Adecade ago, Barney & Barney LLC was kind of flat and morale wasn’t strong. So the ownership group made some difficult decisions that favored employees, and things started to change. The insurance provider went from about $16 million in revenue in 2000 to more than $70 million this year.
“We sort of took off like a rocket when we faced some tough issues and made some good decisions,” says Paul Hering, Barney & Barney’s managing principal and CEO. “That was a moment when it convinced me that you don’t want to compromise on who you are as a company, your character, your culture, and when you really stand by what you believe in, you have the opportunity to accomplish amazing things.”
In keeping with this philosophy, Hering and his team have continued, despite the economy, to do the things that have made the company a great place to work.
Smart Business spoke with Hering about how to create and maintain a great company culture.
Make employees feel valuable. It’s critical that your people feel engaged and connected and part of something, so they’re motivated, happy to be there, successful and productive. That requires leadership to take the time to really get to know people and get engaged with them and be authentic and really share with them what you’re all about and what the company’s all about.
We now have close to 350 people in the organization. I meet with every single new associate that comes into the company, and we spend a half hour together getting to know each other. It’s very informal, not really structured, but it’s a way to get acquainted and a way for me to share my vision of the company and what we’re all about and what’s important to us.
Time management is a huge challenge. It’s a matter of making it a priority. It would be easy for me to say, ‘I’m too busy — I have too many things both inside the company and outside the company that are making demands on my time that I’m just going to let this effort fall by the wayside.’ That would be the wrong thing to let happen. If I were to discontinue it, it would send an interesting message that would be 100 percent counter to the corporate culture I was talking about.