Remote Workforce, Close-Knit Culture
With 43 percent of all Americans now working remotely, according to Gallup, many businesses are dealing with the problem of maintaining company culture with employees who might never be in the same place at the same time. The trend presents an interesting challenge for Evergreen companies that make putting People First a central part of their business philosophy. But for us it’s more than an interesting challenge — it’s critical.
At my four-year-old hospital staffing company, CT Assist, we have 10 administrative employees working remotely full-time and about 40 “travelers.” Our travelers are cardiac- and orthopedic-surgery physician assistants, nurse practitioners and perfusionists who fill in at hospitals that are short-staffed. We hire the full-time travelers as W-2 employees, and the hospitals then enlist CT Assist to provide the service. We are registered and operate in over 20 states, so this means our folks are often on the move as they travel to standard 13-week assignments.
From the very beginning, my partner, Scott Yoder, and I wanted to make sure our Evergreen company lived up to the People First principle. We created the company because we saw many talented physician assistants leaving cardiac surgery because they were burned out. Our goal was to make CT Assist a better place to work — to provide people who have chosen this career with jobs, schedules and lives that they love. We are their voice in negotiating rates and preferred work hours. We attract great candidates with benefits like vacation time for our travelers (not standard in our industry), excellent health insurance, matching 401(k), and ongoing training and educational opportunities.
When your team is highly dispersed across half the country and has little reason for routine interaction, how do you ensure your company values are being upheld across all employee and customer experiences?
First and foremost, our culture prioritizes relationships, so the office staff is on the road a lot getting to know our travelers. We visit them at their assigned hospitals to make sure their working experience is ideal. We take them out for dinner or drinks — whatever they want to do in order to build up our personal connection. This is how we learned that one of our employees had been placed in a miserable apartment situation. CT Assist immediately found a new housing assignment for this person and cut our losses. It’s good for people who might be in a new state every couple of months, in temporary housing, to have that connection and to know that we’re a team that has their best interest in mind.
In order to make sure everyone in the office is aligned and connected, we all join a 10- to 20-minute call every single morning, no matter where we are. We share wins and worries, a quote of the day and even a few laughs. It’s also good for the team to hear us praising decisions that were made where someone at CT Assist did the right thing — not for profit, but to support our provider or customer. After all, that’s how cultural values are disseminated and hopefully then emulated.
The application Slack has helped us lose the formality of emails and the multiple phone calls required to communicate with a dispersed staff. As counterintuitive as it sounds, the various channels Slack provides are great for quick conversations, which has improved communication and offered an instant team connection and understanding even to new staff.
We just launched a company email newsletter. It’s still in the early stages, but I think it will, again, help with bridging the distance between us. I love the idea of people seeing pictures of each other and hearing their stories. It helps people feel less isolated on assignment.
Something else we recently implemented is called Intentional Engagements. If someone goes above and beyond in their work, we send them a gift card, flowers to their spouse if they are traveling, or a simple thank-you note. It’s just another way of showing people that while they may be doing most of their work, they are very much part of our team, and we appreciate their diligence.
Our methods to keep our employees connected will surely keep evolving. Right now we host semiannual retreats for our office staff, but perhaps we’ll one day be able to do this for everyone.
The biggest challenge for us as we grow is empowering our newer managers with the ability to make People First decisions. Often, these folks are coming from bigger companies with less employee-oriented cultures. We believe the best way for them to learn is by showing — and all the techniques I’ve mentioned help even remote managers clue in to our relationship-based culture.
At the end of the day, we have strengthened the sustainability of surgery programs across the country. But we have also sustained a strong Evergreen company, even as our network expands throughout the nation.
Jairemy Drooger is the Co-founder & COO of CT Assist.
Encouraging My Employees to Take Risks Has Paid Off for My Evergreen Company
Although I’m an introvert by nature, I’ve always worked hard to push myself outside of my comfort zone. I initially trained to be an engineer, but when I was 25 years old I switched paths and went to business school to become an entrepreneur instead. I spoke no Spanish, but when the opportunity arose in 2000 for me to move to Barcelona for my wife’s job, I gave up a partnership in a consulting company I co-founded and jumped at the life opportunity — a huge risk for someone saddled with a mountain of school debt just starting a family.
But those risks have always paid off.
In Barcelona, I pragmatically took up writing a manual on project management for the security industry (my entrepreneurial field when I was in the U.S.), but soon noticed there were no boutique hotels in one of Europe’s coolest cities. So I took a risk and tried to start a boutique hotel.
Meanwhile, one of my contacts from writing the project management manual was a California businessman who was running a 13-person security agency with no exit strategy. That contact led me to my greatest risk of all: In 2005, I told him to give me 100 percent control of the company on day one, and I would buy him out in 10 years.
This was the risk that would consume the rest of my professional life. I turned that business into Northland Controls, an Evergreen company that installs, integrates and manages security programs for companies around the world. We have 260 employees and will bring in $75 million this year. Much of our growth comes from Pragmatic Innovation. To spur that innovation, I’ve encouraged our people to take their own risks as often as possible.
