Mike McVean’s father
was a McDonald’s franchisee, and McVean learned a lot in the 10 years he
worked for him.
For example, when someone
asked his father for something,
he always said, “Thank you,”
and employees did the same,
so that customers always
heard that in the background,
making their experience at the
restaurant more pleasant.
“I thought that was pure
genius, so when people ask
me to do something, I say,
‘Thank you’ to them,” says
McVean, who is co-founder
and co-managing partner of
Stream Realty Parners LP,
along with Lee Belland.
Constantly thanking his
225 employees at the real
estate investment, development and services company
shows respect, he says, which
builds trust.
Smart Business spoke with
McVean about how he finds
great people to work for his
company and how he builds
trust with them.
Q. How do you grow
a business?
You need exceptional people
that are trained, capable and
empowered to do their job.
Real estate is our trade, but
we’re really in the people business.
Our whole game is bringing in
great people and helping them
succeed. Every time they move
up the ladder, we move up the
ladder. When we first started the
company, Lee and I literally did
everything. When we hired a
person to do each new task, we
moved up to another role that
was even better than what we were in before.
Give them everything you’ve
got — your influence, your
contacts, your credibility in
the marketplace, your credit-worthiness in the capital marketplace. We want to give all
of our people everything that
we have. Every gift we’ve
given to somebody else has
come back to us times two.
Q. How do you get exceptional people whom you’re
willing to trust with those
things?
We’re looking for four
qualities — smart, honest,
nice and passionate. We
felt like, for both people
we knew inside and outside our company, those
embodied the majority of
the reasons they were
successful.
Assessing talent is a talent in and of itself. It’s a
natural gift, like a good
golf swing. Some people
have it, and some people
don’t.
Look at their transcripts
from school to see how
smart they are and examples of their written work
and the spreadsheets
they’ve done that demonstrate
their financial knowledge. Talk
to people that know them. It’s a
myriad of questions that aim to
get at where they’re coming from
— what their motivations are,
how they feel about themselves,
how they should treat others.
You start off with a first
impression of a person, and
then you generally seek to confirm that you’re right or show
that you’re wrong. We typically
employ a group decision-making process when adding people to the team. Those folks all
come to a collective decision.
Q. Why is a collaborative
process important?
Group decisions are better
than individual decisions. That
goes to one of the core strengths
and reasons we’ve been successful. Lee and I make every decision collectively. We have two
very different perspectives and
ways of looking at things.
Over time, it has shown that
with both of our input, we make
pretty darn good decisions. The
good news is those decisions have kept us in the middle of the
road and out of the bar ditch.
The bad news is you have to
look at yourself and say, ‘Gosh, I
thought I was the world’s greatest businessperson, but now I
know, at the ripe old age of 45,
that I need my partner, Lee, and,
in some cases, other people’s input, to make sound decisions.’
Q. Once a decision is made,
how do you communicate it?
In a number of ways — e-mails,
posting in the lunchroom, that
sort of thing, but I say the key to
our intracompany communication is our office layout. No one
has any offices; we’re all out in
the open.
Everybody can hear everything I’m saying and see everything I’m doing. My desk is an
open template. If anyone wants
to look at anything I’m working
on, they can freely walk up and
do so.
How else are they going to
know what I’m doing unless I
spend a whole lot of time downloading to them what I’m doing?
We didn’t make this magic up —
we’re copying this from the man
who hired us into the business.
It worked great for him, and it
works great for us. If you can’t
trust people, you got a whole
host of other problems.
Q. How do you build that
trust with people?
I’m as dumb as a stump — I’ll
trust anybody. Lee is different
than me. He waits until trust is
earned and gained.
The way trust is earned and
gained is through time and
working with others. You have
to work with somebody for a
period of time, and there has to
be a few opportunities to better
themselves at your expense, and
they don’t take those opportunities — that’s when trust is built.
That can be anything from
making themselves look good …
to taking credit for something
they didn’t do.
HOW TO REACH: Stream Realty Partners LP, (214) 267-0400 or www.streamrealty.com