If you decide to do business with Vince Rinaldi, don’t be surprised if you end up having dinner with him. Sure the CEO of National
City Commercial Capital is a busy guy, but he believes that there is no substitute for meeting people in person. So Rinaldi and
his staff make time to ensure that new customers get a face-to-face meeting so that both parties can understand one another
better. With that philosophy driving the lending company and its 380 employees, assets have increased from $3.2 billion in 2004
to more than $6 billion in 2006.
Smart Business spoke with Rinaldi about encouraging employees and meeting people in person.
Break bread with new business. I don’t believe
you’re going to do deals over the phone. I
think we’re badly misled if we think that
people will do deals with us just because
we talk to them over the phone. You better
get out and get in your car, or get on that
plane, and make the call in person.
Your initial contact and your initial relationship are predicated on face-to-face
relations.
I take it upon myself to go out and meet
top customers. I love to do that because
that’s where you find a common ground.
When you break bread with someone and
you look them eye to eye, you can find out
if you can do business with them or not.
And I believe at the end of the day, people
want to do business with people they want
to do business with. I’ve never known a
successful businessman that can beat (his)
competitors and close the big deal without
having a relationship that has been fostered by meeting with someone in person.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that you
become friends, but you become someone
they can count on and can make a phone
call to bounce a problem off of. When they
meet me, they know that they’re working
with me. They see the person.
It gives us a chance to find some common
ground on a secondary level, where they
can trust you. The only way to do that is
face to face.
Give your staff a pat on the back. Even the guys
who make the most money would not
work here just for that. They want to know
they’re doing a good job; they want to be
recognized as a leader.
You have to take that recognition all the
way down to the person doing billing or
collections. You have to take time to recognize all your people.
You have to do it in a way that shows you
appreciate it and that acknowledges they
did a good job, and do so in front of their
peers.
I encourage my managers, if someone is
doing something well, to compliment them
by e-mail and copy me on the e-mail, so
that I have the chance to send a direct
e-mail to that person acknowledging that they’ve done a great job. Or I can take the
time to stop by and tell them how much we
appreciate their work. Or I can call them
up and make sure that they know that I
know they’ve done a good job. That’s why
people come to work.
If you have to spend eight or nine hours a
day at work, that’s part of the enjoyment,
and that’s how you keep people motivated.
The recognition at all levels is important
just to keep people.
Give employees something to work for. The
main thing I tell people is you have to want
to work here and you have to enjoy working here. That means I have to provide the
environment where they can have fun.
Now fun to people is different things. I
think for most people it’s having a place
where they can build on their strengths,
not try to fix their weaknesses. If you can
find those strengths and capitalize and
motivate them with those, and help them
get better at what they do, they’ll be happy.
Use wins to share the vision. People want to
be part of a successful organization, and
when our people see our rankings move up
every year, and see us taking deals from the
competition, it’s sharing those stories and
sharing the winning, and being a winning
organization.
It’s a matter of sharing that vision with
people and making sure I’m doing a good job of selling that vision every day. That it’s
something we support in monthly and
quarterly meetings when we tell people
where we are going. We tell people what’s
happening to the company, we talk about
wins.
Know who you want to hire. We start by trying
to define what we want. When you say people and hiring, you have to define where,
what, when. What are they going to do,
what are you looking for?
What we try to do is find the strengths
that we want in a particular position. Then,
when we’re looking for people, we try to
focus on those strengths. When we start
interviewing people, we try to find out if
they have those strengths.
We ask a varied group of people to sit in on
the interviews. If someone comes in for a job
in credit, they’ll meet with someone from
credit, but they’ll also meet with people from
administrative. They’ll meet with some of
our salespeople. Everybody has to get along,
and we have to be able to call impromptu
meetings very quickly to get a win.
We try to have interdisciplinary interviews to see how they fit with the group to
see if they make sense, to see if they’re
grounded, they’re consistent. And then we
can all give our input at the end of the day.
It’s good for the candidates, too, because
it gives them a varied view of the company.
It lets them know more about what they’re
getting into, so the chances of keeping
them and keeping the turnover down are
very good.
In general, if I’m hiring a salesperson, our
salespeople meet with our credit people.
Our credit people want to know that
they’re dealing with someone that has
some experience and knows what it’s all
about.
On the same hand, the salesman wants to
know that he has a credit person with good
ears or that can process that transaction at
the right expectation level. It’s about knowing what you’re buying and what you’re
getting into.
HOW TO REACH: National City Commercial Capital, (800) 559-2755 or www.nc-4.com