When you run a privately held,
family business it’s important to
be hands-on, says Bruce A. Black.
“I need to know firsthand every aspect
of our business,” says the founder, president and CEO of Peninsula Valve &
Fitting Co. Inc. “I need to be willing to
get my hands dirty, and I kind of use
the cliché of, ‘Don’t ask anything of
any of my employees that I’m not willing to do myself or have been willing
to do myself at one point.’”
Black, who leads the $28 million
supplier of fluid handling components and systems, says that letting
employees see you getting your
hands dirty with them gains you the
respect of those around you.
Smart Business spoke with Black
about how and when to delegate
responsibilities.
Q: Do you ever find yourself getting
too hands-on in running your business?
Absolutely, in the early days of
the business, when I literally started it myself with no employees
and I was not making much
money. The thought of having an
employee that would begin to take some
of the money that the company was generating, that wasn’t really exciting since
I was desperate for money.
I made sure that I would take the business as far as I could by myself before I
added my first person and then my second person, and what that developed
into is that I became so hands-on that I
became really reluctant to release some
of the jobs. Even when the company was
20-plus years old, I found that I continued to be too involved.
I wanted to micromanage, and that was
not good. Only when I truly stepped
back and said, ‘I’m hiring good people,
and I’m giving them responsibilities, and
I need to let them do their job,’ and [I]
fortunately began to do that as this business grew. As we expanded, I knew that I needed to release the jobs to other people, and that allowed us to grow.
Q: How did you know that you needed to
delegate?
It happens over time. It isn’t a bolt of
lightning that says, ‘OK, I’m going to
change the way I am doing things.’ I think
it happens over time, and that time is
probably years where you’re finding that
you either could hand off this particular
job to a person who’s got time to do it. It
finally begins to sink in that you can (do)
more yourself, personally, on accomplishing the goals that you want to be
able to do as the manager, the owner, the
CEO, whatever you want to call yourself
for the business, if you can release
maybe more of the trivial, mundane stuff.
I’m thinking accounting. I still act so
much in the accounting department
because it is my money, I’m watching
over it, and things like that need to be
released from me as well as worrying about the sales accounts and all the customers. Little by little, you begin to wean
yourself off of the need to be so intimately involved in everything on a daily
basis, but it does take time.
Q: How do you know, today, when to delegate?
I think I will continue to handle
the handful of key financial things
that are reflected in the day-to-day,
the month-to-month and the year-to-year business in relationship to
the balance sheet and the P&L,
payroll.
As old as my company is … I’m
still, even though I use a payroll
service to do my payroll, I am the
only one that is involved in the payroll inputting, and nobody else in the
company knows what anybody else
makes. I handle the bank statement
and reconciliation of the bank, even
though I’ve got accounting people.
Key financial aspects of the financial
well-being of the company remain
with me. Everything else I am perfectly happy to have everybody else handle. Again, that’s been over time as you
relieve yourself of those things that
can be handled by other people.
Q: So no one but you knows what employees at your company make?
Certainly, the people can certainly ask
a fellow employee, ‘Well, what do you
make? I’ll tell you what I make.’ I know
that has happened. I think the fact that
everybody knows how fair the company
has treated the employees, I think the
assumption that I’ve made — and it’s
been well founded — that everyone feels
that things are competitive and everybody is being taken care of by the company the way that it should be.
As long as I am at the desk, I will continue to do that.
HOW TO REACH: Peninsula Valve & Fitting Co. Inc., (650) 965-4197 or www.penvalve.com