Consumer Services
Investing in employees
How Service King prepares for growth and positions employees to succeed
By Kristy J. O’Hara
Smart Business Dallas | April 2006
Eddie Lennox knows that employees make or break a company, which is why he strives to cultivate eager and motivated workers at Service King Collision Repair Centers.
Through competitive benefits, communication, training and quarterly incentives, his 500 employees are positioned to succeed and help grow the company. And those efforts have worked — Service King posted revenue growth of nearly 28 percent over the past two years and has been named one of the best places to work in Dallas.
Smart Business spoke with Lennox, president and CEO of Service King, about how he prepares for growth and cares for employees.
How do you prepare your company and your employees for future growth?
You have to make an investment when you know you’re going to grow. I invest dollars to beef up our HR department, whether that’s someone handling payroll or additional people to handle benefits or another recruiter, along with making the investment to pay for future benefits that those employees will be receiving, like the match of the 401(k) and health care.
When you think of the financial impact of growing your employees, the key word is investment. I don’t look at it as a cost. That’s what scares a lot of people.
I’ve always tried to look at expansion more as an investment and how I’m going to get my return in the future from that. Everything I looked at early on, I thought, ‘Well this going to cost me that.’
That can become a roadblock to growth. Someone told me any time you’re wanting to grow, it’s going to be expensive and it’s going to cost money, but understand that it’s the only way you’re going to be able to grow your financial condition. To do that, you have to look at the expenses related to growth as an investment and not a cost.
How do you train employees?
Training is something I’m kind of a nut about. We have technical, sales and service training about three times a year. These are programs that are ongoing year-round.
This isn’t something that once every year we say, ‘Oh we need to do some service training.’ It’s another way to communicate to your employees.
Training makes you better. It teaches you. A learning employee is something that is critical as it relates to retaining your people. It makes them feel good about themselves. It creates a higher sense of pride and accomplishment within the entire organization.
How do you communicate your vision to employees?
Before you do anything for them, you want them to understand how they’re performing and how they impact how the company performs.
We start at the location level. We do a lot of measuring as it relates to the quality of product we deliver, the service we’re delivering to the consumer, and we measure the profitability of each individual store. All of the managers are required to communicate this information constantly back to all the employees in their shops.
There are certain occasions when I have the opportunity to talk to all the employees, but I spend most of my time with the management team. I talk a lot about what the expectations are for accountability purposes, so all of our management team promotes those things constantly with all of the employees.
How do you get employees excited about your goals?
All 17 stores compete, and we measure quality, service and profitability. ... We rank them from highest to lowest, and when you total all the points in each of the categories, four shops win. One shop wins fifth place for most improved, and this is the way for those at the bottom of the list to be able to improve.
Myself and other corporate management, we go to those shops and cook steaks and chicken and hamburgers for them. We serve them and we do awards and we talk about the grading, the benefits of the shops, and how these shops are accomplishing these things.
They also receive money. First place gets $10,000. The fourth place gets maybe $3,000, and it’s spread among the employees in that shop. We promote that throughout the entire quarter with monthly reports.
It’s a way to communicate to all of our employees on an ongoing basis what’s important: We have to promote great quality. We have to promote excellent service and we have to make a profit.
How to reach: Service King, www.serviceking.com
