Duane Hickerson wants to
put your name on his
merchandise.
As a partner and founder at
Relay Gear, a promotional
products company, Hickerson
creates partnerships with
clients to design customized
promotional programs, keeping their names front and center.
“You want your customers to
think of you when they want
something in your industry
because they know you’re professional, and you’re providing
value,” he says.
In addition to establishing
customer relationships, he
says a strong infrastructure
and sound financial base are
essential to success, and
Hickerson and his 30 employees have grown sales from
$5.5 million in 2005 to $8.5 million last year.
“It’s a lot of moving parts,”
Hickerson says. “The key is to
get the moving parts to work
together.”
Smart Business spoke with
Hickerson about how to
recover from bad hiring mistakes and how to build a
strong infrastructure to grow
your business.
Q. How do you build a strong
infrastructure?
Get the proper personnel in
the right roles. Most of us in
small business know enough
people that we can find good
people. I’d rather have people
who were recommended than
go out and find people.
If you put an ad today online
or in the newspaper, you get
deluged with responses.
People are very good at making themselves look great on a resume, and some people are
professional interviewers.
We’ve hired that way, and
we’ve found out that their
skills were not what we
thought they were.
Q. How do you recover when
that happens?
Sometimes, it takes awhile
because you keep trying to get
the person to do what you
need them to do. You have to
hold their feet to the fire, and
you have to be honest. If the
person’s not getting it
done, you need to
address it. They can step
up and get it done or
they can’t, and you need
to move them out —
and then try to find the
right person.
Hiring is difficult
because most small
businesses don’t have
HR experts. HR experts
can see some of the danger signals a lot quicker
than we can.
Q. How do you find
people who you are
confident will work out?
We try to find people
through recommendations, and we also use temporary agencies that will screen
applicants for us, and we only
meet the screened people. The
temporary agency knows our
business, our culture and our
personalities, and they get a
feel for who will fit and who
doesn’t fit.
We use it as an outsourced
function. It’s still not a perfect
solution, but it has helped.
If you can prevent the bad
hires, you’re saving yourself a
lot of time, money and
headaches.
Q. How do you create a
sound financial base?
First, you have to have a
good relationship with your
financial institution and your
banker. We use a local business-only bank because they’re
more flexible than a major
bank would be. At a major
bank, if your loan officer happens to leave, the new loan
officer may not like the deal or
may not lend this much money
or might have to change the
deal.
Second, cash flow is critical,
so you need to have good customers that pay timely. If you
do a big job for somebody, and
they don’t pay or drag it out over a long period of time or
complain and find ways to not
pay the whole bill — those are
killers to small business.
We can only fund so much
activity — payroll, payroll taxes,
health insurance and operational invoices. When customers
don’t pay timely, it starts eating
into funding the basic functions
of your business.
You have to manage your
receivables; you cannot let
these companies stretch you
out. A lot of companies will
slow pay, and if you don’t call
them, they figure you really
don’t need the cash. As soon as
customers get past 30 days, you
need to be on them because if
you wait until 60 days, you
probably won’t get the money
for 75 to 90 days, and you go
through all that rigamarole.
Bigger companies can fund
that; little guys can’t.
Q. How can companies fire a
bad customer?
A lot of small businesses
keep trying to do business
with bad customers. A bad
customer doesn’t necessarily
mean that it’s a bad business;
they might be an OK customer
for somebody else, but they
might be a bad customer for
you. You need to evaluate that.
When you call and find out
new information about things
that were wrong, you’ll realize
it’s just not working.
For a salesperson, it’s hard to
walk away, but you have to put
your business hat on and say,
‘These guys are killing us.
They’re too hard to do business
with.’ Just try to get the money
that they do owe you, shake
hands and say, ‘Have a nice life,’
and go on your merry way.
HOW TO REACH: Relay Gear, (888) 735-2943 or www.relaygear.com