When Bob Dean started Dean & Draper Insurance Agency LP some 30 years ago, he started from scratch. Those days are long done, and as the company has grown, he’s had the challenge of keeping the small business environment with the demands of a larger company.
“That’s been a very difficult task,” says the founder, president and CEO of the insurance agency, which posted about $13 million in 2008 revenue. “But you’ve got to continuously work at it to do it.”
Dean and his team established principles that the entire company will try to accomplish as a way of keeping everyone on the same page and avoid departments breaking into silos.
“If you isolate yourself into too many little silos of operation where no one is communicating with each other, then they all have separate goals and it just doesn’t work,” he says. “So we try to keep the communication flowing.”
Smart Business spoke with Dean about how to delegate and how to set goals.
Encourage delegation. I do it by empowering my managers and delegating to them, and in our management meetings, we have one every Wednesday, I’ve told them several times about delegation as far as getting the most out of your folks. I tell a story about when I was in high school. I was a high school quarterback and I said, ‘If I handed the ball to somebody on a play and I didn’t turn loose the ball and I had to tell them what to do, like turn here, turn there, run or whatever, then how are they ever going to be able to use their natural talent?’ You’ve got to turn loose the ball and let the people’s natural talent happen. So I try to encourage it through my managers and then hopefully that filters down to where the people … feel empowered to perform their job because they are all professionals.