Smart Leaders
Building for tomorrow
How to create a culture that can handle fast-paced growth
By Mike Cottrill
Smart Business Cleveland | September 2009
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Adelbert ‘Chip’ Marous, president and co-founder, Marous Brothers Construction
Adelbert “Chip” Marous remembers the feeling of having to succeed or fall flat on his face.
It was 1980 and Marous and his brother, Scott, had just founded their own company, and the two young carpenters were the only employees.
That experience taught Marous how to be aggressive and adjust on the fly. And adjust he did. Today, Marous Brothers Construction employs up to nearly 600 people during peak seasons and has grown into a contracting powerhouse.
But Marous, the company’s president, hasn’t forgotten the lessons he learned while figuring things out for himself, so he grows the company through similarly strong-willed talent. That brings in a lot of aggressive mindsets, but that also drives growth.
“We have more type-A personalities in this company than probably any other company in the United States,” Marous says. “But that’s why we’re aggressive. That’s why we’re high energy here.”
Smart Business talked with Marous about how you reward hard work with opportunities and why you throw young talent into the frying pan.
Make sure you reward hard work with opportunities. In this business, and in life, it’s called respect. You have to respect your people. We respect our people; we give them opportunities. We understand it’s a two-way street: You work hard, we work hard and good things happen and opportunities happen, and people grow and move up to different levels. And as the company grows, you need more managers, you need more people to be responsible, and that creates that good culture of growth and aggressiveness. We’re very aggressive here, and those types of people gravitate toward us. It’s amazing. We hire people who have been in the business for many years, we hire people coming out of college, too, but there’s people that have come here that have worked other places for 10 to 15 years and they come here and say, ‘This is unreal. I’ve been in the business 15 years and this is like getting on the autobahn every day.’ It’s high energy and that’s what creates opportunities and that’s why we’re successful — it’s because of our people. And it’s a lot of young people, and they’re aggressive and they work hard, and that’s the culture. Those people gravitate to us, and the people that don’t want to work hard, they kind of deselect themselves.
