Q. How do you determine which employees to keep
and which ones to let go?
It’s an awful lot of hours and
time and effort and meeting
with people.
Meeting with prior managers
to get a good understanding of
the skill set of the people that
you’re bringing on. Hopefully
when you go into the acquisition, you have a very good
understanding of the skill set of
the people you have on board
already.
It’s spending time with the people, whether it’s the CEO
or the people that he trusts, to
really build the team to move
the company forward. You’re
going to make mistakes, but
you do the best you can out of
the process.
It’s pretty simple to make the
decisions on a small portion of
the employees. I think it’s pretty much a consensus — and I
think that’s true with almost
every company — they have
some people that probably just
shouldn’t be there.
Then you run into the group that it’s just a very difficult
process [to evaluate them].
You just take your time and
get to know those people, and you get to know their work and
how they do. Then you make
the final cuts once you have a
clear understanding of their
ability to do the job.
You can’t help but get
employees involved. We sit
down with every single
employee of the company
being acquired. Obviously, they
start speaking of other people,
so by default, you get an awful
lot of input from employees.
They have a clarity in their
mind of who they want to
work with. We don’t have to
ask. They come in and say,
‘Hey’ — and it’s on the positive
as much as it is on the negative
— ‘Boy, this is a fantastic eye;
we need to keep them.’
Q. How do you make a
smooth transition for people?
It goes back to listening to your
employees, being very open and
very candid with the employees
and saying, ‘This is what we
know about you. This is what
you can bring to the table. Tell
us what you think is different.’
Then give them a chance to go
through the process.
I think the key is to get people
comfortable and working
together as quickly as possible.
We have intermixed the people from both companies quite a
bit. That is really beneficial, just
letting them work together.
These are people that they’ve
been working against for years
and years and years, and all of
a sudden, all the myths that
these people aren’t at the same
level, you have to break down
those barriers. The only way
you can do that is show the
competency of the people you
brought on board from the
other company.
HOW TO REACH: Sign Craft Industries, (317) 842-8664 or www.signcraftind.com
