Place a premium on ambition. In
bad times, you will start to see
some people panic. You’ll start
to see people get to a point
where they don’t know how to
manage downward; they can
only manage when sales are
going up. They can’t manage
when sales are going down,
because it affects them personally and it changes their personalities.
What you find out is that the
people you put in place around
you — you find their limitations
and strengths come to the fore-front. You find that you’re only
as good as the people you surround yourself with.
The people I surround myself
with are people who are consistent, who don’t change their
management styles quarter to
quarter or year to year — people who look long term and
make sure the vision is still in
place. In a bad time, they recognize that things will get better.
If you put 10 people in a
room in a successful company,
and those 10 people don’t have
any drive or ambition or any
leadership skills, if you put
those people in a room and tell
them they are going to run a
new company, [and] if you
give it capital, it will fail.
But if you put 10 people in a
room who are driven and you
give them no capital, they will
figure out a way to succeed.
It’s amazing. So it really comes
down to the quality of the people you hire.
Empower your employees. The
hardest part was taking out parts of the senior management. Of the previous group
that was here, we took out a
significant number — and they
were well entrenched.
We had to really cleanse out
their legacies. People were not
allowed to make decisions on
their own. It was very top-down-driven. It was not management by objective; it was
management by dictatorship.
We unleashed the power of
the people and allowed them to
make decisions. How do you
think your workplace should
be? How should we do these
things? How could we improve
our customer service?
You have to get people who
want to learn, who want to be
more than just accepting a
piece of paper in an ‘in’ basket
and processing it and putting it in their ‘out’ basket. You have
to find people who are willing
to say, ‘I wonder how this company does business? How do
they do things in the credit
area or the sales area or the
funding area?’
For example, our people
knew their department but didn’t know the other positions. To
take those silos away, have
people work more together as
teams and not as departments.
Expose people to those
departments. We started to
rotate people around in the
departments to start to understand how the other departments did business. Once we
did that, we got a whole bunch
of suggestions on how to
change things. That allowed
the process to improve.
HOW TO REACH: Popular Equipment Finance Inc., (636) 779-8206 or www.popfinance.com
