Starting out, every business owner has
high expectations of the kinds of people they want to surround themselves with: hard workers with integrity and character who can get the job done. The day-today operations of a business can draw an
owner’s focus away from these ideals, but
they’re still attainable if you’re willing to
put in the effort to bring in the best.
Bill Graham, CEO of The Graham
Company, believes business owners can’t
afford to cut corners when bringing in both
employees and customers. While it might
cost more upfront, being selective pays off
in the long run with greater longevity with
customers and employees, happier
employees and an excellent reputation.
“It’s very difficult to find both clients and
employees that are good businesspeople,”
he says. “If they want to be successful,
salespeople — or producers in the insurance business — need to go after the very
best customers, the cream of the crop.”
Smart Business asked Graham about
what to look for in business associates,
which includes customers, employees,
suppliers and vendors.
You talk about working with good business-people. What would you say constitutes a
good businessperson, and how do you handle clients who don’t fit this standard?
To me, a good businessperson looks at
cost, but also looks at the value they are
getting for a certain price. For example,
one company might sell you something for
$15 while its competitor sells a similar
product for $7.50. The $15 product returns
$45 to $60 every year for each $15 you
spend, while the $7.50 product returns
nothing. A bad businessperson would pick
the $7.50 product every time. It costs half
as much, so he convinces himself that it
must be a good deal. A good businessperson takes the time to understand the differences between the two products and
goes for the $15 product. Even though it
cost him more initially, he knows he’ll get
his money back quickly.
It’s never a good sign if someone says,
‘We can cut a few corners on this,’ or ‘We’ll meet bid specs.’ What you should be looking for is somebody who always wants to
exceed expectations. If after two or three
years, a client isn’t what we thought they
were, we suggest that they might want to
talk to another broker. It’s not very often
that this happens, but it does happen occasionally. We go through a screening process before we develop a business relationship with customers. It involves inspections and a series of interviews about the
way they do things in their business. A lot
can come out of that. If people cut corners
on maintenance, safety, or things like that,
it affects more than just insurance. It’s a
pretty clear indication of their life philosophy.
We’ve made recommendations and people have ignored them and then someone is
seriously injured, and their attitude is,
‘Well, we can’t win ’em all.’ We don’t want
to do business with people like that.
How do you find and retain the best quality
employees?
I think you have to know what you’re
looking for. When we’re trying to hire people, we look for almost the same things
we’d look for in a good customer — integrity and good character are critical.
You have to start by hiring good people
that are smart and street smart — people
that are proud of their reputation and
know how to get the job done. What we do
is go through an interview process initially
where people are interviewed by anywhere
from 10 to 15 people at our company that
do different jobs. It’s a long process. And if
we really feel that this is someone with the
right characteristics, then we send the person for a full day of testing with a clinical
psychologist for IQ tests and personality
inventories. We’re looking for certain characteristics in a producer, other characteristics in an account manager and different
characteristics in a claim consultant.
If candidates do well, they interview with
me and then with a panel. A series of questions includes how, in their previous job,
they would respond to certain situations so
we can determine if they have the tenacity,
the stick-to-itiveness and the problem-solving abilities that will make them successful. Usually, behavior repeats itself. So if
they give up in certain situations at their
last job, they’ll probably do the same thing
with us.
How does this pay off for a business?
You wouldn’t want to hire people that
aren’t high quality or don’t have a lot of
character.
When you have a great group of quality
people that do a consistently good job and
continuously excel, it develops a reputation that makes it a lot easier to develop
relationships with other good people. Birds
of a feather flock together: a referral from
a bad egg will probably get you another
bad egg — a referral from a quality person
is probably going to lead to another quality
person.
BILL GRAHAM is CEO of The Graham Company. Reach him at
(215) 567-6300 or [email protected].