When I first came on as CEO, I wasn’t sure how to instill a risk-taking ethos in a group of grown adults. Conference-room icebreakers didn’t seem quite right. Then, almost by accident, an employee showed me the way.
In 2008, I asked one of my technicians to go to India to oversee a project there. He was initially horrified by the poverty and seemed like a fish out of water. But within three days, he adapted so well that he would convince the tuk-tuk drivers to let him drive to the project site, with them in the back seat. At some point, he discovered that there was a 2,000-kilometer tuk-tuk race across the country, so I sponsored him to enter. It built his self-confidence and showed him that he could survive without any sort of technology. It also made him eager to explore the world on behalf of Northland. In one year he traveled to 25 countries.
This was just the beginning. I realized that trips and challenges like this communicate to our employees that Northland encourages and honors people who are willing to take huge risks. It has also helped us expand internationally as our employees have immersed themselves in other cultures in ways our competitors would never consider.
Since then, I have sent people to rural Uganda and Rwanda to help install solar panels, and to Armenia, the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic and Georgia to ride 4x4s in the Caucasus Mountains, as well as to the American Southwest to expose our folks to the American can-do spirit. We’re heading to Nepal in 2018. Of course, not everyone is up for a rugged trip to rural Africa — and I understand that. Recently we worked with GRID Alternatives on a “solarthon” day in the Bay Area, where 10 of our people installed solar panels for a low-income family in Menlo Park. We are now working with GRID Alternatives on a project every six months. All of these experiences, which often include a humanitarian aspect, are designed to encourage risk-taking.
Not only do these challenges, which are all voluntary, help our people step into uncomfortable situations and learn to expand their horizons — they also help them bond. Employees of all levels must work together as equals. It’s a really amazing experience that encourages everyone to trust each other.
It’s also helped us grow our company’s bottom line. After crossing the Caucasus, our appropriately risk-averse CFO took on the risk of building up our overhead, a painful decision that nonetheless has allowed us to scale up the rest of the business. After a tuk-tuk trip in India, my managers realized the importance of picking up a phone and talking to the locals rather than sending endless emails with instructions. That mindshift has translated to us having a stellar record for getting our work done on schedule in a country where deadlines are notoriously difficult to meet. And after trekking through Rwanda, one of our technicians was able to talk to and bond with colleagues from across the different disciplines in our company, and realized he wanted to be an application engineer. When we got back, he got a chance, and within a year was embedded with one of our clients (a well-known social media company), and quickly became a crucial part of our value to the client.
I have a team of people who are very close and who are comfortable in any sticky situation, no matter the country. That’s a vital advantage in the security industry, where we work with fast-moving customers and rapidly changing technologies.
In my life I’ve written two great business plans and gone out looking for money twice — once with a plan to write apps on PDAs (the clunky precursors to smartphones) and once for my hotel in Barcelona. From those experiences I realized that I am not good at selling myself and convincing people to invest in my ideas.
But I was able to use the knowledge I gleaned from those experiences to build Northland Controls. We have grown the company to $75 million in 12 years and we did it with no business plan, no sales and marketing people for the first 10 years, and no cost controls. Those are the kind of things that would have driven investors crazy. I’m happy not to have to worry about that.
Pierre Trapanese is the CEO and owner of Northland Controls
How Pragmatic Innovation Helped Me Save My Faltering Company
I’m an accidental CEO. I stepped into this position four years ago when the company I was working for, Wall-tech, almost went out of business.
At the time, I was a minority stockholder and vice president. Wall-tech, which specializes in framing, drywalling and finishing, had been hit hard by the recession. We depend on new construction for much of our business, and as everyone remembers, new construction all but dried up after the housing bubble burst. The situation was dire and our board of directors was weighing liquidating the company. But I loved Wall-tech and couldn’t bear to see its 100 employees let go.
So I begged the majority stockholders for a chance to turn things around. They gave me three months.
Instead of giving in to the panic I felt, I moved into survival mode. My background was in architecture and construction, not business management. So I hired a good accountant and a CFO to help me figure out a plan. I pulled every penny out of my savings account and lined up a few personal loans, a business loan and an operating loan. I managed to cobble together around $2 million, enough to buy out the three former partners and keep all the employees on staff.
And then my real work began.
The buyout happened in the spring of 2013, and in order to get another bank loan that fall, we were going to need to show a good financial report card. Wall-tech had operated the way a lot of small businesses do, without a contingency plan. But now, in the midst of a financial crisis, I had to develop a plan that I could quickly implement and easily execute. Of course, execution is the hard part.
So I embraced a new concept for the company: Evergreen. In particular, I started promoting the Evergreen principles of Pragmatic Innovation and Profit. I looked at what was really going on in the company and I used that information to help me make decisions about the future.
I started with forecasting and strategic planning so that we could see where the company was headed over the next five to 10 years. Wall-tech was full of great people but had some underperforming divisions that looked like they could eventually sink the company. So we made the tough decision to downsize by cutting those divisions way back and selling most of the equipment to make sure we’d have no temptation to return those lines of business to that size again.
