Cover Story
Sowing the seeds
How Dave Lindsey positioned DEFENDER Direct Inc. for growth by giving his employees the tools to lead
By Mark Scott
Smart Business Indianapolis | March 2010
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Dave Lindsey has a favorite story to tell when he is asked why leadership training is important at DEFENDER Direct Inc. It’s a tale of two guys whose job is to load bags of ice onto trucks.
Employee A gets off to a great start upon his hiring. He shows up to work early every day and gets his job done promptly. But within a few months, the effort has left him with a sore back and feelings of frustration with his job and his employer.
“Now he’s got a bad attitude and he thinks the company has been treating him bad,” says Lindsey, founder, chairman and CEO of DEFENDER.
Employee B is given the same workload but takes a different approach to getting it done. Instead of having beer and pizza and crashing on the couch every evening like Employee A, he makes sure he eats a nutritious meal and joins a gym to help him better handle the heavy lifting.
He learns some new lifting techniques and even discovers a belt that will help him lift twice as many bags of ice as he could before.
“Ninety days later, he has twice the productivity of every other guy in the department,” Lindsey says. “He’s teaching every other guy in the department how to lift two bags at once. He is actually done with his work so early every day that he is talking to his boss and figuring out what his boss does. … He has revolutionized the department and doubled productivity. We didn’t even know about these techniques, and he went out and found them and brought them to us.”
DEFENDER doesn’t sell bags of ice. His 1,600-employee company is an authorized dealer for homeowner services and products. But the lesson Lindsey wants to convey still applies. Employees who are willing to invest themselves in their jobs and think about how to do their jobs more effectively can provide great value to your organization.
“It’s growing and developing people,” Lindsey says. “We go into businesses and we all want to have a better widget and a better plan than the next guy. But at the end of the day, the humbling thing as an owner and leader is I’m only able to grow as fast as my people can grow. We have a saying at DEFENDER that businesses don’t grow, people do. We battle every day for that not to be a cliché.”
Lindsey wants his employees to be more like Employee B. He wants them to think about their role in the company, but he also wants them to know that he cares about their personal growth, as well.
His efforts to develop balanced employees have helped DEFENDER grow from $20 million in 2005 revenue to $142 million in 2008. The key to that success is not about getting people to buy in to his vision.
“You can’t get people to do anything,” Lindsey says. “They have to want to.”
