Cover Story
Keeping score
How Troy Templeton created a culture of teamwork that took Trivest Partners to new levels of success
By Mike Cottrill
Smart Business Miami | March 2008
When Troy Templeton took over at Trivest Partners L.P. five
years ago, he could have left well enough alone.
The investment firm, which provides equity for middle-market
corporate acquisitions, recapitalizations and growth capital
financings, had nearly 25 years of success with an attitude of
entrepreneurial spirit that allowed the firm’s lead deal makers to
work on their own to create deals.
But forgive Templeton, the firm’s managing partner, if he wanted a little more. Though he could see the company was doing
well, he also knew that if he could bring those people together as
a team, giving people a chance to look over the few deals being
made that may hurt the company, it would give Trivest and its
employees a big boost. So Templeton went to work at creating a
teamwork culture that still let people be creative.
“You have to build a culture for a firm where people want to
work for and be part of,” Templeton says. “It’s many long
hours, it’s not a 9-to-5 job, and in order to find people that
enjoy that kind of work life you have to have a culture that promotes a feeling of being part of the team, of being part of something where one can learn from, develop and grow. We focus
very much on our culture and building one that’s sustainable
and provides an environment to do what it takes to be successful.”
That teamwork culture was a building process for Trivest
that started at the top with Templeton and his senior leaders
setting the stage by helping midlevel leaders take over projects. Once the idea of teamwork was created, Trivest worked
on strategies to hire team players and create a framework for
the company’s entrepreneurial goals to be reached through
team practices.
The resulting culture Trivest created has helped the company
continue to grow. Not only does the company’s portfolio manage companies with $1.5 billion in revenue with more than
5,000 employees but returns on investment, which had traditionally been around 30 percent at the company, have increased to more than 40 percent during Templeton’s five years
at the head of the firm.
Make teamwork your priority
There’s a trick to creating a culture of teamwork while still
letting employees develop, and Templeton says it’s fairly
abstract.
“You have to know when to manage and when to leave people alone, and it’s critical,” he says. “We all try to hire stars,
and stars want to have the opportunity to manage a project or
whatever the task is at hand, so the key is to give them the
autonomy to do that. On the other hand, you have to realize
when they need help and when they’ve hit a sticking point
and need leadership from management.”
Templeton says you create that process by letting employees
jump in the pool while acting as more of a lifeguard than a
floating device.
“It starts with trust, and you have to give people the opportu-
nity to succeed or fail, but the key is not letting them fail.
That’s more of an art than a science, but it’s just like watching
somebody swim — you know if somebody is swimming and
getting across to the other side, and you know those that are
struggling. It’s hard to describe, but it’s easy to see.
“The key is to jump in and help the person that’s struggling
and not pull them to the other side but hopefully give them a
little bit of a breather so they can get there on their own. My
job is to let them go as far as they can and then jump in and
provide a little creative input to help them get over that
obstacle.”
Templeton fleshes out the idea of helping someone stay
afloat by giving examples of small ways you can aid someone
while letting them still swim their own course.
“It can be as simple as somebody making a deal, and they
believe it’s a good company, but maybe they’re missing one
thing, so it’s providing the years of experience and saying,
‘Why don’t you look at this before you come back with a decision,’” he says. “Hurdles are an everyday part of life, and what
you don’t want to do is let them try to struggle with it on their
own when they are not able to get around that hurdle.”
The main focus is helping an employee along without taking
over a project. By giving some insight but allowing them to
swim on their own, lessons are learned, and the employee
remains empowered.
“Growing up in the industry, the way I learned the most was
doing it on my own,” Templeton says. “But you can never do
everything on your own, and it was great always having help
involved in a transaction that helped guide you through whatever challenges you faced, so that’s what we try to provide.”
Though the swim lessons have to come from the top,
Templeton doesn’t have to spend all his time coaching. He populates most business deals with one midlevel manager — the
aspiring swimmer — and has two senior-level associates helping the process along whenever there is some trouble. The
result not only removes pressure from the person handling the
deals, but it removes the stigma around asking for help. Since
each employee has the opportunity to get help, they are also
willing to give a hand on any project.
“It’s our job to guide them through the transaction but allow
them the freedom to execute and get things done,” he says.
“People want to participate in that, and we try to get that message across through a team environment where you are not on
your own, you’re not the only person responsible for a deal or
an acquisition.
