Q. How do you ensure
that a job candidate will
fit into your culture?
We try to introduce
them to as many people as possible, and we explain our family-based culture. That’s clearly a
top priority for people when
they come to work here.
They still have a job to do, but
if they’re happy at home, they’re
happy here. That goes a long
way for job satisfaction, turnover
and all those types of things.
People aren’t working 50, 60,
70 hours a week, but they’re
going to learn the business and
be around here over a longer
period of time. Having that
tenure in a company is more valuable than working people
and blowing them out the doors
every year.
Q. How do you invest in your
employees’ futures?
We do leadership training once
a quarter. We bring in an outside
company and put together a
long series of leadership classes.
We’ll shut the company down
for about four hours and focus
on leadership or team-building,
something that’s going to make
these people better. We also hand out a book for the employees to read after the class, like
‘The 21 Irrefutable Laws of
Leadership’ by John Maxwell or
‘Good to Great’ by Jim Collins.
These books are tied into the
training that we’re doing.
Q. How do you determine
what the training will focus on
each quarter?
We look at gaps that we have
in the company. Maybe it’s a
sales gap, communications training or just management leadership — everybody being held
accountable for their actions.
Rarely is it technical. It’s more of
the soft skills that you need.
Everybody needs to be a
leader here, and everybody
needs to have good skills. It
makes things run better. The
company is going to be more
successful if everybody knows
they have a job and knows that
they have decision authority.
They need to be a leader to
make the company the best
company it can be.
Q. How do your employees
know they have that authority?
I communicate it to my people.
My philosophy is, ‘It’s better to
ask forgiveness than it is permission. My people know that, and
I encourage them to make decisions. When people first come
in, they are a little hesitant to
take that approach, but a good
leader will make the right decisions, and it speeds things up.
It’s good diversity for the company to have more than just one
person making decisions. The
business can’t grow if one person is making all the decisions
because things just get bogged
down. One person can’t be
everywhere; they can do that
when there are five people in
the company, but as it grows,
everybody needs to be making
decisions.
HOW TO REACH: Oak Street Funding, (866) 625-3863 or www.oakstreetfunding.com