At Stan Richards’ advertising agency, a potential client exits a conference room and enters the stairwell to the applause of 690 people and a spelling bee challenge. If the client wins the war of words, he gets The Richards Group T-shirts. If he loses, the company jokes that it gets to double his fee. These stairwell “meetings,” as the company’s principal calls them, promote humor and a sense of teamwork throughout the organization, which both spell success. Last year, The Richards Group posted $1.2 billion in billings and about $148 million in revenue. Smart Business spoke with Richards about how he manages his company.
Hire people with a history of success.
I always start by asking if they can get back to high school, what were they like in high school? I really believe that people who tended to be outstanding in high school will probably be outstanding the rest of their lives.
The second thing is, I only hire people I like. If I like them, they are likely to like each other and enjoy working with each other, and our clients are likely to like them.
Have a sense of humor.
If you were working at a car dealership, and you were a salesperson, the very first thing you would want to have happen when you walked up to that customer is you would want that person to like you.
One of the ways you endear yourself to people is with the use of humor, whether it be broad humor, slapstick humor, sophisticated humor — something that provokes a smile. If people will smile with you, they’ll be willing to do business with you.
Everything we do has to have a sense of humor. On a regular basis, we have stairwell meetings, where all of us gather in the stairwell, and there’s always something to make everybody smile.
Maintain energy as you grow.
The greatest challenge is to grow at a rapid rate and still feel like we’re an organization of 50 or 60 people. Nobody here feels like he or she is just a cog in a machine.
It’s a working environment that’s full of energy, electricity and vitality, and it makes it fun for everyone to come to work every day.
When you’re packed into a tight space and everybody looks at everybody else as a neighbor and a friend, you get past those tribal barriers and you figure out how we are going to get along. How are we going to move the business? How are we going to continue to slay dragons, even though we may have a difference of opinion of how it should be done?
When we moved to multiple floors, we destroyed all the departmental and functional lines. In every cluster of spaces … every discipline is represented in these little interdisciplinary villages. We’ve managed to keep that same vitality we had when we were tiny now that we’re pushing 700 people.
Reward tenures, not titles.
One thing that is a problem in most organizations, the important people get to sit around the windows and the unimportant people get to sit closer to the hall.
We don’t do that. We don’t have any unimportant people here. Everyone is important in his or her own way.
There are no doors. No one has an office. Everybody is in open space. We don’t have senior people sitting around the windows. If you’ve been here a long time, you get to sit by windows, and if you’ve been here a short time, you get to sit by the hall.
We have an incredibly low turnover rate. It takes a long time to work your way over to the windows.
Everybody recognizes what they’re doing is significant. Whatever your title is, whatever your compensation may be, you have to go through every day recognizing you’re being treated with the highest level of respect and your contribution is valued by everybody in the organization.
Create a welcoming work area.
Think about the workrooms in most organizations. They’re in the middle of the building, lousy places to be. Our workrooms are out by the windows, and we have one on each floor in a position that could be a CEO’s office.
The whole idea is to reinforce that no matter what your job is, even if you’re going in to do the most routine stuff that we as an organization have to do, you’re going to be treated with respect.
Show employees you value them.
We have as many as 60 or 70 conference rooms scattered through almost seven floors of offices. Our conference rooms are named after people who work here, without any regard to what their title is or how much we pay them.
If you’ve been here a long time, you have a conference room named after you. To our most highly paid people, it is of little consequence that they have a conference room named after them.
They know they’re important. We don’t have to reinforce that.
But we have a lot of conference rooms named after coordinators, people who do clerical reports. To them, it is important. It’s a way of signaling to them that we respect what they do, we value what they do, and we value them as individuals.
Don’t bother with fake teambuilding.
We don’t have pep rallies. We don’t have teambuilding exercises. It’s everybody recognizing that he or she is important and is making an important contribution.
As long as we continue to flourish as a company, everybody can take individual credit for that. You don’t have to artificially build team spirit. It exists because everyone can take personal pride in we’re doing well as a company and they’re doing well as individuals.
Be passionate.
There needs to be at least a modicum of intelligence. You can’t be stupid to run a business. More than anything else, it’s passion.
It’s feeling that what you do is important. It’s not about the money, it’s about the work. The money will take care of itself. Be passionate about the work and let compensation be way down on the list of priorities.
The primary measure of success is absolutely loving what you do and feeling as though you would do it for nothing, and isn’t it wonderful that somebody is willing to pay you for it.
HOW TO REACH: The Richards Group, www.richards.com