Mike Marcon didn’t want to fail when he launched Equity Risk Partners Inc. over a pizza with his wife back in October 2000. But he wasn’t afraid of disappointment either.
“I said, ‘I’m about to bet the house that I’m going to be able to build this company, and if it doesn’t work, we’re going to lose the house,’” Marcon says. “My wife looked at me and said, ‘That’s not why I married you. I didn’t marry you for the house. If we lose the house, we’ll go live in an apartment, and you’ll go do it all over again. So go do this and don’t worry about it.’ Ever since then, it’s given me the freedom to swing for the fences.”
That freedom gave the founder and CEO the positive energy he needed to make the financial services firm a success. Now with 45 employees, Marcon’s biggest challenge is making sure his people are ready to keep growing.
Smart Business spoke with Marcon about how to help your people keep pace with you and what to do when they no longer can.
Be upfront with people. Being able to continue to grow and develop the firm and attract the talent you need to continue to thrive without abdicating the responsibility you have to the people who were there with you on day one and still making them feel part of the overall success of the enterprise, that’s a significant challenge.
As we grow the firm, we might add a division or add a new practice group, and as those people come into the firm, they are used to being senior leaders where they came from. Are they going to displace the existing senior leader? How do you get them to work together? Obviously, in this type of environment, you need all the oars pulling in the same direction.
One of the things I pulled out of one of Jack Welch’s books was brutal honesty. Be upfront with them, be direct, and that solves a lot of problems. I’ve learned to not tap dance around these issues.
I sit down with my colleagues and I say, ‘Here’s the issue, here’s what we’re dealing with, and here’s why I want to bring this other person in. They’re not better than you or superior to you, but they are bringing this skill set and this business acumen, and we need to find a place for them. In order to do that, this is what I need you to do.’
Explain your plan. In our business in particular, insurance brokerage and insurance agencies, there tends to be a lot of firms that start up only to be sold a short time later and get merged into a larger business when the principals cash out.
It’s hard to get people vested emotionally and intellectually into a long-term business plan if they think the owner is going to cash out in three to five years. One of the things I repeat constantly is, ‘We are eight years into a 100-year history.’ I make it loud and clear to everybody that the firm isn’t going anywhere.