Ask Gary Chodes about the
dangers of speed, and
he’ll tell you the only danger is not going fast enough. As
founder and CEO of Oasis Legal
Finance LLC, he operates at a
breakneck pace to drive the 85-person legal financing firm to
the head of the industry with
2007 revenue of $20 million.
But Chodes is careful not to
blur the line between rapidity
and risk in the process. He’s
implemented speed as a cultural
tenet that’s founded based on
careful and cautious study.
“First, you have to believe that
speed is going to help,” he says.
“We’ve studied that, and we
continuously study that.”
Smart Business spoke with
Chodes about how to put the
pedal to the metal while avoiding some of the obstacles along
the way.
Q. What are the keys to
maintaining speed in business?
Consumers often will have
lots of options that they can get
to through the Internet and the
television. One of the things you
have to do is get their attention
quickly, and then you have to
move quickly before they move
on to something else.
Be responsive to the consumer right away. Take the call
right away as opposed to going
into messaging. Have an efficient call center with reasonable wait times.
Having a rapid cycle time in
terms of completing a transaction with the consumer is critical. You have to be able to
move quickly, or they will disappear.
Q. How do you develop that
rapid cycle time?
It would be a function of how
sophisticated the call center technology is, how well the reps are
trained, how good the scripting
is to get as quickly as possible
to, ‘Is this a candidate that we
can help or is this a customer
that we won’t be able to help?’
You want to make sure that
the application is simple, one
that you can do quickly and one
that you can really tell on the
phone within just a few minutes
whether or not it’s somebody
you’re likely able to help. If
you’re likely able to help, you
get them to the next stage. If
you’re not likely, you
(weed) them out of the
process.
Q. How do you communicate that need for
speed in the workplace?
The first thing that you
have to do at the executive level is have some
data about your own business to prove that it helps.
We took a sample of
transactions of about
4,500 customers in a
recent time period. Then
we looked at the likelihood that we would be
able to help them.
When we were taking a
month to deal with a consumer, we were 20 times
more efficient if we instead
cycled them in one day, and we
were 10 times as efficient if we
instead cycled them in the first
week.
Once the executive team,
who presumably is helping you
manage the operation and is
responsible for the employees,
once they buy in to it, then you
can get into the mode of communicating that down to the
employees who are actually
going to do the process.
Q. How do you get buy-in
from lower-level employees?
We would share the data
about how efficient we are
when we’re fast, and then how
slow we are when we’re taking a long time.
The vast majority of it is
informal face-to-face team
meetings with team leaders
and team members. Frequent
communication of the results
— typically, how we did every
day and certainly at the end of
each week.
Q. Do incentives help in this
process?
We reward them for the
absolute number of transactions they close in a given
month. There’s some scoring
for quality, but the primary
attributes are how many you
convert out of a base number.
We’re measuring that frequently, (so employees are) going to
see their results every day and
every week.
We provide a financial incentive for hitting stretch goals at
two levels. The employees involved in the process know very
specifically to the week within
the month how they’re doing
relative to the things we’re measuring. They can see that they
have a direct impact on achieving those levels. They see that
there’s a direct financial incentive at the end of the month.
Q. What advice do you have
for others regarding speed?
You’ve got to get the measurement tools in place to
measure your business process in terms of the cycle, and
then obviously breaking it
down into the component
parts. You can’t just measure
speed. You actually have to
spend time to study your
process to understand how
long it’s taking. Conduct an
analysis of how well you do
when you’re process moves
faster or slower.
The last step is to remove
the steps that are barriers or
are unnecessary or only come
up some of the time that lead
to (a longer) cycle time. It’s
not just saying, ‘I have to be
fast for the sake of speed.’
HOW TO REACH: Oasis Legal Finance LLC, (877) 333-6675 or www.oasislegal.com