Real Estate and Construction
An honest leader
How to be a role model for your employees
By Meredyth McKenzie
Smart Business Columbus | July 2008
Page 1 of 2
Bill Heifner
Founder and president, Renier Construction Corp.
Integrity is a key word for Bill
Heifner. That word appears almost everywhere at Renier
Construction Corp., from the
back of business cards and in
the company logo to the company mission statement and a
plaque on the wall.
Committing himself and his
company to integrity helped the
founder and president when he
failed to follow through on part
of a project, then admitted his
mistake right away to the client
and vendor.
“It hurts to say that, but in the
end, the vendor pitched in to
help me because we had a great
relationship, and I’ve treated
him with integrity,” he says.
“My client appreciated it, too,
because nobody’s perfect, and I
didn’t try to push it off on
somebody else.”
This commitment to integrity
by Heifner and his 50 employees has led the general contractor, which focuses on building
auto dealerships, to 2007 revenue of $41 million.
Smart Business spoke with
Renier about how to live the
value of integrity and how to
model that to your customers.
Be a good role model. In one of
Lee Iacocca’s books, he made a
comment that in any well-managed company, there’s a little
piece of the person at the top
that permeates down through
the company. If you’re a good
role model and conducting
yourself with the highest degree
of integrity, then that goes
through the company and resonates to the people who actually have contact day to day
with clients.
You have to have impeccable
integrity. Integrity sets the tone
for anything that you do when
you’re somebody’s mentor
because they’re looking up to
you and basing a lot of their
thoughts and thought process
with how you deal with day-today challenges. If you put
integrity at the top, then everything else follows suit.
If you realize that you make a
mistake, and the harder you try
to cover it up, the easier it is
that somebody’s going to find
out about it. When they find out
about it, it compromises your
integrity so poorly that it takes
you so long to recover from it
[that] it’s just not worth it.
Satisfy your customers. You have
to have 100 percent customer
satisfaction or a high level of
customer satisfaction to maintain your client base. If you do
that, it’s easier and you can
improve your sales success
ratio by working with satisfied,
happy past customers.
Anytime they need anything,
they pick up the phone and call
you. If you have a good relationship and take care of their
needs and they have complete
trust and confidence in you,
those customers will call you.
The most important thing is
listening to the customer. A
friend of mine told me that God gave you two ears and one
mouth, so you’re supposed to
listen twice as much as you
talk. We have to spend a lot of
time listening to their needs
and understanding their goals,
operations and what makes
their business work.
Be sincere. I’ve seen people
who will sit with a client and
put on a good show that they’re
genuinely interested in what
the customer wants, but at the
end of the day, they’ve already
formulated in their own mind
what they think the customer
wants. You need to concentrate on spending time with
customers.
I was recently in a situation
where I was courted by a furniture vendor. It was an hour
meeting, and the salesman
talked for 50 minutes and didn’tlisten. When he left, I looked at
him and said, ‘So what’s important to me?’ and he had this
deer-in-the-headlight look.
I said, ‘The problem is that
you didn’t listen,’ and we went
on about our separate ways. It’s
important to listen.
