Consumer Services
Getting FIT
How to beat your company's growing pains
By Matt McClellan
Smart Business Cleveland | September 2008
Page 1 of 2
Micki Tubbs
Co-founder, president and CEO, FIT Technologies
No matter how big her
company gets, Micki
Tubbs will always make the time to stop and say hello
to her employees. She says that
will be the case even when staying in touch becomes a challenge at FIT Technologies, as the
IT company Tubbs co-founded
with Michelle Tomallo in 1999
has grown to 189 employees and
almost $14 million in revenue.
“There are people who had
more involvement with us on a
daily basis, and the organization
has kind of grown up around
them,” Tubbs says.
As president and CEO, Tubbs
has kept her employees
involved in FIT’s vision while
giving them the resources and
opportunities to grow along
with the company.
Smart Business spoke with
Tubbs about how leaders need
to change as their companies
continue to grow.
Q. How has your management style changed as the
company has grown?
When we were smaller,
Michelle [Tomallo] and I could
communicate almost everything
out to our staff directly. That’s
more challenging when you
have 180 employees.
You have to rely on the management team that is in place to
communicate it in the same
way that you would communicate it or at least make sure
your employees are getting the
same message.
In this organization, for many
years, we wore all the hats. It’s
just over the last two or three
years that we’ve brought in senior leadership that we’re able
not only to pass on some of the
things we were doing but people who could bring in their experiences and add them to ours.
It’s not without its challenges.
Everyone has a different filter of
how they deliver messages or
hear messages. Now it goes
through a filter, where before it
always came directly. We’re constantly checking out the filters.
Q. How do you make sure
your message is relayed
correctly?
By having our ears to the
ground, we’ll quickly get a sense
that people are hearing
something differently
than how it was intended.
So let’s say it’s something in regard to the
work effort it’s going to
take to execute for one of
our clients. How that
message comes through
to people, we’ll quickly
know how they heard it.
What we do then is circle back with our management team to better
understand how that got
delivered. Then we coach
through the re-messaging
of that.
