Food & Beverage
René M. Diaz
Chairman and CEO, Diaz Foods
By Kristy J. O’Hara
Smart Business Atlanta | August 2007
"If you have the right people, you can get dog food and sell it as caviar. If you have the wrong people, you could have Louis Vuitton bags, and you couldn’t sell them." -- René M. Diaz, CEO, Diaz Foods
After just three weeks on the job, while at the company’s Christmas party, one of René M. Diaz’s employees decided to tell him everything that
was wrong with Diaz Foods. Diaz, chairman and CEO of the company, encouraged the employee to meet with the human resources manager,
but before the meeting, Diaz gave the manager instructions — if the situation wasn’t salvageable, fire the employee. So when the man came in,
he refused to talk and complained that he was supposed to meet with the man in charge, so the HR manager simply replied, “Well, the man in
charge told this woman in charge that you’re fired.” Diaz doesn’t want bad apples in his $130 million food wholesale company, so he deals with
them quickly if they aren’t a good fit with his company.
Smart Business spoke with Diaz about how he identifies people with “chispa,” the
Spanish word for “spark,” and why it’s so important to his company.
Get the right people. You can have all the
capital in the world, but if you don’t have
the right people, you’re not going to succeed. If you have the right people, you
can get dog food and sell it as caviar. If
you have the wrong people, you could
have Louis Vuitton bags, and you couldn’t sell them.
In Spanish, it’s called chispa — spark.
They have to have it in their eye. They
have to have it when they speak, but it
has to be a true chispa.
You interview people, and they’re like,
‘I want to come work for you, and I’ll
work eight days a week, 30 hours a day,
and I’ll live, breathe your company, and I
can raise your sales 50 percent.’ That is
false chispa. He’s creating a spark
because he’s doing an interview.
The spark is more in the want. You can
see it when they speak because they’re not
trying to prove themselves to you in a 10-minute interview. You can see it in the way
they dress, the way they look, the way they
handle themselves. You can come in a
hand-me-down suit, but you tied your tie
properly, you sat up straight in the chair.
You at least cleaned your shoes.
If someone gets here late and got stuck in
traffic, folks say, ‘Oh, he doesn’t care.’ You
have kids at home, you get delayed, your
car breaks down. Those things can happen.
It’s more personality. How they look at
you, how they speak, their mannerisms.
Are they polite? Do they say thank you?
That all matters.
Don’t be fooled by resumes. Resumes do
not impress me. I’ve seen people — master’s here and 10 different colleges, and
you interview them, and they have no
social skills. They don’t look you straight
in the eye when they talk to you. They
don’t sit up upright.
They’re not proud of who they are.
They’re not self-confident, and you can
see that when you talk to people. Then I
hire some kid who had to leave high
school to support his family, and he
impresses the hell out of me, and he
gives me a wow.
That’s what I look at. Do you demand
more of yourself? Do you demand more
of what you are able to contribute from
your abilities? A kid who didn’t finish
high school has limitations to a certain
amount, but those limitations to them
don’t exist, and they exceed those limitations, and that’s the spirit I’m looking
for — that nothing holds them back.
Do things yourself. If something’s small,
like faxes or return this person’s call, it is
who can do it the fastest. If it’s going to
take me longer to tell my assistant to call
Kristy and tell her I can’t make the conference call, and she’s like ‘Who’s Kristy?’
‘Kristy works for Smart Business. She’s
an associate editor — here’s her number.’
It’s faster for me to pick up the phone and
call you.
Whoever’s going to do that for me, they
have work to do as well. If it’s going to
take me five minutes to explain, and I’m
going to take that five minutes of their
time, and they still have to make the call,
it would have been more efficient for the
company if I had just done it myself.
Delegate. If I get calls from folks who
want to buy my company, I say nicely,
‘You need to speak with my CFO,’ and
they say, ‘Well, we only talk to owners.’ I
go, ‘No. My CFO has access to everything. If you want to talk financial stuff,
you talk to my CFO,’ and that’s how I
delegate.
If it’s not my responsibility, it’s delegated to a manager. Period. I keep a list of
the tasks by managers in a public folder.
They have access to that folder — they
can read it, they can copy it, but they
cannot amend or delete it.
I’ll add the task, I’ll e-mail her the task
so she knows that that’s an expectation
of mine, and I put a start date and a due
date. Then they get back to me and tell
me whether that’s reasonable or not. I
know everyone’s busy, but I don’t know
what you’re working on. I’m flexible on
that stuff.
Reorganize periodically. Let’s assume
we’re starting from scratch. Forget people. Forget budgets. Create an organizational chart for me that would meet your
needs today. Then forecast your needs
for the next 12 months, then a soft scenario for 24 months.
In the reorg, we’ve created a list of
requirements before we look at who’s
going to fill that box. Then we say, ‘(She)
had that job before — that was her title.
Look at the job now. Does she fit that
job? If she does, is she willing to do it?’
One of my buyers, when I analyzed
what she was doing, she was creating
reports for sales. She was analyzing
data, so I moved her into my team, and
she’s our business analyst. It’s not different. It’s just sometimes the title, over the
years, has remained the same, but your
duties have changed, so you’re really
doing something different than what
your title calls for.
It makes us refocus on our business at
a micro level rather than a macro level.
It’s not a lot of changes, but one or two
little boxes you move around makes a
huge impact. When you’re growing 30
percent a year, you have to redefine
yourself every 12 months. If not, you’re
fooling yourself.
HOW TO REACH: Diaz Foods, (800) 394-4639 or www.diazfoods.com
