Human Resources
Designer’s challenge
How George Feldenkreis motivates employees to push Perry Ellis International to the next level
By Mike Cottrill
Smart Business Miami | January 2008
Page 1 of 1
When George Feldenkreis fled Cuba in 1961, he arrived in Miami
with just $700 in his pocket and a vision for how to make it in
America.
Today, Feldenkreis, the chairman and CEO of Perry Ellis
International Inc., leads a men’s clothing and apparel company
that is trying to push its way to $1 billion in revenue.
Along the way, Feldenkreis became known as a visionary in the
industry, producing success after success by knowing where the
clothing industry was going. First leading Supreme International,
he became well known in Miami for helping to evolve the market.
His visions always seemed to be just ahead of the curve and were
always a huge hit in the market, changing the men’s clothing landscape and helping Supreme grow large enough to go public in
1993. With that extra money, Feldenkreis was able to purchase the
powerful Perry Ellis clothing brand. Since acquiring Perry Ellis in
1999, taking the big name brand as his company’s lead name, he
has continued to grow, taking his 1,400 employees to more than
2,200 today. Along the way, Feldenkreis has kept the brand going
by building upon the name and also making acquisitions like the
2005 purchase of Tropical Sportswear.
“I tell them what I think is going to happen,” he says of his
role. “Frankly, I’ve been very right so far, and it’s part of the
reason why we went from zero to a billion dollars in sales
almost. I’ve been a visionary on the sourcing side; I’ve been a
visionary on the branding side. We were a small boot company, and I started to buy brands to build, and I kept buying
brands that I felt would be worth more later.”
But while Feldenkreis’ vision is unique to him, he understands that to be a visionary he has to build a team that can
attack his growth goals. So while he may know where Perry
Ellis should be going all the time, he still has to get his entire
staff to follow that vision or it’s just a good idea wasted. To do
that, Feldenkreis has honed his staff by involving them in the
plans to make them feel a sense of company pride, tying those
plans to their accountability and then cutting the cord with
those people who just can’t get on the same page. As a result,
Perry Ellis, which posted $830 million in revenue in fiscal 2007,
is set to pass $900 million for fiscal 2008.
Involve everyone
It’s a good thing that Perry Ellis is closing in on a billion dollars, as Feldenkreis is quick to point out that he has more than
2,200 mouths to feed. In order to keep things going smoothly,
he tries to capture that idea and make his employees feel
involved with the company’s decision-making process.
“To me, it’s very important for the people to have the feeling
of belonging,” Feldenkreis says. “We grew from a small family
company, and we feel very strongly that it is important for people to feel part of the family.”
Perry Ellis does the usual company bonding activities — holiday parties, company picnics and the like — but Feldenkreis
tries to go beyond that to make employees feel proud to be a
part of the team. When employees first start, they have weekly
or biweekly meetings with managers to talk about their aspirations. Both Feldenkreis and his son, Oscar, who is the company’s president and chief operating officer, receive and respond to e-mails from employees. The idea is to make sure
employees on every level feel involved.
“We try and listen to who they are and where they come from
and what their aspirations are,” Feldenkreis says.
He works to increase the frequency of those communications
by getting as close to the ground floor as possible when he’s
out visiting Perry Ellis locations.
“I try to have interaction at all levels, even at the warehouse
level,” Feldenkreis says. “I like to know who works here, and I
like to help them in whatever way I can. I feel like everybody
is important. I learned in Japan, when I visited many years ago,
how old people clean the streets and are very proud of what
they are doing. It doesn’t matter what you do for the company
as long as you are proud of what you do. That is really the most
important common denominator.”
It’s in those visits and in smaller meetings where Feldenkreis
begins to build buy-in for his newest visions. Sometimes, he
will just e-mail a small team of managers to kick around a new
idea; other times, he will sit down with a larger group to talk
about what’s needed to get employees interested.
“You sit down with the people involved in it, and you try to
get the consensus,” Feldenkreis says. “You should try to get as
much consensus as possible. It takes a long time to get an
agreement of an idea, but after that, implementation is very
quick. Sometimes, CEOs don’t talk to anyone and they say,
‘This is what’s going to be done,’ and, of course, there is much
more resistance that way.”
