Energy

Baldur Schindler

By Mark Scott

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Baldur Schindler credits the ability to develop positive relationships as the key to running a successful business. As co-founder and CEO of Beacon Electric Supply, Schindler and Donald Vivier, co-founder and president, still handle sales assignments and work to maintain relationships with the company’s customers and their families. They are also careful about taking on new customers, using their chief financial officer as a gatekeeper to weed out unreliable people. Nearly a quarter century after its founding, the electric supply company has 72 employees with 2006 revenue of $50 million. Smart Business spoke with Schindler about being direct and honest with your employees.

Have a clear vision. No pie in the sky but real, measurable, attainable goals. Surround yourself with people you can trust to do their jobs with little or no guidance.

Never lose track of the fact that you can’t do it alone. It is not, ‘I did it’; rather, ‘We did it.’ We expect our people to follow our lead and not be pushed.

Walk the talk. Rather than driving and shoving the employees as a sheepherder, we tend to be more shepherds in that we lead out.

We feel that it’s important that we both have contact with the marketplace so that we know what’s going on. We still carry sales assignments even to this day. We generate a good share of the profit of the business and lead our sales force by example, rather than, ‘Here’s the map, and go do it.’

Talk to your peers. We belong to a purchasing co-op. It’s called IMARK [Group Inc., a marketing group], made up primarily of independent distributors, such as ourselves. They are all pretty much the same. The ownership or the upper level of the businesses are all entrepreneurial, such as ourselves, and are almost always hands-on people.

We have a group of 10 to 13 distributors. We meet together twice a year, and that acts like an outside board of directors. All of the owners and the hierarchy of the various organizations, we sit down and beat ourselves up and talkabout best practices, insurance, high fuel cost, all the stuff that affects our business. The basic culture of our entire industry comes out of groups like that.

Be direct about changes. Once we crossed the 50-employee mark, a couple things came to pass that are troublesome. The employee handbook. It laid down the law. You have so many vacation days. It was understood.

But when it’s put down in writing, you have so many sick days, if you take more than that, you get docked, this has to be approved by this manager. The guys that have been with us 15 or 20 years all of a sudden are saying, ‘We’re being forced to do these things that we’ve never been forced to do before.’

We sat everybody down and brought the HR consultant in and had them explain it. Guys grumbled for a while, but it went away. Just don’t be secretive about it. You have to be very open.

We don’t have very many closed-door meetings. We don’t do anything secretive. If something is up, we tell everybody.

Show the path to advancement. We’re very strong on promoting from within. We have an annual evaluation. Each department does their own people. (Employees) have to know where they are at, where they are going and what their future is. That’s paramount.

You have to have a road map for every single person. The day they come in, they have their 90-day review. That’s done very religiously. About two weeks before their evaluation is due, they get a form where they do a self-evaluation. They bring that to their appropriate manager for discussion.

That’s very critical because you need to know what you think of yourself.

Don’t overreact to bad news. Every once in awhile, a job will go foul on you, and you lose some money. We understand that. It’s just one of those things that happens to you every once in awhile.

We usually sit down and talk it through, and see what we can do to fix the problem. With an inside salesperson, if they make a $4,000 or $5,000 error, you don’t drag them through the mire and beat them up and raise holy heck.

You just sit down and talk about it. See what you can do to fix it, learn from it and go forward. Obviously, there is going to be a reprimand, but you don’t raise the roof, and you don’t drag them through the office and raise the red flag and say, ‘This guy is an idiot.’

Watch your pennies. Find the funding that it takes to fund your payables. It was always easy for us to go get business. Let’s say you went out and got a $1 million project and the bills for that job came due before you got paid. We wouldn’t be able to pay the bill.

We could actually grow considerably faster than we had the finance to back up the growth. We probably would have gone broke if it weren’t for the fact that we had a banker that helped us immensely when we first got started. Actually, he anchored us. He reined us in, if you will.

He said, ‘Hey look, guys, you’ve got to slow down here. You’re not strong enough to warrant a larger credit line, and you’re stretching things a little too far. If one of these guys goes south on you, you’re in trouble.’ We pulled back a little bit.

Be visible. I’ll be out at the counter sitting on the counter stool talking to our customers. I do that every day. I walk through the whole building every day and say, ‘Good morning’ to everybody.

I’m generally here among the first. I think that’s important that they know you’re here. Always have an open door. Anybody can come waltzing into my office any time they choose. I just never run them out. It’s always been that way. When they come, it may be one of the salespeople. They’ll have a question about one of the projects, or if they just want to shoot the bull, we’ll do that.

HOW TO REACH: Beacon Electric Supply, (858) 279-9770 or www.beaconelectric.com