But the team strategy and forecasting meetings also revealed some promising news. It looked like there would be major labor shortages in the construction industry when the economy picked up, which would ultimately impact our customers’ ability to meet schedule demands. We decided to take a crack at the prefabrication-building-components division because the ready-made structures would allow us to adhere to our schedule and maintain our commitments. We were able to jump into the market with both feet and have been very successful there.
I’ve long been a devotee of Jack Stack’s Great Game of Business, so I implemented some of his teachings right away. Inspired by his open-book management ideas, we started doing financial-literacy training. Our company is spread across three states, so it can be hard to communicate sometimes. We set up a better system to keep key employees aware of our finances on an ongoing basis so they could make smarter decisions that would help our bottom line.
I also decided we should move to a Stack-inspired employee-ownership model. We made all of our office workers, foremen, superintendents and subforemen part of the employee-ownership plan, which was hard at first. Most of these folks would have been happier with cash than with stock, and some thought it was just a trick to make them work harder.
To make them more comfortable, I hired coaches from Jack Stack’s Great Game of Business to work with us. They helped us set up management teams where people could slowly become more involved in decision-making. We also started doing quarterly leadership meetings to encouraged people to step up and take responsibility.
Something else that really made a difference after the buyout was taking the politics out of the good-ol’-boys network. We got rid of nepotism, which was a terrible morale killer for many years, and made everyone’s job performance based.
It hasn’t always been an easy process. About two years ago, we had to lay people off. We lost track of our growth — it’s tough in our industry to always gauge where and when workers are needed — and committed ourselves to much better forecasting of seasonality and a better long-term mix of core versus seasonal employees. And of course, we then had to rebuild trust among the employees, which takes years. We don’t want to make that mistake again.
I remember one time, early on, trying to celebrate a win for our team by sending a note inviting everyone to meet for drinks at a tavern after work. Three people showed up. They just weren’t used to management and field operations mixing together. That told me we needed to work on culture and communication. Now we make a lot of effort to do group cookouts so that everyone knows they are welcome.
Today, I have 330 employees on staff; 84 of them are employee-owners. We’ve taken on over 50 apprentices in the last few years. We train people up and we make sure they know they are cared for. We brought in close to $18 million in revenue three years ago and we’re poised to bring in $40 million this year.
Thankfully, my risky buyout and commitment to Evergreen are working out — for me and for my employees.
Pete Braun is the Owner/President of Wall-tech.
How Pragmatic Innovation Makes Creativity Part of the Process
At my company, Azavea, we create software and data analytics that help people see the bigger picture. Data about how buildings in Philadelphia are using energy can help companies all over America fight climate change. Public information about preschools in Chicago can be the basis for a simple application that helps people find local early-learning centers. Computer vision techniques applied to satellite imagery can detect changes in shipping and fishing activity.
I also try to see the bigger picture when it comes to running my company. Azavea’s mission is focused on both social impact and advancing the state of the art through research. Our business model is to take existing data sets and find novel ways to help people glean useful information from them. That requires a lot of creativity, but how do you help a comparatively small workforce find the time for that kind of flexible thinking when everyone has lots of tasks they need to accomplish every day?
We can’t build more hours into the day, but in the early days of the company, one of my colleagues realized we could influence how our colleagues spend their time. Following in the footsteps of research and development programs at Google and 3M, he proposed what we now call our Research and Learning Program, or “10% Time.”
The program works like this: Employees create a personal research or learning project focused on something they care about. Then they can spend up to 10 percent of their working hours on it. The projects should both cultivate each person’s interests and be true to Azavea’s mission to have a positive civic and social impact. This can include learning a new programming language, taking a Coursera course, testing a new technology, contributing to an open-source project or even doing pro bono work — it’s all good.
Of course, deciding on a 10% Time policy and getting everyone to embrace it are two different things. Like many Evergreen companies, Azavea is strongly mission-based. We believe that we can make the world a better place using information that is already out there. That kind of company naturally attracts passionate workers who want to do the best they can on the projects on their desks. Asking them to take time to think about things that might not relate to a current deadline requires a companywide commitment to learning and sharing knowledge.
To help get things moving, I collaborated with software developer Steve Meyer (who had originally suggested the 10% Time program) on a project focused on real estate, a shared interest. We wanted to help people make better decisions about where to rent or buy a home by blending information about lifestyle interests with market information. For example, I don’t own a car. Instead, I ride my bike to our Philadelphia office. My wife and I enjoy both cooking and eating out, so we want to live within walking distance of a grocery store and restaurants. Another home buyer might be more concerned about being near parking, child care and a spouse’s workplace.
Steve and I used public databases related to home sales and community assets and pooled our energy to create a program we called REX, short for Real Estate Explorer. It was a sophisticated product, but we were a small company with no capital and we ultimately could not grow the geographic footprint enough to make it viable. But while any failure is disappointing, we had learned a lot about combining large amounts of seemingly incompatible data sets into one online application.
We have since been able to use elements of that knowledge to build GeoTrellis, a software library that helps power software for everything from water-infrastructure planning to crime-risk forecasting. We’ve also leveraged this and other work to build OpenDataPhilly, which enables local citizens to sort through and search 350 data sets on 14 broad topics that touch upon various aspects of life in Philadelphia including the arts, public education, and health and human services organizations.