“On the other side, if there’s a problem or a fire to be put out,
we want people that don’t mind jumping in and getting their
hands dirty. That’s critical to a great culture because if you
build that environment, people know there’s somebody watching their back, they know that they’re not going to be measured
solely on their own performance but how they interact as part
of a team environment, and that creates a desire for everyone
to work together.”
Hire a team player
While Templeton’s theories on building a team culture start at
the top, part of the process comes from the bottom. That
means that if you want teamwork as a core of your culture,
your new hires better be team players.
There are plenty of checks and balances to the hiring system at
Trivest, but the one thing that Templeton really wants to know
about potential employees is if they’d be welcome at a company
lunch on a Friday afternoon. It’s not that Templeton is looking for
another buddy, he just knows that when it comes to company
culture, a new employee has to fit in or risk being left out. So
whenever Trivest is hiring a new professional — one of the 25
people that work inside the company on its acquisition and asset
management projects — Templeton takes them out for a meal
with others from the firm.
“No. 1 on my list is culture first,” he says. “Before any new
professional is hired, they meet everybody in the firm, each
person in the firm has a different aspect to gauge that person’s personality, and everybody goes through a gauntlet of
meeting people in the firm before they’re hired. And what I
ask everybody, because we all meet together after the interview sessions and discuss each candidate, is a simple question, ‘Would you like to go to lunch with this individual?’”
It seems banal, but at the core of the question is a basic premise: Assuming skill competencies are met among the candidates,
is this person the right fit for the team?
“We’ve all worked in an organization, and if at lunch time you
walk by that individual’s office, and you don’t want to have
lunch with him or her, that’s not a person that fits in with the
team,” Templeton says. “So the going to lunch factor is first and
foremost, if you don’t particularly want to have lunch with that
guy or gal, they’re probably not going to fit in with the team. It’s
kind of simple but important.”
Give employees team-oriented
goals
Beyond Templeton setting the stage for his company’s team-work initiative and his simple test for making sure qualified candidates will fit in with the team, Templeton had to help create
team-oriented goals so people felt involved.
When Trivest was operating as several independent people or
groups doing deals, there was no real framework to include others and work within a company-oriented goal. To get the people
thinking in terms of Trivest’s overall goals, Templeton set an
agenda for what he expected from the entire company and set
the bar higher across the board to encourage people to think
outside of their own deals to help others get across the finish
line.
“The thing I try to do is set the big goals,” Templeton says. “If
you don’t aim high, you’re not going to shoot high, so you may
not attain all your goals all the time, but you are certainly going
to attain a higher level of performance if you are going after the
big goals rather than saying, ‘I want to beat last year by 5 to 10
percent.’”
Beyond setting the bigger goals, Templeton also wanted
Trivest to have a system that encouraged the new team-oriented objective he’d laid out. To do so, he kept some of the entrepreneurial attitude of the firm intact by allowing people to still
design portions of their own deals, while creating a scorecard
system for the firm’s most successful deals. The scorecard
showed what deals were most profitable for Trivest traditionally, so if a new deal didn’t match up well with that card, it
couldn’t move forward. The system gave a boundary in which
creativity was still necessary, and it also acted as a great training process for younger people.
“That had a huge impact because it very quickly taught our
younger folks the culture of the firm,” he says. “If you came to
work for Trivest, and you filled out 10 of these scorecards in a
five-week period, you would know exactly what works and
what doesn’t work for our investment philosophy.”
Overall, the idea was to allow people to be creative while
working within the goals of the company. Templeton gave a
destination, and then let his professionals design their path.
“It doesn’t allow for deals to get outside the box to get any
traction at Trivest,” he says. “It pretty much limits the ability
for that outside deal to get rationalized, and that’s the biggest
risk is rationalizing an opportunity that you think is an opportunity but really isn’t within your core set of experience.”
Not every company has the employee structure that Trivest
does, but Templeton says that the idea of putting together a destination with team-oriented goals is universal if you want people to be successful.
“You can’t get to your destination unless you know where you
are going, and this tells them where they’re going — the destination,” he says. “They may have to figure out their tasks to get
there, but they know the goal, so it eliminates that uncertainty
of not knowing what might be the right opportunity for Trivest.
It takes a lot of the stress and uncertainty away because you
can say, ‘I know I’m doing this.’”
HOW TO REACH: Trivest Partners L.P., (305) 858-2200 or www.trivest.com
