Tom Moore may not be the
mother of invention at his company, but he is the father of
quality.
Moore, CEO of Cord Blood
Registry, founded the company
with his daughter in 1995 with
the idea of creating a company
that collects and stores the
stem-cell-rich blood from a
newborn’s umbilical cord. That
concept put them on the map,
and there was one business lesson Moore immediately applied
at CBR: Quality comes first in
everything.
“If you don’t have quality, you
end up being a commodity; you
can’t differentiate,” Moore says.
“I learned a long time ago that a
very high-quality company is
less expensive than a company
that continues to make mistakes.”
So as CBR has grown to more
than $100 million in annual
revenue, Moore has built the
company’s employee base carefully, getting to 300 employees one quality person at a
time.
Smart Business spoke with
Moore about how to hold people accountable for quality and
why building a business is like
opening a paint tin.
Don’t add people until you’re good
and ready. I’ve always likened
starting a business to taking
the top off a paint tin. To take
that top off, you can kind of
wrench it off in one fell
swoop, and you end up with
paint all over the place, or you
go around that tin lid two or
three times with incremental
movement.
You need to add people, but
if you try to do it in one fell
swoop, you’ll end up failing
and creating a problem that
you’ll then have to clean up.
So our progress is incremental, and as you do that, you are
developing people who understand the business inside of
the business.
So you really have to want to
add a slot, you have to justify
it. As you add people, if you
add them too fast, it’s back to
the paint tin analogy; you can
lose process because you have
new people reporting to new
people reporting to new people, and all of the sudden,
you’ve lost culture. So that’s
something you always have to
keep a vigilant eye on, and the
best way to manage that is
head-count control.
As we look at adding new
positions, we say, ‘Why are we
really doing this, what value is
that going to add, and is it really required?’ because if you’re
just bringing in another body,
so to speak, it doesn’t really
add value, it adds more complexity. Whenever you bring in
a lot of people all at the same
time, you risk losing your culture, losing your processes and
losing what you’re all about.
And it’s not that those people
don’t try to do the best job
possible, they do, but they’re
all from different backgrounds
and companies, so they make
up their own processes.
