Business Services
Growing pains
How Greg Dubecky manages growth at Corporate Screening Services Inc.
By John Nank
Smart Business Cleveland | June 2007
Problems associated with growth are good problems for a
business to have, but for Greg Dubecky and Corporate
Screening Services Inc., that doesn’t mean those problems are any less critical. After CSS grew its team by nearly 50 percent
from 2004 to 2005 and then again by a third the following year,
Dubecky, the company’s general manager, realized that even the
more trivial difficulties required attention.
“There were a myriad of problems as simple as, ‘What are we
going to do about parking?’ Dubecky says. “These were things you
would never think about. ‘Where are we going to put everybody?
We’ve got to buy phones? We don’t have any place to park these
people.’”
Founded in 1995 as a spin-off of Corporate Investigative Services,
a company that specialized in workers’ compensation and insurance fraud investigations, CSS found a niche within the burgeoning corporate screening industry.
“You spend all this time trying to figure out which products you
have meet market acceptance,” Dubecky says. “Which one of these
things is beneficial? Which one of these things offers value to the end
user? We started to look at screening pretty seriously.”
By 2003, after CSS had moved out of what Dubecky describes as
survival mode and had outgrown its informal leadership structure,
the company’s principals began putting processes into place in
anticipation of further growth. Though it was difficult in a rapidly
growing industry, they began forecasting where they wanted to be
three and five years into the future, and then took steps to build a
scalable infrastructure to support the growth they foresaw.
Dubecky says that creating scalability helps a growing company
retain some of the agility characteristic of smaller companies.
“Being scalable helps you out because it gives you peace of mind,”
Dubecky says. “When you know that you have systems and policies
and procedures in place that are scalable, you can make those
changes and you know that, that structure that you have in place is
going to accommodate that.”
In making the transition into a more formal leadership philosophy, Dubecky and the other principals of CSS placed greater
emphasis on forecasting, planning and strategizing to sustain
growth rather than on day-to-day operations. Though it is a difficult shift for many leaders, Dubecky says having the ability and
wherewithal to delegate is vital to continued growth.
“The most difficult part for us in that shift process was considering the fact that we couldn’t any longer work in the company, we
had to work on the company,” Dubecky says. “We always liked the
day-to-day operations, but we realized we weren’t going to be able
to sustain our growth unless we really concentrated on the company.”
As part of his new responsibilities in the more formal leadership
structure, Dubecky found that conveying the company’s mission and
values became a much more challenging task given the growth in the
CSS staff.
“Everybody is moving at warp speed,” Dubecky says. “All of a
sudden you don’t have just 15 or 20 people; you have 70 people that
you have to communicate what your mission is. You’ve got to get
everybody on the same page, and that becomes an arduous thing
to do.”
In successfully managing rapid growth, Dubecky says that a
leader should never hesitate to seek guidance, something CSS did
to help it cope with growth.
“We hired a human resource professional to come in and help us
out,” Dubecky said. We were able to really help to establish a culture, get people on board with the mission and keep people happy
and motivated.”
HOW TO REACH: Corporate Screening Services Inc., (440) 816-0500 or www.corporatescreening.com
Customers come first
While Corporate Screening Services Inc. was growing, General
Manager Greg Dubecky stressed above all else that customer relationships must be maintained. Here is what Dubecky says about
preserving that bond.
“You can’t grow unless you have a sound foundation. You need to
figure out what a sound foundation is. A sound foundation for us
is, first and foremost, our relationship with our customers. Without
existing customers, you can’t build. If you have customer attrition,
you’re going to be spinning your wheels.”
“Your customers know when you’re experiencing some pains.
They identify immediately whether or not you’re having some
problems, and they’ll be the first to tell you. We were not ashamed
to tell them, ‘Yeah, we are experiencing some growing problems.
These are good problems to have. We hope that you want to align
yourself with an organization that’s successful. CSS is successful,
but we have some new challenges.’”
“Profits and money come secondary to us. It’s about making the
customer happy. Those are the things that help us sleep at night. At
our organization, we’re not afraid to put our folks in front of the
customer. Our front-line people speak to our customers on a daily
basis. We encourage that, and we want to make sure of that,
because they’re projecting that same image.”
