Hiring From Outside
In 2002, Lee Kimball, Inc., owners Gregg and Bruce Johnson created a strategic plan that reached five years into the future. Using this detailed document as a guide, they began making some substantial changes within the company. “The plan was for growth,” says Gregg. “So one of the first moves was for me to leave production and move into sales.”
Since Gregg had been production manager at the firm for years, the brothers knew that finding a replacement wasn’t going to be easy. However, when they began searching, the first place they looked was to their current staff. One person, their production coordinator, stood out. “He was so loyal he bled Lee Kimball,” Gregg remembers. “While he hadn’t had experience in the position, he was a go-getter so we felt we could coach him and turn him into what we needed.”
But things didn’t turn out as planned. One of the major responsibilities of the new production manager was to grow the production department with qualified personnel so that it was ready to handle the expanding sales volume that was being generated by the personable Johnson brothers. “We had meeting upon meeting to discuss this issue, among others,” says Gregg, “but he could never come up with a plan to make it happen. In the meantime, he became a bottleneck to the whole company because production couldn’t handle the load.”
Finally, after two years, Gregg was forced to ask the employee to leave the company. While many good managers come from within, it can be a long-term investment. Considering that the Johnsons wanted to grow and grow rather rapidly, they didn’t necessarily have the luxury of time for the manager to take hold.
So this time around, they took a different tack. Since so much of the future success of the company relied on the skills and experience of the production manager, Gregg and Bruce committed to making what might be a hefty investment. Gregg said, “We wanted a top notch person and were willing to pay for it.”
They contacted a headhunter to help them find the right person. “The beauty of working with a headhunter is that they’ll search out great people who are happy where they are and weren’t even thinking of leaving.” Gregg said. “But sometimes, they’re willing to talk and then they get excited about the possibilities.”
In the meantime, while the company was growing, the team was also working toward another goal detailed in the strategic plan -- purchasing a building to house the company. The building was finished and they moved in early in mid-2006. “When we began interviewing candidates, one of the things that impressed them was the size and the appearance of our offices,” Gregg commented. “When they saw our beautiful space, they knew that we weren’t a mom-and-pop operation but a growing enterprise. It had an impact.”
The person they eventually hired was one of those people described above -- happy working for a large commercial remodeler and who wasn’t thinking of leaving. But when he met the Johnsons, saw the offices, and learned about their plans for the future, he took a pay cut and joined the team. However, even with this pay cut, the salary was a 40% increase for the company. Since that time, he’s jumped in with both feet to help the company achieve their goals.
“Within weeks, he’d set up procurement and planning tools similar to what he’d been using at a $300 million company,” Gregg said. These sophisticated tools were something that would be very difficult for someone trained within the company to develop because they just wouldn’t have had the expansive experience to draw from. One significant benefit of hiring talent from outside of the company is the likelihood that they will carry with them a ‘briefcase’ full of new-to-the-company tools, systems, and experiences that can have an immediate impact on company productivity and efficiency.
Gregg adds, “When we hire a great manager from the outside instead of trying to grow a manager from within, the new person just takes off. They have the horsepower to get things moving immediately.” Hiring an experienced, quality player means that training is kept at a minimum so they can take on more responsibility quickly, allowing the owner to focus on his or her own high impact activities instead of slowly delegating over a period of months, if not years.
This approach is paying off for Lee Kimball Kitchens. In the past two years, they have grown from $3 to $5 million in revenue and expect to hit the goals they spelled out five years ago in their valuable strategic plan.
“With the aggressive goals that we had in place, we now know that hiring from the outside is the right move for us,” Gregg comments.
Victoria Downing is president of Remodelers Advantage Inc., a national consulting firm specializing in the challenges of running a remodeling company. The Remodelers Advantage team works with thousands of remodelers each year to help them develop companies that deliver an above-average personal compensation, healthy net profits year after year, and the structure that allows for a balanced life.
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