Even though Feldenkreis is an amiable guy, he’ll be the first
to admit that the thought of shaking 2,200 hands on a daily
basis is crippling. So after making sure there are avenues for
occasionally touching many employees, he focuses much of
his energy on going to his second-tier managers with messages
and good will. By going just beyond the executive table, he can
help the cascading process and see where problems are beginning to bubble.
“As the company grows, it becomes more difficult for the top to
communicate with a vast array of people,” Feldenkreis says.
“The reality is, CEOs get divorced from the rest of the company
just from lack of time, so it behooves you to bring this up to first-and second-tier managers and try to resolve it. I try to talk to
the second-tier management as much as I can, and I really don’t
need to talk for too long to know what’s going on with them
because I’ve been in this for so long.”
Hold employees accountable
Though Feldenkreis feels it’s important to spread a family message to his team, that doesn’t mean that he forgets that his vision
requires results. So while he wants to give employees a chance to
succeed, he also insists that everyone be tied to a metrics system
to ensure success.
“Numbers are a great way to account for success,” he says.
“Managers that don’t deliver the numbers that they promise, I try
to teach them and help them get the numbers. But, at some point,
they either grow up or they have been here long enough that if they
can’t do that by themselves, then they become an obstacle to the
company.”
When Feldenkreis ties his vision to goals, he doesn’t consider
them flexible. After doing the pre-emptive work to get buy-in, he
puts numbers to the plan for a reason: to get results.
He sets metrics for everything in the company, even measuring
those subjective departments like human resources. Though it’s
not as easy as measuring sales or production teams, Feldenkreis
breaks these departments down by finding measurable functions
of their work that are telltale for productivity.
“There are things that you can do,” he says. “For me, HR is
really divided into four functions. It’s human development —
the training development function, the hiring function, the
administration of benefits and structure of the company, and
listening to grievances and complaints, which are always present when you have so many people.”
Once he really breaks down what a department does, he can take
a look at the numbers produced. For a department like HR, he
can’t say for sure whether a subjective training policy is successful, but he can see how many people are trained efficiently and
retained each year and measure that against growth goals and
expectations, giving him pretty good insight.
“I think that HR is subjective when you look how they manage
each one of those things,” Feldenkreis says. “But you can look at
how many people get trained each year, how many people stay on
after that training, what are the returns on our plans, for example,
on our 401(k)s. You can look at hiring by seeing how much we
have to use headhunters as opposed to hiring in-house.”
The key to Feldenkreis is finding a way to make sure that each
function of a department is working at a high level — because each
team is tightly tied to the vision.
Let people go
In tying his attempt to keep all employees involved and his
efforts to keep them accountable, Feldenkreis says he has built a
solid team and a solid family at Perry Ellis. But in order to keep
that going, there is one very serious component that must be
added: He won’t let you get in the way of the family business.
“I always look at the company as me having 2,200 families that
need to work here and that have to have a life and whoever
becomes an obstacle, whoever doesn’t carry his weight, that’s not
somebody that we want to be connected with for a long period of
time,” he says.
Feldenkreis says he is happy to work with employees to help
them get on track, but he’s not going to continue to do that once it
starts to become a distraction for other employees. When he rolls
out a new vision, he believes in explaining it to smaller groups and
trying to cascade it down from his second-tier management. After
that, employees need to start moving forward.
“You have to push them to get it, and if they don’t get it, they have
to go,” he says. “You have to communicate the best you can, you
prod them, but there are some people that will never get it. There
are some people who will not change their habits, and you know
that people in every proposal that you make will be against any
change. It’s a proven fact that there are people that cannot adapt
to change.”
That doesn’t mean that you don’t make every realistic effort possible to keep someone with the company, but you have to cut the cord
when an employee becomes a constant chore for a manager or
begins to navigate others away from the vision.
“I don’t know that you can convince everybody all the time,” he
says. “It gets to the point that if you don’t need them, you let them
go.
“My worst nightmare is letting anybody go, I don’t like to do that,
unless it’s for cause, but letting people go because they are not contributing or are an obstacle to the future is difficult. But when you
have to do it, you have to do it. At some point, some people are in
the middle and become an obstacle, so you have to decide if you
want them to become an obstacle because then it becomes a problem for the other 2,000 people. It’s not fair to those people that are
working very hard, so you have to do it. In my own mind, that’s
how I justify it. It gets to a point where you are an obstacle to others and no matter how difficult it is, it has to be done.”
HOW TO REACH: Perry Ellis International Inc., (305) 592-2830 or www.pery.com
