When it comes time for
Shelly Sun to hire a
new employee at BrightStar Healthcare LLC,
she’s done plenty of research
to help her reach a decision
with her team.
That’s because the founder
and CEO spends months —
sometimes even a year — networking to find the perfect
match for her $12 million
health care franchising company. And almost everyone she
knows hears about her hunt for
the smartest people in the field.
“It’s about talking to as many
people as possible,” she says.
Smart Business spoke with
Sun about hiring employees and
creating a culture that keeps the
business running smoothly,
even when she’s on vacation.
Q. How do you create a
culture that keeps the
company running smoothly?
I wouldn’t have been ready to
put this culture into my company three years ago. I’ve evolved
there by putting together an
advisory board of people that
are smarter than me and having to listen to them to be the
most successful.
Really look at the core functional areas of the company
and who your department
head is for that and have them
put together their own strategic plans for their division and
present it to all their fellow
team members. And as hard as
it is, don’t say anything. If I
start interjecting my opinion,
it’s going to be Shelly’s strategic plan for their department,
not their strategic plan for
their department.
I intentionally don’t attend
some interim meetings because everybody’s looking to take a
cue from the CEO. If I’m
squashing it or asking questions
as though I don’t support it,
everybody else will follow suit.
I want to have my say at the
ninth step of 10 in the process,
but having my say in steps one
through three means nothing
happens in four through eight
other than what I already
came up with.
Q. How do you find those
self-starters for your team?
The old saying, ‘Hire
slow; fire fast,’ is probably one of the smartest
sayings ever created. I
don’t know who said it
first, but it’s probably
one of the best guiding
principles in any organization at any level.
I think that when you
rush it, you hire the
wrong people. You hire
out of desperation versus true fit.
Assess your own culture. For any CEO,
depending on what their
culture is — if it’s a
more formal culture,
then they want to look
to network people that
are more formal, and
not everybody will be, so that’s
why I start early. Any hiring
manager should start early.
It’s always a stronger hire to
network (with others) to a hire
than find them cold because
you can find out true information about them. Because I’ve
gotten them as a reference from
someone, and that someone
knew them typically in some
kind of work setting, I can find
out what makes them tick.
That’s important information
you can’t get by calling the
human resources department.
