From Entity to Enterprise in 90 Days
Want to change your company's culture in a few short weeks? Celebrating your company’s tenth anniversary or starting your first business? Listen up because this article is for you. It is the story of how, with a complete disregard of conventional wisdom, I was able to transform ten years of bureaucracy into an entrepreneurial entity that now has more than 100 employees and continues to grow each year.
This article will show you the way I did it by outlining what tools, technology, and tactics we used during our transformation. You will learn about the problems we encountered before changing our course and some methods for preventing them from happening again in future transformations. I will also show you how to quickly recognize these same problems when they start to rear their ugly head in your own transformation.
This is the story of how I, as a typical employee, transformed from an employee of the department into an entrepreneur who launched and ran my own company. This is a story about changing your personal mentality. Law of attraction refers to the idea that what we focus on grows. In our case, we focused on starting our own company with the full intention that it would be successful so that we could transfer our business skills from one job to another. And, so we did.
In celebrating the success of our ten-year anniversary as an independent entity, I thought this would be a good time to look back at what got us here, how we did it, and how you can quickly accomplish the same business transformation. The purpose of this article is to take you from employee of the department to entrepreneur in 90 days. This is not a transition that can happen overnight; it takes time and determination. Still, if you follow our steps—if you change your mentality—you will find yourself in position to make a similar kind of transition.
The Journey Begins
It has been ten years since I first became jobless—sort of—and started my own company. The journey began when I decided to take action and do something to solve a problem I had been experiencing. At the time, I was working for a large community bank and was experiencing the typical problems any community bank faces in hiring good employees. I was frustrated with turnover and recruiting efforts because it took so long to fill positions. We would advertise a position, get many qualified applicants, interview them all, hire one or two, and then the new employee would quit after a few weeks or months on the job. The cycle repeated itself continually until the position was eventually filled by someone who had been at one of our sister banks or at another company or who we hired from outside of banking altogether.
This problem occurred because we did not want to pay the higher salaries necessary to attract and retain people with banking experience. Instead, we relied on our employee referral program, which worked fairly well. (If you do not have such a program, start one.) However, if the person hired did not have banking experience, he had to be trained from scratch. We often tried to solve this problem by hiring someone who was fresh out of college or who was unemployed and needed a job because his wife just had a baby. This person would be excited about being promoted from working as a teller to being a full-fledged banker handling commercial loans. However, after a few months on the job, his motivation would fall and he would quit to take a more desirable position at a sister bank or at another company.
I became so frustrated with this situation that I decided to do something about it. I bought some software from another company that was designed to help financial institutions find employees and then used it to develop my own database of potential employees. I created an in-house position for someone who might be able to solve our employee retention problems. This person would act as a headhunter/recruiter—someone who could find us people with banking experience and get them hired quickly. We needed to act quickly because we had a commercial real estate project that would require us to put together a team of about eight people in just a few weeks.
I reluctantly hired someone who had recently quit his job at one of our sister banks. I was not sure whether he would work out, but he seemed very enthusiastic and eager to prove himself. We had high hopes for him because we were in a hurry. In the end, it worked out even better than we hoped, and he became one of the most valuable employees we ever hired.
Lessons Learned
The first lesson I learned from this experience is that it is not what you know but who you know that counts. If you want to start your own company, it makes sense to hire someone who knows how to do the kind of work needed. This was the first step in my transformation because I had always thought that new hires should come from a traditional training program and be taught exactly what they needed to know. By hiring someone who knew the ropes, we were able to get him up and running right away. Granted, he had never worked for us before, so it took some time for him to learn about our operations and products. However, we were able to train him more quickly than if we had hired a person from another bank who had never worked in banking before. In fact, we had been trying to hire someone from another bank for months without success. By hiring the former banker, we were able to obtain the qualified employee we needed quickly and avoid losing valuable time.
The second lesson I learned is that you need a good headhunter/recruiter who is well connected in the industry. This person will help you get what you need when you need it. If you have a good relationship with your headhunter/recruiter and she knows your bank's needs, she will be able to provide qualified employees and work around your schedule.
The third lesson I learned is that you need to hire quickly and aggressively. You cannot afford to lose valuable time. If you are hiring a new headhunter/recruiter, make sure she has enough experience in the industry to know who might be good for your job. If you have a large project coming up (e.g., a commercial real estate project), make sure your headhunter/recruiter has access to people who are available at short notice because you will need them quickly.
Finally, I learned that even if you hire the person from another bank or from outside the industry, make sure he really wants to work for your company.
Conclusion
The headhunter/recruiter concept works very well and is easy to put into place. It saves time, money, and effort, and it helps you get what you need when you need it. From the beginning, I found that my headhunter/recruiter understood my needs because he had worked in banking for a number of years. In fact, he is still with me today (although he no longer fills the role of headhunter).
I have spent the last ten years working on this concept at my bank and have helped many people establish their own businesses through it. My efforts generated so much income for our bank that I was able to start a new business unit within three years.