Smart Leaders
Coach ’em up
How to put people and systems in place for sustainable growth
By Mike Cottrill
Smart Business Cleveland | August 2009
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Dennis Abrahams, president and CEO, SageQuest LLC
Dennis Abrahams is no rocket scientist.
He’s the president and CEO of fast-growing SageQuest LLC, but at heart, Abrahams is still a high school baseball coach with a simple philosophy on how you build success.
“I look back to when I was a high school teacher and coach; I look back to early experiences,” he says. “And my answer pretty consistently is, be good to your team and they’ll deliver. I don’t think this is rocket science.”
OK, it’s not rocket science, but there have been some impressive numbers floating around SageQuest the last four years, as the service provider of GPS fleet tracking and management solutions has grown more than 1,500 percent in that time. Along the way, Abrahams has lived the philosophy of taking care of his team, setting realistic goals to keep them on track and rebuilding the company infrastructure to give his 85 players better systems and products.
Smart Business picked Abrahams’ brain on how you set growth goals and why rebuilding infrastructure takes precedent over short-term goals.
Carefully bring in team players. We’ve always made certain to bring on board a team that’s not only talented and covers the breadth of skills required but also has to have the passion to succeed and, even more importantly, the commitment that it takes to succeed. We put every employee here through behavioral testing — are they a cultural fit; do they exhibit the core traits that we believe drive success? I’m a big believer in that stuff to the degree that a lot of people that I work with that I get along with make fun of me. They say, ‘You’re so into the interpersonal side; you’re so into the team side.’
We use a few different tools, we use BMA, Behavior Management Associates, we go through a battery of testing with BMA and then salespeople we also put through Sogistics testing. So the stuff we do is very behavioral, and people sometimes laugh at the stuff I do, but, very bluntly, we’ve almost had no turnover, and we’ve had tremendous success with our people.
You’re always tweaking the system, and as you grow, as you go from 10 employees to 30 to 50 to 70, the dynamic changes. But the core rudiments of what we’re looking for, the behavioral characteristics, the cultural characteristics, the sales characteristics, the technical skill sets … have remained pretty constant. Our methodologies have been adjusted over time but not dramatically.
