Cover Story
Two of a kind
How David and Eliezer Hernandez built and maintain a winning culture at Liberty Power Corp.
By John Nank
Smart Business Broward/Palm Beach | October 2007
Earlier this year, Liberty Power Corp. was named the nation’s
fastest-growing Hispanic company by Hispanic Business magazine, but Eliezer Hernandez, in typical fashion, let pass a tailor-made opportunity to pat his company and himself on the back.
“We’ve been doing what we’re doing for so long that today certainly doesn’t feel any different, and yesterday didn’t feel any different from the day before,” says Eliezer Hernandez, Liberty’s co-founder and chief relationship officer. “We’ve been running at this
pace for so long, I guess someone just noticed.”
Such modesty has been a hallmark of Liberty’s culture since
Eliezer Hernandez, his brother, David, and their colleague,
Alberto Daire — who now serves as Liberty’s chief operating officer — founded the retail electricity supplier in late 2001. Though,
in just a short time, the company’s annual revenue has already
grown to approximately $120 million, predictions are that Liberty
will reach $1 billion within the next several years as it receives
licensing to provide service beyond its current 15-state territory. David Hernandez, now Liberty’s CEO, says that as the company grows, continuing to serve its customers efficiently and
effectively will require that Liberty’s employees can work in an
environment that encourages communication and collaboration.
“One of the biggest challenges for a large corporation is that
people aren’t always willing to work together,” David
Hernandez says. “When you have a culture that is conducive to
strong communication, it just makes things much more fluid.
You can move quicker into new markets, roll out new products
and come up with new ideas. The benefit of a strong culture
for the customer is that they get the benefit of those new products and innovation.”
Influenced largely by the values imparted upon them by their
mother, Eliezer Hernandez says that for him and David, and
the rest of Liberty’s leadership team, maintaining an unpretentious outlook has come as second nature as they’ve worked to
create a culture that will help take their company to the next
level.
“The culture here is very egalitarian in the sense that there is
no them and us,” Eliezer Hernandez says. “There is senior management, of which the founders are members, but nobody calls
us ‘the founders’ or ‘the owners.’ We’re regular guys, and we
certainly haven’t let whatever limited success we’ve had to
date go to our heads.”
Learning from the past
Building a positive and successful corporate culture requires
employees who can help contribute to and maintain it. David
Hernandez says that in order to do so, a company must first
learn what qualities make specific individuals successful members of its team.
“A successful organization is one that learns from its experiences and is continuously improving,” David Hernandez says.
“One of the areas that is most critical is learning what type of
person you’re looking for, what type of person fits in to the
organization, so that it’s a functioning machine.”
Having been in business for several years, David Hernandez sat down with his executive team, and together they examined
current and former employees of Liberty and developed a
defined set of attributes common among those employees who
had prospered.
“We sort of looked back and did an inventory of some of the
traits that made some people successful and why others left or
were asked to leave,” David Hernandez says. “When we narrowed down the traits of the people that have been successful
here at Liberty Power, we found that those who were humble
and who didn’t have the need to be right tended to succeed.”
Along with humility, the management team at Liberty discovered that an intellectual hunger and intelligence were
characteristics of those who had fit well with Liberty’s values
system and corporate culture. Not coincidentally, those three
traits — humble, hungry and smart — are mentioned by
author Patrick Lencioni in his book, “The Five Dysfunctions
of a Team,” which is now required reading for Liberty’s management team.
As a learning organization, Eliezer Hernandez says much of
Liberty’s corporate philosophy has been influenced by
Lencioni’s work.
“We didn’t invent this stuff,” Eliezer Hernandez says. “We
were kind of figuring it out on our own, but (Lencioni) confirmed and validated a lot of the things that we were thinking
about.”
David Hernandez says the strategy has proven beneficial to
the company.
“Whenever we’re identifying the kind of people that are successful here, looking back has proven a good way for us to
learn what it is that makes our people successful, and other
leaders should, and can, do that, as well.”
Building the team
Once a profile of the desired traits has been constructed,
Liberty’s human resources department sources and vets
resumes in preparation for a thorough and well-structured
interview process designed to identify candidates with the
right mix of cultural tendencies. Because the culture he has
created stresses collaboration, David Hernandez says Liberty’s
interview process is a team effort.
“For a small company, we involve a lot of people,” David
Hernandez says. “On average, when someone gets hired, they
interview with at least eight or 10 people within our company.”
After using a telephone conference as an initial screening of
prospective team members, those identified as possible good
fits for the organization are asked to come in for a series of
interviews, the length of which is adjusted depending on the
level of the position within the organization. Eliezer
Hernandez says holding interviews over the course of several
days has improved Liberty’s ability to truly isolate the personality and qualities of a candidate.
