Fast Lane

Creating harmony

By Abby Cymerman

A zero turnover rate is a lofty goal, but at BGT Partners, David Clarke wants his employees to hop on board for the long haul.

Clarke, managing partner of the online marketing consulting firm, says his company uses the recruiting pitch, “Change your job for a career.”

“We don’t want employees to see this as a five-year stint. We really want this to be the last job they ever have,” he says.

Founded in 1996, BGT Partners has 75 employees and offices in Miami, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Argentina and France. Revenue has grown 275 percent from 2004 to 2006, and Clarke expects 2007 revenue to reach $10 million.

Smart Business spoke with Clarke about how he recruits and retains the right employees to move his company forward.

Q: What can other executives learn from your hiring process?

When we hire, we don’t hire because we necessarily need an employee. We hire because it’s the right fit, so we’re constantly interviewing and looking to see who the good resources are.

We’re never at a point where we have a new project and need to hire 10 people. It’s always a question of, ‘Is this the right person to fit with this team?’

When you don’t have harmony among teams, you can’t be as productive for your accounts, and it also creates more turmoil within the office.

Q: Is the ongoing interview process worth the expense?

There’s nothing more expensive than bringing somebody into the company, training them for months and then realizing that they just don’t click with the team. They could be the most wonderful, intelligent, experienced resource, but if they don’t work well with the rest of the team, the entire team won’t be as productive.

We also have a pretty extensive training process. Nobody’s engaging with clients for the first couple months of working here. They’re always shadowing somebody within this company to learn how we do things.

Q: How does that benefit your company?

It’s so important that we all have the same message, and we’re all delivering the same solutions across the board. In order for that to happen, you need the experience of working within our team, and that’s where the learning happens.

One of the things we say to people when we hire them is, ‘It’s not what we hire you to do; it’s what else you want to do.’ We might hire you to be a project manager, but you want to go into usability. You just have to show us that you want to do it, and then you can do it.

I say we have zero turnover rate because we’ve had people who have left BGT, but they always ask for their positions back because they’ve tried it somewhere else — gone to a larger corporation or thought they could find something else in a different region — and then they come back and say, ‘I like what you’re doing here.’

As long as they’ve left on good terms, we welcome them back because we know they have the experience. We might hire someone who’s very young — it’s been their first or second job — and we respect the fact that they might want to try a different company; that’s just part of the business world. It is a huge compliment that they want to return to work for us.

Q: How do you create a team environment?

At BGT Partners, the leadership has an employee mentality. They’re in the trenches, working with all the employees, and they understand what it takes to deploy a successful solution.

Nobody at BGT is put on a pedestal. Everybody’s working within the teams. Employees are able to have access to any of the executives here. It creates a very comfortable environment.

It’s not necessarily that we have an open-door policy. Employees aren’t coming into an executive’s office; the executives are actually going to them and working with them. It’s nice when you walk around the office and you see vice presidents working with managers or directors trying to find solutions to our clients’ problems.

There’s such a seamless integration that our clients are really getting wonderful service by working with all the different people on the teams. They’re not restricted to working with their project manager or usability expert; they might be on the phone all day long with a partner.

The end result is that the more the executives and the partners are involved with the project, the more they understand the solutions. They’re able to get fairly detailed with what needs to be done, as opposed to just having that high-level view of what needs to happen within a project.

Q: What is one pitfall in the growth process?

The biggest pitfall is when employees transition too much, and companies can’t maintain a stable team. That’s a killer.

We find that we’re taking accounts away from other companies, specifically because the client doesn’t like the turnover on their existing marketing teams.

HOW TO REACH: BGT Partners, (305) 438-1800 or www.bgtpartners.com