right? You went off schedule, you didn’t tell anybody, you didn’t ask anybody. We found out that he was actually going through a divorce and we didn’t know about it. He thought … he was like, “I understand if you guys let me know. I understand, you know, I kind of brought it to myself,” but instead, his leader drove out there and spent half a day with him, and just really encouraged him and tried to walk that with him because there was an understanding there.

 



Like, “Yes, you violated company policy, yes, it puts us at a disadvantage, the customer didn’t get service. However, we all have situations. Life happens.” We did note that in the file, but there wasn’t any disciplinary measures taken, and it kind of helped get him back on his feet and kind of walk through and be clear with the expectation, but also give some accommodation.

 


Adam:
That’s great. I can imagine the impact that had on the rest of the team, when you lived that value authentically. That’s pretty powerful.

 


Paul:
Yeah. When you do things in front … and that’s the benefit of such a transparent environment, even like you have here at Hireology. I realized that when you give people grace openly, you tend to get it back. You know, treat others as you want to be treated really works, and it’s not as a strategy. It’s just because we’re human, and everybody in essence wants to be treated well. When they see other people getting grace, they know that they’ll need it at some point too.

 



That’s kind of part of our definition of grace. At some point, we’ll all mess up and need it. I as the CEO need a lot of grace, right? I’m a rookie CEO. I always joke. I say, “I’ve never run a company this big before,” because as we grow, it’s the truth every year. I’ve never run a company this big before. I like to sow that through the culture, because I need it too.

 


Adam:
Yeah, like setting that expectation. Trust me on one thing, I’m going to screw stuff up. My only promise is I’ll make it right, I’ll fix it, and I’m going to need your help to get there.

 


Paul:
Yeah, exactly. Absolutely.

 


Adam:
It really makes a difference.

 


Paul:
It sure does. It makes a difference.

 


Adam:
Let’s talk in the final couple of minutes we have here about your marketing company. Tell me, at what point did you say, “Hey, I think we know something about telling the story of culture and company, let’s go do that too”? That’s fascinating to me.

 


Paul:
Sure. I think that it is the greatest time in history to be a creative, because the market and commerce values creative like it never has in history, and that shift is upon us. That goes with not just external push marketing, but it also goes internally. Because I’m a people person, that was always a focus of mine, how do we keep these couple dozen people that are separated by 500 miles, how do we stay aligned? How do we stay around this vision and mission and values? How do we know what’s going on?

 



We’re talking 10 years ago. You and I were just having a conversation about, you know, bandwidth back then. There was no streaming video, there was no instant downloads. The only way I knew how to communicate was through creative, right, so I grew up as a musician and kind of have that creative bent, so we started producing media. That guy Peter I told you about who’s been with me, strangely enough, he studied video production, which was a whole different thing 15 years ago. We’ve got a big studio, we’ve got tapes, we’ve got levers that we push forward. It looked like the Death Star control panel.

 



We bought some gear and we started producing videos for ourselves that we’d show at our company parties, and every time we did, you know, whoever the catering service was, they were like, “I want to work there.” It was basically just everybody telling their story of why they work here and what it means to them, and then little by little other companies would see it. “Hey, can you make us one?” I took a chance on a young man who was doing an internship locally in Syracuse at a church. He needed a part-time job, so I brought him in and he was very talented and we worked well together, so we started making better media and more of it.

 



We started working with a small two-person marketing agency for some of our products, and that business, really the owner was looking to come under an umbrella, to work as part of a bigger agency. It was tough going by yourself, and so he’s now our business manager. All of a sudden we have this cohort of like three or four people that can do this, and there were some legacy clients that he brought in. Now all of a sudden, we’re helping the Boston Bar Association and we’re helping, you know, food producers and dealerships.

 



All I can say is I really enjoy the messaging side of that business. I used to think it was I liked production, and I realized that it’s bringing people clarity is what I love to do. I think that branding and marketing and video production are all just means to do that. Now we represent … we work with local and national brands to do both product launches, fashion brands. We did a big internal communication project for a large … you would know it … food producer in the country, and that really just … finding a way to work those two companies in synergy is a big difference in culture.

