Baldur Schindler credits the ability to develop positive relationships as the key to running a successful business. As co-founder
and CEO of Beacon Electric Supply, Schindler and Donald Vivier, co-founder and president, still handle sales assignments and
work to maintain relationships with the company’s customers and their families. They are also careful about taking on new
customers, using their chief financial officer as a gatekeeper to weed out unreliable people. Nearly a quarter century after its
founding, the electric supply company has 72 employees with 2006 revenue of $50 million. Smart Business spoke with Schindler
about being direct and honest with your employees.
Have a clear vision. No pie in the sky but real,
measurable, attainable goals. Surround
yourself with people you can trust to do
their jobs with little or no guidance.
Never lose track of the fact that you can’t
do it alone. It is not, ‘I did it’; rather, ‘We did
it.’ We expect our people to follow our lead
and not be pushed.
Walk the talk. Rather than driving and shoving
the employees as a sheepherder, we tend to
be more shepherds in that we lead out.
We feel that it’s important that we both
have contact with the marketplace so that
we know what’s going on. We still carry
sales assignments even to this day. We generate a good share of the profit of the business and lead our sales force by example,
rather than, ‘Here’s the map, and go do it.’
Talk to your peers. We belong to a purchasing
co-op. It’s called IMARK [Group Inc., a marketing group], made up primarily of independent distributors, such as ourselves.
They are all pretty much the same. The ownership or the upper level of the businesses
are all entrepreneurial, such as ourselves,
and are almost always hands-on people.
We have a group of 10 to 13 distributors.
We meet together twice a year, and that acts
like an outside board of directors. All of the
owners and the hierarchy of the various
organizations, we sit down and beat ourselves up and talkabout best practices,
insurance, high fuel cost, all the stuff that
affects our business. The basic culture of our
entire industry comes out of groups like that.
Be direct about changes. Once we crossed the
50-employee mark, a couple things came to
pass that are troublesome. The employee
handbook. It laid down the law. You have
so many vacation days. It was understood.
But when it’s put down in writing, you
have so many sick days, if you take more
than that, you get docked, this has to be
approved by this manager. The guys that
have been with us 15 or 20 years all of a
sudden are saying, ‘We’re being forced to
do these things that we’ve never been forced to do before.’
We sat everybody down and brought the
HR consultant in and had them explain it.
Guys grumbled for a while, but it went
away. Just don’t be secretive about it. You
have to be very open.
We don’t have very many closed-door
meetings. We don’t do anything secretive. If
something is up, we tell everybody.
Show the path to advancement. We’re very
strong on promoting from within. We have an
annual evaluation. Each department does
their own people. (Employees) have to know
where they are at, where they are going and
what their future is. That’s paramount.
You have to have a road map for every
single person. The day they come in, they
have their 90-day review. That’s done very
religiously. About two weeks before their
evaluation is due, they get a form where
they do a self-evaluation. They bring that to
their appropriate manager for discussion.
That’s very critical because you need to
know what you think of yourself.
Don’t overreact to bad news. Every once in
awhile, a job will go foul on you, and you
lose some money. We understand that. It’s
just one of those things that happens to you
every once in awhile.
We usually sit down and talk it through,
and see what we can do to fix the problem.
With an inside salesperson, if they make a
$4,000 or $5,000 error, you don’t drag them
through the mire and beat them up and
raise holy heck.
You just sit down and talk about it. See
what you can do to fix it, learn from it and go
forward. Obviously, there is going to be a reprimand, but you don’t raise the roof, and you
don’t drag them through the office and raise
the red flag and say, ‘This guy is an idiot.’
Watch your pennies. Find the funding that it
takes to fund your payables. It was always
easy for us to go get business. Let’s say you
went out and got a $1 million project and
the bills for that job came due before you
got paid. We wouldn’t be able to pay the bill.
We could actually grow considerably
faster than we had the finance to back up
the growth. We probably would have gone
broke if it weren’t for the fact that we had
a banker that helped us immensely when
we first got started. Actually, he anchored
us. He reined us in, if you will.
He said, ‘Hey look, guys, you’ve got to
slow down here. You’re not strong enough
to warrant a larger credit line, and you’re
stretching things a little too far. If one of
these guys goes south on you, you’re in
trouble.’ We pulled back a little bit.
Be visible. I’ll be out at the counter sitting on
the counter stool talking to our customers.
I do that every day. I walk through the
whole building every day and say, ‘Good
morning’ to everybody.
I’m generally here among the first. I think
that’s important that they know you’re here.
Always have an open door. Anybody can
come waltzing into my office any time they
choose. I just never run them out. It’s always
been that way. When they come, it may be
one of the salespeople. They’ll have a question about one of the projects, or if they just
want to shoot the bull, we’ll do that.
HOW TO REACH: Beacon Electric Supply, (858) 279-9770 or
www.beaconelectric.com