09 Aug Positioning Employees for a Thriving Business
Putting our employees in the proper roles has been critical to our success. In the book Good to Great, Jim Collins references the concept of putting the right people into the right seats on the bus.
Learning
In our first 3-4 years as a company, we failed to put our employees in the roles that best suited them. While we found a couple of employees who turned into gems, for the most part we had a high rate of turnover. I didn’t feel that we serviced our clients to the level that we should have, and the idea of a customer seeing and developing a good relationship with their route driver or service tech wasn’t where it needed to be. We had a revolving door problem.
Evolving
We decided that in order to grow and properly evolve as a company we were going to have to evolve in our hiring practices. We began to put less emphasis on past experience and more focus on finding someone who fit the ideal mold of what we wanted in a Camelback Vending Services employee. We learned that if we found the right person, we could teach them the Camelback Way. While it is a much more tedious process on the front end, the shift in who we look for and how we find them has had a quantum effect on the company.
Moving Forward
Over the last 5 years we have had little-to-no turnover as an organization while typically adding at least one new staff member per year to account for growth. Client retention has skyrocketed, employee moral is great, and we have been able to grow steadily as a company that can scale to service any size customer. Our strong management leadership and employees keep us nimble and audible ready to meet the ever-changing trends in the industry.