Others have used their 10% Time to experiment with open data released by the federal government. When Azavea was invited to participate in The Opportunity Project, an Obama White House initiative, two colleagues, Kathryn Killebrew and Mike Maurizi, combined public-transit data with housing and economic development data to create TransitAnalyst.com, an online tool to help citizens and communities access critical resources within reach of public transit.
For Azavea, 10% Time has been an important tool for Pragmatic Innovation. Because we are an Evergreen company working at the leading edge of technology, everyone must be part of the R&D department in some way, as it is the lifeblood of our business.
It has also helped with attracting and retaining the best people. The 10% Time program is frequently cited as a key benefit in interviews, and we engage in several activities to both encourage and celebrate the program’s outcomes. Every month we hold a short all-hands meeting where each person has a chance to summarize their progress on their 10% Time projects. Each quarter, we gather at the end of the workday with some beer and snacks and listen to everyone present more detailed versions of their projects. It’s a great chance to hang out, have fun and learn from one another. The projects also provide unique opportunities to share what we are learning in blog articles, at conferences and as source code we make available to the public. By sharing what they learn, folks have an opportunity to develop their writing, documentation and presentation skills, but the overarching theme behind all of these ideas is that it is more helpful, more fun and more impactful to share what we learn with others.
Though I am no longer writing software code, I still try to use my own 10% Time, and I mostly focus now on learning how to run a better company. This means things like going to conferences, reading about other companies, evaluating other Pragmatic Innovation programs and even joining the Tugboat Institute.
Although not every project pans out right away (or ever), our approach to Pragmatic Innovation has had an incredibly positive impact on our firm. My colleagues feel empowered to try new things, and even sometimes fail. This last point is important, because failure, which closes paths and opens new ones, is critical to both learning and innovation. The results have been so positive — in terms of new lines of business, products and capabilities — that we see any failure as a necessary and very reasonable price to pay.
Robert Cheetham is the CEO of Azavea.
Caring for the Caretakers
About 10 years ago, my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. It was an upsetting time for our family as we scrambled to find her help.
We hired two primary caregivers. One was basically a sitter who attended to my mother’s physical needs and little else. My mom’s dementia seemed to get worse every day she spent with her. The other caretaker, however, engaged my mother in conversation and encouraged her to take part in activities. When my mom spent time with this second person, her mood brightened.
It was nearly impossible to find anyone else, though, who could provide this kind of care. As a health care consultant, I’ve seen the system work from afar, but our struggle to find the right care for my mother put everything in a new perspective.
The reason it’s so hard to find great home care is not because of the people who are working in the industry — they are usually wonderful people who truly want to help — but because of the structure of most home health care companies.
Caregivers tend to have erratic schedules and often don’t know whose home they need to visit next. They often have no internal support, so if they find an agitated or ill client, they may not know how best to help them. As a result, it’s customary for caregivers to have very little loyalty or attachment to a home health care agency. It’s typical for a caregiver to carry IDs from five different agencies. And because they are not paid well (between $12 and $14 an hour in the Bay Area) they might neglect one call in order to take the better-paying gig. In turn, they tend to not bond with their clients or take any sense of pride in how their client might be reacting to their care. The average industry turnover is 60-70 percent.
As I worked to help my mother, I knew that I could also build a better home health care company by embracing the Evergreen concept of People First. That meant I had to completely rethink the home health care model when I founded Tender Rose in 2009.
That started with pay. We pay our workers $16 an hour and go up to $30. We offer annual raises and bonuses. If someone has to work overtime, we’ll send him or her a thank you with a gift card.
All of our workers who are full time (and that’s 70 percent of our staff) qualify for benefits after 30 days. We provide training and professional development and a lot of support in the field. Our caregivers can find themselves in very challenging situations with clients who might be acting up violently or who might be in the throes of a medical complication. We have two people on call 24/7 to offer our caregivers advice and guidance.
We also create room for advancement, so a fresh face can eventually become a field director and a mentor to others. We love to promote care coordinators from hourly to salaried workers who make $55,000 to $70,000 a year.
And we limit how many patients a caregiver is visiting. At Tender Rose, caregivers are assigned only two families at a time. This allows for bonding and consistency. Over time, the caregiver intimately learns what activities bring the client joy and meaning.
Treating our people right means that they are treating their patients right, and that’s been the highest mission of my organization. But offering this kind of care isn’t easy. We have to charge more than typical agencies — between $38 to $52 an hour compared with the $30 to $33 an hour most agencies charge. That’s meant embracing the Evergreen ideal of Paced Growth, which doesn’t bother me. I’d rather add clients gradually and be able to offer them the best care I can than to grow too fast and sacrifice quality care.
My mother passed away in 2015, and I take comfort in the fact that her final years were meaningful and happy. There’s great satisfaction in knowing we’re helping other families find that same comfort.
Jim Kimzey is the CEO of Tender Rose Dementia Care Specialists.
