PEOPLE SMARTS Does Your Business Still Fit?

I’m sure you’ve had this experience? One morning you wake up and put on that well-worn jacket only to find it feels tight around the shoulders. The first reaction is to call the cleaners and complain. But you soon realize the problem is a function of age and despite how much you love that jacket, it’s time for a new one.

Let’s face it. Each company, as it progresses through the stages of growth, wears its own jacket. Repeated wearing gives it a warm, personal, broken-in feel. People who helped start a company understand the “jacket,” what it symbolizes and how it brings comfort. They overlook its frayed collar and that there are stains that can no longer be removed.

Companies can grow from a size 40 regular to a 46 long right in front of our eyes. It doesn’t happen over night, but there are plenty of indicators. Sometimes we ignore them in favor of the security the old “company jacket” provides us.

When the company was a 40 regular, things were more predictable. Customers were happy and the employees were proud and excited about coming to work. Then, good customers recognized the company’s quality and dependability and started to ask for slight variations in their services.

At first, it wasn’t a big deal. But as demand increased, the new requests took the company in new directions. And to produce new customers, equipment purchases strained lines of credit and put pressure on revenue generating activities.

The field people started feeling the pressure of providing new services that differed from their original job requirements. These new services were not always priced properly and required more time at the job. Customer complaints started to increase because they weren’t getting the quality in the expanded services that they had come to expect from the company’s basic services. As discouraged field people resigned, management people doubling as technicians to meet customer demands filled their positions. The excitement of the vision was rapidly being siphoned off by sheer exhaustion and confusion.

What was the owner doing? He was spending more time in the office planning for “additional expansion” and neglecting the emerging problems. In effect, his people noticed he was wearing that tattered old 40-regular jacket more frequently. For the first time, it no longer looked good on him. Some even said he looked ridiculous, dated and out of touch.

From the owner’s perspective, things looked great. In fact, he was planning to implement more new ideas. He had forgotten he hadn’t had a staff meeting in two months. He hadn’t noticed things that used to get done quickly were taking forever, even when assigned to his most responsive people. He failed to connect the dots among the frequency and types of incoming customer complaints.

He was consumed with planning for new divisions in the company to meet new demands and had lost sight of the fact that his core business, which would fund these new ventures, was losing customers and good employees.

The company had become a 46 long. Even the people who proudly had worn the old 40 regular knew it was time for a change. The owner faced two choices – pull up the collar of the 40 regular and hunker down into that old familiar warmth or find a new tailor.

Larry Fish is president of GreenSearch, a human resource consulting organization. He can be reached at 888/375-7787, larry@greensearch.com, or via www.greensearch.com. PeopleSmarts® is a registered trademark of GreenSearch.

What would you do?