Keep working hard
The culture is part of a leadership philosophy where a company constantly strives to get better and its leader does not get caught up in reading about how good he or she is doing at running the business.
“Nothing breeds failure like success,” Epsten says. “You have to stay hungry. You have to constantly challenge the organization and constantly run it as though you are an underdog. The business landscape is littered with yesterday’s success stories.
“By nature, I tend to look for what goes wrong. It’s one of the fears that I have in success. There are always threats lurking around the corner for any business. Our job is to try and figure out what those are and work around them and try to mitigate them.”
Epsten says he walks around the office on a regular basis to interact with his employees and keep the lines of communication open, looking and listening for opportunities and threats.
Whenever he can, Epsten says he will arrange a face-to-face meeting. If that isn’t possible, he says a phone call and even a voice mail is a more effective and more personal way of getting his message across than e-mail.
“In a culture where hopefully everybody is moving in the same direction, the need for the written word, e-mail or memos is not needed as much,” Epsten says. “What’s more important is speed and informality. Our managers can pick up the phone and leave a voice mail — say, for instance, in St. Louis — and talk to 100 sales-people all at the same time. They can not only listen to his words, but they can hear his tone or inflection, as well. For our field sales-people, they don’t even have e-mail.”
He says this regular interaction along with the opportunity to be involved in the larger decisions of the company is not only beneficial to today’s businesses, but it is something that younger employees are looking for in today’s world.
“They want to be a part of something in everything that they do, including their job and where they work,” Epsten says. “To be part of not only a company but also a community, as well.
“We encourage, and, in fact, we have initiatives in all our offices to become involved in the community.”
Whether it’s getting involved with a Meals-on-Wheels program to deliver food on Thanksgiving and the holidays or helping out a local school with supplies at the start of a new school year, phil-anthropic deeds tend to pay off in multiple ways.
“It’s amazing how ultimately somebody that I can run across one day in the community, the next day, I’m involved with in a business relationship,” Epsten says.