Family, Business
When I was 19, my father called my two younger siblings, my mother and me down to the dim low-ceilinged, windowless office in the basement of our family home in Bangor, Maine, for a solemn “family meeting” to discuss his business plans—and by consequence, our family’s fate. He had decided to exit the engineering consultancy he’d formed a few years earlier with his business partner whom he had grown to detest. “We’re going to start a new company, called The Fitch Company,” he said. He leaned back in his leather executive chair. It was important that we all understood and supported this idea.
To my ear, The Fitch Company sounded like an awkward name for an engineering outfit. But I sensed that this wasn’t really the best time to voice such concerns. After a bit of quiet reflection, my siblings and I did what any supportive family should in that situation. We held our tongues. We nodded. We hugged our father.
I thought of my father and his firm and our family often during this year’s Tugboat Institute Summit. More than 100 Evergreen business owners trekked to Sun Valley, Idaho, for the retreat. Several of the speakers at the summit talked about the joys and challenges of running a family business.
Listening to them, it hit me that there are striking paradoxes at the heart of the Evergreen way: It requires a towering sense of individualism but also demands vigorous support from family. You have to be willing to work incredibly hard, but as Tugboat founder Dave Whorton asks, “Why build an Evergreen business if you do not foster an Evergreen family?” He explains: “It goes both ways—you need their understanding and support, but as a leader, you also have to invest in your children’s development and, perhaps, foster their appreciation for your business.”
By support I don’t mean blind trust. Hell, family support can sometimes look curiously like opposition. John Keatley, the photographer celebrated for his portraiture, described to us a life-changing moment many years ago when he and his parents decided, quite soberly, that it was urgent that he abandon his budding photography practice entirely to focus upon his business-school studies. He reversed the decision the very next day when a manager at a local pharmacy took him aside and told him she liked the images in a roll of film she’d just processed for him. Still, his parents’ counsel stuck in other important ways. He has made sure to respect the business side of photography.
Sometimes, supporting your Evergreen family business also means tearing some of your parents’ and grandparents’ cherished ideals to shreds. Robert Pasin, owner and chief executive of Chicago-based Radio Flyer had to do exactly that to the storied wagon-making company that his grandfather Antonio started in 1923. Antonio had been trained as a cabinet-maker in Italy, and he obsessed over the details of running a highly efficient manufacturing operation. Robert recognized that Radio Flyer would never outlast the onslaught of lower-cost wagons from Asia. He refocused the company on design, branding and imagination. Though he had to lay off dozens of workers when he shuttered Radio Flyer’s factory in 2004, his company now attracts some of the best designers, marketers and creatives in the country. Radio Flyer wagons, tricycles, scooters are a secure mainstay of American childhood.
It’s not surprising that most family businesses either fall to pieces or are sold off before they pass to the second or third generation. If you study the few firms that do succeed at succession, you learn a lot. St. Louis Trust executive and Olin School of Business lecturer Spencer Burke has observed that multigenerational Evergreen families make sure “the equity ownership is controlled by a single person or entity that has a very long life.” Burke calls this “good hygiene.” They understand that once the clever chaps from the investment world get their hands on any equity, the exploitation begins. Instead, the later generations figure out ways to prune ownership and management responsibility. They buy out the negativists and look to supremely talented outsiders to manage things day to day, Burke says. They “embrace professional management at every level.”
Evergreen owners need not only supportive wives and children but also to be part of a supportive community where they can find brothers and sisters in arms. We found that once again in Sun Valley this year. When I greet people like author/journalist Bo Burlingham, bicycle-maker Ross Evans, logistician Tim Barrett, lifestyle-brander Carrie Van Winkle Greener or ice-cream demigoddess Amy Simmons, I embrace them warmly, like brothers and sisters. When I pick the brains of Stanford-trained business scholars like Calvin Tsay of Bi-Rite or Mac Harman of Balsam Brands, they share their tart insights as though they’re chatting with a sibling.
At least half of my conversations this year touched on the primal connection between our families and our businesses. There was the opening-night chat some of us had with Paul S. Mears III. Paul has struggled with mixed feelings as he puzzles over which, if any, of his four children might aspire to lead his Orlando-based limo, taxi and corporate-events firm that his grandfather founded in the 1930s and that his father ran before him. Paul and his brother now employ more than 3,500 people, and they’re battling fiercely against the disruptive ride-share powerhouses Uber and Lyft. The pair are in their prime now, but he’s already thinking way ahead to the long, draining days that his successor will inevitably face. “My grandfather was the senior Paul Mears, my father was Paul Jr., and I’m Paul the third,” he says. “My 20-year-old son is Paul Mears IV.” But the opportunity and challenge that is wrapped up in his son’s name is every bit as available to his three younger sisters. Paul III is readying himself for the weighty conversations that are, for now, still a ways down the road.
It’s a conversation that my father never had with me. He wisely transferred ownership of his firm not to any of us kids but to a brilliant young engineer whom I loved and who’s been a generous mentor to me. Still, I know that my Papa would be proud that when it came to assigning a moniker to my own company, I followed his lead. When I told my wife and daughter that I was naming the company FitchInk, they didn’t blink, they just hugged me tight.