“Our process requires that we have people interviewed over
different dates,” Eliezer Hernandez says. “Someone might be
having a really good day one day, but even a monster has a really good day. So we invite them back for that second round of
interviews on a different day.”
One step of Liberty’s process, inspired by Malcolm Gladwell’s
2005 book, “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking,”
involves an impromptu, informal greeting and discussion,
administered by Eliezer Hernandez, during which a candidate
is approached in the lobby for a brief, but often telling, interaction. Gladwell’s book argues that too often people insist on
having a surplus of information to make a decision instead of
trusting their instinct, and Eliezer Hernandez says Liberty’s
“Blink” interviews provide an opportunity to form a gut reaction to a candidate.
“The objective of the ‘Blink’ interview is to not get too
much information,” Eliezer Hernandez says. “For example,
someone could be a jerk, but when you ask them about
themselves, they tell you they graduated from Harvard, and
they worked for the president of the United States. You end
up sort of talking yourself into, ‘Wouldn’t it be neat to have
someone that worked for the president of the United States?’
and you look past the really important cultural things. But in
that ‘Blink’ interview, you don’t get enough information to
talk yourself into making the wrong decision.”
When interviewing for a senior-level opening at Liberty, at
some point in the process, candidates are asked to meet for
an interview at a somewhat unusual off-site location. Eliezer
Hernandez says judging how an individual handles himself or
herself in an unfamiliar environment — for example, at the
beach or on a roller coaster — can reveal a lot about his or
her character and how he or she will integrate into an existing corporate culture.
“Asking arrogant questions like, ‘Why the heck are they
wasting my time? Why am I here?’ tells us somebody is going
to be resistant in doing things in the way that we found to be
successful,” Eliezer Hernandez says. “They don’t realize the
test is not just the questions that are being asked, but how
comfortable they appear in a setting they weren’t expecting.”
Of course, it is not only the number or nature of interviews
in a hiring process that determines its success, but also the
types of questions being asked in the interviews. Generic
questions are typically answered with generic responses,
and as David Hernandez illustrates with the classic
“strengths and weaknesses” line of questioning, to learn as
much as you can about a candidate, those conducting an
interview must be willing to dig a bit deeper.
“People are very comfortable talking about their strengths,
and they’re very familiar with their strengths,” David
Hernandez says. “Typically, people have a baked answer for
what their weakness is — ‘I work too hard and neglect the
family,’ or whatever that might be. So we ask them what their
second greatest weakness is, and if it’s another off-the-shelf-type weakness, we’ll ask for the third. We’ll keep peeling the
onion until we get to, ‘OK, this person has a problem interacting with people.’ People’s integrity and how honest they
are comes through in how they answer questions like that.”
Investing in the future
Especially during times of rapid growth, David Hernandez
says it is important to keep in mind that a company’s job is
not done once a hire is made. On the contrary, effort is
required on the part of an employer to successfully integrate
new employees into an existing culture. At Liberty, an
employee orientation program has been put in place that,
while costly, has created a system through which recent hires
are welcomed and familiarized with the organization.
“When you’re going a hundred miles an hour, the bias is for
throwing people into a role,” David Hernandez says. “Even
though it’s an upfront cost, I see it more as an investment of
time and resources, and over the long run, it helps bring people in and integrate them into the organization.”
During their first week at Liberty, employees attend sessions covering the history of the company, what is happening
currently and where the company is heading in the future.
Liberty is currently in the process of creating additional sessions. One that will address the inner workings of the organization and how the different pieces fit together, and another
that will explain the nature of the energy industry and the
company’s place in it.
“The point is to get people who are here a month the benefit of having a lot of the information that other people who
have been here three years have gotten slowly over time and
systematizing it so everyone learns these things at the beginning,” Eliezer Hernandez says.
While it may seem excessive to some, he says making the
commitment to educate employees helps create an egalitarian atmosphere where even Liberty’s least-tenured team members have the same information as its founders and are thus
armed with a clear sense of what it will take to make themselves and the company successful.
“It’s worth doing this because when people feel like they
own their areas, their space and their company, they behave
very differently, all the way from wiping down a counter to
picking up a piece of paper,” Eliezer Hernandez says. “Those
are symbolic things and evidence that people have an ownership mentality and feel like they have a stake. These orientations do that. They give people context and give them a sense
of ownership.”
Though creating an orientation program like the one at
Liberty might not affect a company’s bottom line directly,
David Hernandez says an organization of people who are
knowledgeable, engaged and comfortable will pay great dividends in the future.
“Effective companies learn that sometimes the decisions
that are not as tangible in the short term are the best decisions,” David Hernandez says. “As you look at building a culture, you realize in hindsight that a lot of the little steps that
you take over time really pay off in the long run. If you’re
looking at creating a long-term business, you have to invest in
your people.”
HOW TO REACH: Liberty Power Corp., (866) 769-3799 or www.libertypowercorp.com
