Timothy A. Blett didn’t want to leave college. From the intellectual stimulation to his time on the baseball field as a collegiate
athlete, he loved the whole experience, so when it came time to enter the real world, Blett decided that he’d take the fundamentals
that made him successful as a student athlete into the advertising field. Now the president of Doner Advertising Co.’s Newport
Beach office, Blett pushes more than 110 employees to use a student mentality to study their clients while convincing the
employees to employ an athlete mentality to stay on top of their game. Smart Business spoke with Blett about how to find self-starters and why you get two points for an idea but eight for its execution.
Be a student of your industry. The student part
is the insatiable need to learn more about
everything. It’s based on a curiosity, and that
leads to a sincere list of questions that allows
you to get to know the people that you need
to know: your employees, your colleagues,
business partners, whatever the case may be.
The need and desire to know not only
about them and their businesses but about
what is impacting their businesses, what’s
influencing change in business, leads to
knowing about trends and what is motivating purchase decisions and certain behaviors and certain actions.
Raise the bar for yourself first. It’s about commitment; it’s about the relentless pursuit of
perfection. I raise the bar on myself higher
than any of my colleagues, and they recognize that. So, I’m not just asking them to
jump higher than is possible; they witness
me trying to jump higher than is possible.
Environment plays such a key role in motivation. It’s just like working out at home versus working out at the gym. When you have
a bunch of people around you, pushing
hard, it’s a completely different environment. When you come here and get a sense
of the leadership of this organization pushing hard, and not just pushing hard, but
everybody participates and works together,
it helps you feel attached to this cause.
Build your culture with students and self-starters. The culture of this company is we
want to create ideas, so you’re going to start
with who you hire. There are going to be
certain characteristics of these people, and
one is that they are going to be a self-starter.
When you were playing football, the
coach would throw a ball out onto the
field, and everybody was supposed to stop
what they were doing and jump on the
loose ball. That kind of instinct, knowing
one group is heavy under pressure, but
they’re walking over and saying, ‘What can
I do to help?’ as opposed to saying, ‘That’s
not my job.’ You can preach that all day
long, but if you’re talking to a self-starter,
they’re going, ‘Yeah, I get it, keep your eye
on the loose ball.’
Second, you want someone who wants to
learn. You dig in to why certain experiences
were important, what they got out of those
experiences, how they learned from those
experiences. I just interviewed a candidate,
and when I walked up to the interview, she
handed me The New York Times and said,
‘Have you read this article this morning? It’s
very relevant to what we’re going to be talking about.’ The first thing I told other people
about her is, ‘Now, there’s a student.’
Make sure your people are on top of their game.
We encourage people to be on top of their
game, and that goes back to the student
piece. You have to read, read, read and read
more. Then you have to go experience,
experience, experience.
If we’re working with a surf brand or
pitching a hotel chain or a pet food supplier, we need to go through that experience
and absorb it. Being on top of your game is
the study of all things. It comes from experience and staying on top of late-breaking
news.
When you’re on top of your game, it helps
personal growth because you become a
subject-matter expert, and when somebody is a subject-matter expert, they can
walk around pretty proud and excited.
When that’s happening, business grows.
When our people are on top of their game,
and our client’s business grows, that word spreads, and then we’re solicited to help
other people grow their businesses.
Lead with positive energy. The thing we stress
is that positive energy breeds positive energy, and negative energy breeds negative
energy, and we have a zero-tolerance policy for negative energy. My role is to inspire
great thinking and to provide an environment that encourages it and rewards it.
We have live agency newsletters where
we are able to share the work that everybody’s been working on and call specific
people out for it. We highlight people
where a deadline was changed, and
maybe they had to work all through a holiday, we make sure to bring that to the
attention of their peers and also for me to
acknowledge that.
We also do ‘time outs.’ We’ll meet just 15
minutes with a smaller group, and we’ll sit
down and have some Jamba Juice brought
in and acknowledge the great work that
project team or department has pulled off
recently.
I try to do that in a very timely manner,
based on the performance. There’s no question that having my finger on the pulse of
what is going on and being able to acknowledge it is a key part of why the reward is
effective, why it adds to building the culture,
because if you do it six weeks later, the execution didn’t work. So, that’s something
where you get two points for the idea but
eight points for that timely execution.
Fix problems without pointing fingers. When
we run into a problem, I’m going to bring
the team together and I’m not going to
blame anyone, I’m going to focus on fixing
it because what’s done is done. Once we
get it fixed, we’ll then circle back and audit
our process and procedures to make sure
that everything is intact.
In that time, where somebody is expecting to get chewed out and you don’t, you
assure them that you’re going to throw the
proper resources to fix it, it builds incredible loyalty.
HOW TO REACH: Doner Advertising Co., (949) 623-4310 or
www.donerus.com