Stephane Fitch is founder and editor in chief of content-marketing firm FitchInk, which helps some of the world’s biggest companies use thought-leading content to connect with audiences they value the most.
How Anthropology Can Help Evergreen Executives
Anthropology looks at how we went from an agrarian society to an industrial society to what is rapidly becoming a technological society. We look at these changes by getting up close and personal with specific groups, or “cultures.” Traditionally anthropologists studied indigenous peoples, but today they often focus on contemporary communities.
One culture to which you and I both belong: the community of businesspeople.
I didn’t study anthropology because I wanted to be better at business. I studied anthropology because I wanted to get a deeper understanding of how human beings interact and how they deal with change.
When I decided (after getting my Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University) to go into law, I thought that I would eventually view anthropology as a diversion from my true professional path. But what I found was that at every turn, from practicing law at a firm, to serving as general counsel at McCaw Cellular Communications Inc. and Netscape Communications Corp., to developing interdisciplinary study programs at Stanford University, I was always looking at my work through an anthropologic lens.
That’s because the questions we ask in anthropology are the same questions leaders need to ask themselves in order to build excellent, sustainable organizations. What are the different values people are bringing to this group? What is our group culture? And how can these people find new ways to work together in an ever-changing world?
Evergreen executives will recognize this as a People First mentality. If you’re Evergreen, chances are you’re already thinking about your people a lot and you already realize that their success is your success. But viewing your company as an (honorary) anthropologist will help you get an even deeper understanding of your organization and how you can make it even stronger. Here are three ways you can do so:
Encourage Flexibility
Society and institutions are always evolving. Look at the long history of human development. We’ve gone from living in isolated tribes and farming villages to being a constantly connected global community.
That’s big-scale change, but this kind of evolution is also happening on a more intimate level. Demand for a company’s product grows and subsides. A new deal requires internal growth. Or expansion into new markets means the company has to rethink who is responsible for what.
Understanding and accepting that everything is in flux is an important part of what makes societies succeed, and it’s crucial for businesses, as well. Never assume status quo, and make sure your people adopt a similar mentality. By encouraging flexibility, your organization will be able to grow and change more easily.
Focus On Your Company’s Values
Individuals have values, but so do institutions. Stanford, for example, values learning and giving back to society. Those two elements have to be part of everything our university does, and we need to impart these values to our students.
On a societal level, cultures are defined in part by the similar values held by their members. Businesses work slightly differently. An Evergreen CEO needs to know their company’s values, use them to support and protect their corporate culture and then make sure to hire people who are comfortable with these values.
It’s crucial that you understand and clearly articulate these values. What do you stand for? What’s the bigger purpose of your organization beyond making money?
Having strong values and a strong culture is even more important for Evergreen companies that want to survive for 100 years or more. The values you put in place today can help to keep the company leadership focused through successive generations.
Put Humans First
It might sound obvious to say that humans are at the center of every business, but as technology evolves, that’s no longer a given. I worry quite a bit that we’re not focused enough on people right now in our endless quest for efficiency. Automation might be good for the bottom line, but it isn’t always good for your organization.
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t use technology to improve your business. But leaders need to keep their people front and center as their companies evolve. Humans are the ones who are going to make your vision a reality, no matter how many robots or how much artificial intelligence you use. Making sure that those humans are comfortable with any change and that they know they are still valued is crucial for today’s organizations.
Evergreen companies are not immune to these changes. But with their People First outlook, they may be able to weather this evolution better than public companies that are so focused on the bottom line.
Taking the lessons of anthropology — putting humans first, understanding that everything changes and keeping your company’s focus on its values — will go a long way toward helping you build a sustainable business.
How Our Biggest Crisis Brought Our Company Together Again
In the franchise business, trust and respect are paramount. If your franchisees stop trusting you, they’ll stop caring for their customers, and the business risks falling apart.
This is something we’ve always known at Taco John’s, the 382-restaurant franchise where I am now president. But in 2013, we became dangerously distracted by profits and sales and almost lost that connection to our franchisees that, for me, has always made Taco John’s so special.
James Woodson and Harold W. Holmes franchised their Midwestern-based Mexican fast-food eatery in 1969. Many franchising companies own a majority of their restaurants, but we have only 10 company restaurants; the rest are all franchisees. I started here in 2000 as the director of technology.
In 2013, in an attempt to boost sales and grow the number of restaurants, we brought in a new CEO who applied a strict profit-focused strategy. While we didn’t see it at the time, this turned out to be a serious mistake.
Rather than consulting the franchisees and getting their buy-in as we always had, we started making changes straight from the top. We removed items from the menu, even when those items made up 8% of a restaurant’s annual sales. We dismissed our franchisee operations committee. We changed worktables from steam to dry heat, which was devastating to owners who love their old equipment. And we pushed franchisees to buy precooked taco meat rather than make it themselves—at an annual profit loss of $15,000 per restaurant.
By 2016, more and more of the franchisees were disillusioned and almost combative. We dropped from 405 to 382. We lost 57 employees from our Cheyenne, Wyoming, headquarters from 2013 to 2016. As a company, we felt we had been violently shaken. Our culture was in tatters. We realized we had to get back to our roots and that meant that as a company, we had come together.
