By Tommy Mello, owner of A1 Garage Doors, a $100M+ home service business. Sharing what I’ve learned to help other entrepreneurs scale.
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I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was a 10-year-old kid. (My first business at 10 years old was a landscaping service that I ran with my buddy Elliot… Time flies.)
Over the last few decades, I’ve founded a 400-employee company, met thousands of entrepreneurs and studied the best companies. I just love learning about what makes a company successful: what their secret sauce is.
So what makes companies great?
Sure, you need to have a great product or service. You need to have great marketing. All that’s obviously the foundation. But that’s not enough. Here are three things I noticed that great companies all seem to understand better than everybody else:
1. What gets measured gets managed.
In other words, you need to know where you want to go and what you want to get out of things. Be as specific as possible. If you don’t have a vision of your business and how each role helps you grow, you’re setting everyone up for failure.
So where does this principle apply? It applies to everything in your business, of course, but there are two things I’d really pay attention to:
• Your vision. A lot of companies have this big, ambitious vision, but employees don’t actually believe in it. Why? No one has really explained to them how it’s possible. Have you broken it down stage by stage and milestone by milestone so that everyone sees that it’s achievable? Have you shown your employees how their day-to-day work fits into the bigger picture? As executive coach Randall Stutman discussed: “Everybody should have direct priorities going on today, tomorrow, next week.”
• Your training. If your employees don’t know how to do a task, when to do it and, more importantly, why they should do it exactly as you say… they’re not going to do it. I would almost guarantee it. That’s why you’ve got to make it easy for them. Yes, give them a step-by-step process, but also sell them on a few things: What’s in it for me, my career and my family? Why do you want me to do it?
2. Tough conversations are better than polite conversations.
How do you build a culture that grows along with your company? It all comes down to how you communicate with your employees. The mistake that most leaders make is beating around the bush and not telling the truth… until things get too bad and they have to fire the employee.
You need to be able to have these tough conversations, but you also need to be able to handle them. This is especially true for your executive team with whom you work very closely. If there’s any animosity at all, your company could be in trouble. I read this book called Fierce Conversations by Susan Scott, and the author has a few great questions to help you become better at tough conversations:
• How many meetings have I sat in where I knew the real issues were not being discussed?
• How often do I find myself—just to be polite—saying things I don’t mean?
• What has been the economic, emotional and intellectual cost to the company of not identifying and tackling the real issues?
• What has been the cost to me?
3. You should never convince someone to work for you.
If you have to convince someone to work for you, something is wrong. Why? You should have a brand—a reputation that attracts “A” players to you. So how do you build your company brand? Here’s what I’d do:
Wherever you go—especially when you’re not hiring—tell people how exciting it is to join your company, what roles you might be hiring for and what opportunities they will get by joining. I believe in the mantra “always be recruiting” because you don’t want to wait until you’re forced to hire, which can lead you to rush the hiring process and hire the wrong person.