Every day is fabulous at Akron’s QT Equipment Inc., says its president, Doug Root. And why shouldn’t it be?
From 2004 to 2006, the distributor of commercial service vehicles and material handling systems grew sales nearly 325 percent, reaching
nearly $10 million in revenue last year. Over the past five years, its employee base has increased from six to 21.
After several slow years, Root started sharing corporate information with employees and empowering them to make decisions. As a result,
the company took off.
“We live and die with our employees,” he says. “They know where we want to go, and they’re the fuel to get us there.”
Smart Business spoke with Root about how he learned to loosen the reins.
Q: How do you grow your company?
Every invoice and every piece of our marketing material says, ‘Quality people create quality services.’ A lot of companies say their
biggest asset is their people, but we really do live it. If an employee has a family issue, that comes first. We worry about vacation days
later with that kind of stuff.
We pay 100 percent of their hospitalization. (Other executives might say) hospitalization’s a big expense; I’d say turnover and retraining of help
— that’s a big expense. We virtually have no turnover in our organization. People just don’t leave us because we take good care of them.
There are three rules to work for this company: Don’t lie to the boss, don’t steal from the company and don’t be late for work. Anybody
that hires on gets a letter with those rules in it.
The first time I meet a new employee, I shake his hand, look him straight in the eye and tell him those three rules. There are expectations. If they can’t live with those rules, they can’t work here.
Q: How can executives keep growth under control?
Maintain a very good banking and accounting relationship. Our cost of doing business and our cost of capital grows all the time. We lean
pretty heavy on those folks.
We include them in our plans. We know where we want to go, how we want to expand, and they tell us how we can get there and what we
can and can’t do. I’m not afraid to listen to the fact that maybe my ideas are a little bit too aggressive for us right now.
Q: How does it benefit your company to include financial experts in your plans?
Everybody wants to see a small business be profitable. They have opened my eyes to other parts of business that may never have meant
anything to me before.
They’ve really educated me in where we need to put our foot on the gas and where we need to take it off just a little bit.
Q: What can prevent a company from growing?
Living too much in the past. Three-legged milking stools don’t sell anymore. I have some friends in business who want to continue to
do business the same way they did 15 years ago. Business isn’t done the same way as it was five years ago, and they can’t get past what
it used to be like.
The real key to it is that you have to remain young at heart. It helps me manage the business because you need to lead by example, and
you need to be able to relate to the younger folks. Staying young keeps you moving in the right direction.
Q: What other advice would you give other leaders of fast-growth companies?
You have to embrace the change that comes with growing a fast-moving company. You have to let go of some things. I didn’t always
think that way; I micromanaged a lot more.
I had an informational funnel. All the information about everything that went on in this company was inside my head. If anybody needed to do anything, they needed to get with me first so I could tell them what I knew.
I’ve learned to let go of all of that stuff. We’re more of an open-book company now, and that’s one thing that had to be done. Today, I
can be gone for weeks, and everybody knows where they’re supposed to be and what’s going on. Information flows a lot cleaner and a
lot simpler to the right people now.
Q: Was it hard letting go?
Oh my, yes. It really was the reason we didn’t grow. You know what the definition of insanity is? It’s doing the same thing over
and over again, expecting a different result.
I didn’t want to let go of that stuff, and consequently, we didn’t grow. We were marginally profitable, at best, for years. It was exhausting, and a lot of hard work, and we weren’t going anywhere. We learned to let go and grab hold of some other things. It’s made all the difference in the world.
HOW TO REACH: QT Equipment Inc., (800) 758-2410 or www.qtequipment.com