Seven years ago, Rick Davis
needed to hire a new chief operating officer for DAVACO Inc.
While most leaders look for
people with five pages of management experience or multiple
graduate degrees from Ivy
League schools, this founder and
CEO took a different approach.
Because his company specializes
in retail services including retrofitting stores and high-volume
rollouts, retail experience was at
the top of Davis’ list.
This was all the more important because Davis himself
lacked this experience, so to
better relate to his clientele and
balance his shortcoming, he
needed someone who understood the inner workings of the
retail industry. He found just
what he was looking for, and
today, the majority of his management team at the $115 million company also has retail
experience.
Smart Business spoke with
Davis about why hiring presents
the biggest roadblock to
growth.
Hire great people. The biggest
challenge we have day in and day
out is just finding great people.
The biggest inhibitor to growth
is hiring. It can be damaging to
hire the wrong people. Our widget is our people, so the quality
of the people that we have out
representing DAVACO is all we
have. If we compromise that, we
compromise the entire company.
Most of our work is done in an
open-store environment. When
you have an open store, our customers are not only the managers of that retail chain, it’s also
their customers. If we don’t give
great customer service, we may
not have that customer.
We are only as good as our last
job or project for a client. If we
are not careful, one employee
who is careless can erase years
of superior service. If you have
employees that are misrepresenting your brand and not meeting
the quality standards that you
have set for the company, then
your business will suffer.
Strength of character is the
most important qualification.
Skills can be taught, but integrity, ethics, loyalty and high standards are inherent qualities.
Hire quality people with good
values and integrity that will do
what they say they’ll do because
I can’t train that. It starts with
evaluating the person’s personality, and then we go to great
lengths to test for everything
from drugs to driving and all the
things that you want to make
sure that someone has the proper abilities to do.
We go through 20 to 30 candidates to find one. It’s important
because of the time and what
you have to go through to train
them once you put them on
board. Hire great people, and go
to great lengths to do it.
If you have to rehire them, it’ll
cost you, so we spend a lot of money upfront trying to make
sure that we hire great people.
Promote from within. Part of the
growth process has been that
we made an effort to promote
from within. We have several
employees in our management
team that have been with the
company since the beginning.
With a business that is growing
quickly, you get the opportunity
to grow the employees with it.
That really helps you on the
growth part. If you’re growing a
company at 35 percent a year,
year over year, it helps that people can deal with change, and
the people that have been within the company and moved up
with the company understand
that change because they’ve
been a part of the company.
They understand where we began and how far we’ve come.
Communicate. You can’t drive
growth and year-over-year success without change. Successful
companies are not static. They
are constantly challenging themselves and their employees to
evolve. We have encouraged
and built a culture within our
company to embrace change.
The best way to foster the idea
of embracing change is to make
sure that you communicate with
your employees. There’s so many
mediums today to communicate
with your people, whether it’s
through a Web site, or we have as
many as 500 BlackBerry devices
throughout our work force that
we communicate through daily.
We have quarterly meetings, a quarterly newsletter, and we go,
semiannually, off-site. It’s simply
to communicate the vision of
the company, where we’re headed, where we’ve been and what
changes we’re going to make.
We even have a Web site
that we use to communicate
benefits. We have a DAVACO
University for training sessions, and we bring in people
to train and communicate
through that medium.
The more communication that
you can give them, the better.
All of that is important because
it assures that everyone in the
company understands our annual goals and is motivated to be a
part of reaching those goals.
Recognize achievements. We’re
about people, so we go to great
lengths to recognize the superstars in our business.
On a monthly and quarterly
basis, we have a companywide
meeting within the office, and
we have a program where any
employee can recognize another employee for going above
and beyond. We go through all
of those and have a quarterly
superstar. At the end of the
year, we have an annual super-star — you get to spend a week
in Hawaii, and you don’t even
have to use your own vacation
time to get there.
Recognizing achievements
within the company are just as
important, if not more important, than monetary rewards.
People like to feel as though
they’re really appreciated. It’s
a good thing.
HOW TO REACH: DAVACO Inc., (877) 732-8226 or www.davacoinc.com