I took over as president and chief executive officer in August 2016 and made it my goal to get back to our corporate culture of being more collaborative with our franchisees. I was lucky enough that our former head of human resources, who had 30 years of experience with the company, came back to help us regroup. Any time there’s a big change at the top, employees panic that they are going to be the next to go. She met with people and put an open-door policy in place to make sure that our 70 corporate employees felt safe and cared for and ready to work more closely with our franchisees.
Our vice president of finance and in-house general counsel stepped in to help keep the day-to-day business of our corporate headquarters going while I hit the road to visit, in person, as many of our franchisees as I could. I wanted to reassure them that we were once again going to be a company that listened to them and took their needs into consideration.
Our leadership team worked hard to reconstitute our committee system, which had always been the heart of Taco John’s culture but had broken down over a growing “us vs. them” mentality. Our committees are made up mostly of franchisees managers with our corporate personnel providing leadership. The committees make important decisions about matters such as menu changes, advertising and who will supply our restaurants. We made sure we had the right people on each committee to foster an atmosphere of cooperation.
We are also now planning to meet twice per year with the Association of Taco John’s Franchisees Board to ensure that we are all in alignment on brand priorities.
The effort is starting to pay off. A few weeks ago we had our annual national convention. I took the time to write every franchisee a hand-written invitation, and as a result, we had more people attending than for any conference in the last five years. For the first time in a long time, it felt like we were a family, who trusted one another again.
In his opening remarks, our franchisee association president said: “A new era of trust and cooperation has begun. We have a new leader who is working to rebuild relationships with shared ideas and a respect for the franchisees.” That’s more than I could have hoped for.
We are now at 382 franchises and expect to be back to 405 by the end of this year. Our team effort is paying off.
Jim Creel is the President & CEO of Taco John's International, Inc.
Why I Tell Students They Should Consider Family-Owned Businesses
Family businesses are, by their very nature, quiet. They don’t have to report on their financials, they tend not to promote themselves to investors, and any press can often mean unwanted attention on family dynamics.
So it’s not a huge surprise that most of the students I encounter through the business school at Loyola University aren’t thinking about family businesses as they assess their post-graduate job options. But as I like to tell them, if they don’t think about opportunities at family businesses, they’re shutting themselves off from what could be a very satisfying career.
I had my aha moment on family businesses around 2008. At the time, I was working at an outplacement company coaching C-suite executives who were looking for new jobs. In the wake of the financial collapse, many smart, talented people had been let go simply because their corporations needed to cut their budgets by 10 percent. These people hadn’t been let go for cause; they had been let go for purely financial reasons.
At the same time, I was consulting at the Family Business Center at the Quinlan School of Business at Loyola University in Chicago, where I am now the director. I was facilitating small groups of leaders from family-run businesses who were coming together for support and to learn from each other.
These executives were facing the same economic challenges as the big corporations that were laying off C-suite executives. But they were dealing with them very differently. They were being creative and purposeful about finding ways to retain their employees. They weren’t worried about their debt because they didn’t usually have much. They weren’t just thinking of themselves and their bottom line; they were thinking about what would be best for their entire work community.
I saw that family-run businesses have a different set of values, and that attracted me. I decided I wanted to work with people who are trying to create lasting value in their businesses and their communities.
There’s a lot of overlap between family-owned businesses and Evergreen companies, many of which are family-run today, or eventually family-run after the first generation. Both groups tend to put People First — paying as much attention to the growth and well-being of their employees and customers as they do to their Profits. Both groups tend to avoid outside investments and debt. And companies in both groups tend to have a deeply held Purpose that serves as their north star.
Twice a year I go into the classroom to make my pitch for family-run businesses. Here are the advantages I lay out for the graduate students:
A Bigger Mission
Millennials are children of the recession. They’ve learned that work needs to be about more than a paycheck — that it needs to be satisfying in a deeper way. So they’re looking for mission-based companies. Family-run businesses often fall into this category. Many family businesses that have been around for several generations have kept the company (and the family) together by having everyone focused on a bigger goal. That can be as simple as keeping the company in family hands or as big picture as trying to make the world a better place.
Opportunity To Advance
Public companies tend to be very rigid in their hiring and promoting policies. If you start at the bottom, you’ll have to work your way up through many layers in a way that could take years. Family businesses are different. They are usually just looking for the best people for the job and are looking for team members who are loyal and talented. And as an outsider to the family, new employees often have fresh ideas about how to make the business better. I tell the students they may find that they have more chances to advance more quickly at family businesses.
Sustainability
Students tend want the startup experience — where they jump into the chaos and excitement of a new company knowing it could all go away at any minute — or they want stability. For students looking for a more grounded environment, I recommend family-run businesses that have been around for three or four generations. Any company that old will have gone through almost everything the economy can throw at a company. It’ll be well-prepared to weather the next storm while remaining nimble and able to flex for the changing marketplace.