 



We have guys walking in from the remanufacturing facility in the back, dirty, covered in aluminum dust, and they walk through, and there’s a millennial on the couch with his feet up on his phone, right, but he’s working. He’s working. It was an interesting year or two, everybody realizing that, hey, we’re on the same team, and at one point I really didn’t know if we were going to be able to pull it off. It has been pulled off, and everybody again has rallied around Provision4Life.

 



Yeah, so now it’s one of those elements that I get access into boardrooms and find myself at tables next to CEOs. I feel like this is way above my pay grade, but it has helped me bring that back and be able to sow it into the lives of the people in our company. It’s really been an interesting thing.

 


Adam:
That’s amazing, and the impact I’m sure you have … I mean, I can guarantee you have … on a company’s ability to find the right people by telling that company’s story in an authentic way, it’s just such a powerful thing.

 


Paul:
Oh, I love that side of it. It’s called Congruent Story because “congruent” is, you know, not equal, but it’s the same as. We believe that your media should be an accurate reflection of who you actually are. Even from the technical side, I think sometimes just poor production, you know, just out of I don’t know how to produce, poor production or even preplanning and crafting that story and that message so it really does reflect who the people are I think is doing them, the team, their business, I think just a great service.

 


Adam:
Very cool. All right, so if you come back on the show in a year and tell us about the big thing you’ve got to tackle now, and you’re bragging about knocking it out of the park, what’s the thing that’s on your plate?

 


Paul:
Yeah, I think that we would have effectively made the transition from about 35. I’ve never really liked quantifying a number of people as far as success, but I think what it represents now, we’ve wrapped our mind around it. I think if we are in the vicinity of 50 team members a year from now, I think that would really reflect the fact that we’ve executed on our plans.

 


Adam:
That’s incredible.

 


Paul:
Yeah, that’s a big jump.

 


Adam:
That’s 50 percent head count growth in a year.

 


Paul:
Yeah. It’s a big jump, but we can see it. I feel like we’ve built the infrastructure now that we can do that with a lot … without much infrastructure change. I feel like we’ve been building it to this point to now. We’ve built the motorcycle, now it’s time to run it.

 


Adam:
Yeah. It’s an honor to be a part of that journey.

 


Paul:
Yeah. Oh, you’re a valued, valued partner.

 


Adam:
I think that’s fantastic. Okay, what book is on your nightstand right now?

 


Paul:
Yes, I haven’t … I’ve read two pages of it.

 


Adam:
That’s fair.

 


Paul:
It’s “The Effective Executive” by Peter Drucker.

 


Adam:
Okay. That’s kickin’ it old-school.

 


Paul:
It’s real old-school. I read the first two pages and they immediately made me feel better. It’s like, you know, the cover’s not sexy, it’s none of this. You know, he doesn’t have a blog, I don’t think. He probably doesn’t even use any social media, but he basically says, “I’ve worked with political leaders and executives and not-for-profit leaders,” and he quantifies it, “in this country and this country and this country.” He says, “Never once have I seen someone who was a natural at being effective. Effectiveness is something you have to learn. It doesn’t come natural.” Automatically I said …

 


Adam:
You got me on page two. I’m hooked.

 


Paul:
Like, “Empathy. You know me.” I read through, and he boils it down to seven things that an effective executive would focus on, and they all are things that can be learned. That’s what I’m reading right now.

 


Adam:
Enjoy. I look forward to catching up with you on what you thought of that. That sounds like something I need to tackle. All right, that’s the final word. Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been learning from Paul J. Daly, founder, CEO and creative director of Image Auto and Congruent Story. Paul, thank you for being with us.

 


Paul:
Oh, it was my pleasure.

 


Adam:
All right, that’s a wrap for this week’s episode of The Best Team Wins Podcast. We’re featuring entrepreneurs and business leaders whose exceptional approach to the people side of their business has led to incredible results. My name is Adam Robinson, author of the book “The Best Team Wins,” which you can find online at www.thebestteamwins.com. Thank you for listening, and we will see you next week.

 

The post Creating an Environment Safe for Dissent appeared first on The Best Team Wins.