Responsibility To Employees
The average tenure for a CEO at a public company is five years. At family-run businesses it’s 20 years. CEOs and employees may have similar tenures and are mutually invested in the company and their teams. Family businesses also usually consider their businesses, and everyone who works there, as an extension of their actual family. That creates a sense of caring and responsibility that you don’t find at many public corporations.
Ability To Contribute
Our students leave school eager to dig in and play a real role wherever they decide to work. Recently I heard of a student who did an engineering internship at a family business. He developed a new product idea and the company let him lead the development team in building it.
All of this advice comes with caveats. Not every family-run business (just like not every Evergreen business) is the same, and ultimately the most important thing is finding a good professional, developmental and financial fit. But I’m glad to see the students putting family businesses into the mix more and more often. They are real assets to these companies and will find real satisfaction in their careers with them.
Anne Smart is the Director of Family Business Center within the Quinlan School of Business.
What A Bankruptcy Taught Me About Perseverance
You’ll never get another job. It’ll show up on your resume. They’ll see it on your credit report. These were my fears as our company, Miller Broadcasting, headed into Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings in 1996.
I was 33 at the time, and scared to be going through something I believed had such a stigma. And I was scared the stigma was deserved, because somehow this was my fault.
But now it’s over 20 years later, our business is doing well and I see that bankruptcy as a lesson. By going through the fire, I learned how to Persevere.
My family’s been in the media business since the 1880s. We have worked in most major forms of media, including newspapers, radio stations, TV stations and online. These days our company, Rocking M Media, is headquartered in Manhattan, Kansas, and we own 31 radio stations. I co-own Rocking M with my mom, Doris, and my dad, Monte.
Media’s not only in my blood — it’s been my career. I graduated from Kansas State University in 1986 with a BS in radio and television and immediately began working for my family’s media businesses. I started in the collections department at TeleGraphics, our newspaper business, and as vice president of sales for Miller Broadcasting, our television company. That was my job in 1996, when we faced our biggest crisis yet.
The main source of revenue for our Kansas City TV station was the Home Shopping Network. But that year, after HSN was sold to Barry Diller’s Silver King Broadcasting, the company reduced its payments to us by half. Silver King was looking to cut expenses as much as it could, and that meant cutting our budget.
We had taken out hefty loans to build the station, and with the reduced payments, the only way to restructure those loans was bankruptcy.
It was my responsibility to formulate and negotiate many aspects of the bankruptcy, though as a family business we were all involved. I had to develop and prepare all our spreadsheets and documents for the bankruptcy plan we would submit to our creditors. But at first, I didn’t know where to begin. I didn’t know the difference between Chapter 7 and Chapter 11. And we couldn’t use our trusted corporate counsel, so we had to search for a good bankruptcy lawyer.
I suffered a spiritual crisis to go along with my financial crisis. The well-being of our employees and their families was resting on my shoulders. Explaining to them that Chapter 11 was our only option was incredibly difficult. It was hard not to feel like I had screwed up.
But I soon realized that Chapter 11 doesn’t mean the end of a company. First, some practical advice if you do find yourself in a bankruptcy: Hire the best bankruptcy attorney you can afford and try to get as much work done up front as you can.
The orderly nature of the bankruptcy process allowed me to work through some of my concerns. It gave us the chance to keep working, whether that meant filing a report or attending a court date, and moving forward one day at a time.
It also helped that I had the support of my parents, who were also my co-owners. We all kept reminding each other that family is more important than business, and that helped get us through.
The bankruptcy also deepened my faith. I come from a strong Catholic family and you can be sure we said an awful lot of rosaries during that time.
We came out of the bankruptcy a year later with our debt renegotiated, still holding onto ownership of the company and our TV station. And I am proud to say we repaid everyone in full, and no one had to take a write-down on their debt. We eventually sold KMCI to the E.W. Scripps Company in March 2000, for $18 million, turning a nice profit.
But that wasn’t the end of our difficulties. For years the media landscape has been rapidly changing. Over-the-air has given way to cable, which is now giving way to online programming. Each change made it harder to make money from media’s lifeblood: advertising. Even though my family started in the newspaper business, we sold our last paper in 1998. And when we sold KMCI, we officially exited the TV business. We realized the TV-station business model wasn’t made for mom-and-pop owners like us.
In 1998 we were again challenged by our tight relationship with HSN when they tried to block the sale of our Kansas City television station to the NBC affiliate. We ended up in a jury trial in United States federal court — something that would have panicked me earlier in my career. But thanks in part to the lessons I had learned during bankruptcy, I kept my cool and it paid off. The jury sided with us and we sold the channel.
I now feel these stressful situations taught me to be more centered, relaxed and thoughtful about business. I examine deals more thoroughly, and deal with crisis more calmly.
These moments that have taught me about Perseverance have also helped me become an Evergreen executive. In fact, I think being Evergreen is the definition of Perseverance. And to me that means never giving up on your company, even when you must go through something you don’t think you can do, like a bankruptcy or having to restructure. It means finding a way to somehow get through it, because you realize you owe it to your company, your team, your employees and your family. You’ve got to do it somehow. There’s no other option.
Christopher Miller is the president of Rocking M Media.
