Automotive

On the money

By Brian Horn

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Bob Coughlin: Founder and CEO, Paycor Inc.

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Five years ago, when Bob Coughlin’s company was posting about $10 million in annual revenue, he met with his management team.

At that meeting, a statement on the wall asked what prevented Paycor Inc. from becoming a $50 million company. There were also pictures, and one of those — a drawing of someone in a rowboat trying to pull an ocean liner — spoke a thousand words.

The group saw the parallel in the effort; as the rowboat didn’t have the ability to pull the ship, neither did the payroll service provider have the management depth and talent to pull the company to the next level.

The management team members concluded that Coughlin should hire another level of management above them to take the company to where they wanted it to be. Coughlin says it was important that they came to that conclusion on their own because if he had said it, they would have been defensive. Coughlin, founder and CEO of the 450-employee company, says using a collaborative approach has helped his company reach $47 million in revenue for fiscal 2007.

Smart Business spoke with Coughlin about how recognizing your strengths and weakness can help you take your company to the next level.

Involve employees early in the process. I’m a big believer in having people involved upfront and buying in to what the goals are and even maybe in setting the goals.

We have a position within the company, which I think is game-changing for us, who’s a chief quality officer. Essentially, their job is to involve all the stakeholders in laying out a successful initiative, including putting stickies on the board and deciding what the goals are.

Sometimes, you start with a weakness-based statement like, ‘What prevents us from doing something?’ Put some parameters around it, and then get the team involved in coming up with the issues and coming up with solutions. That, versus a top-down approach of saying, ‘Look, I’ve studied this, and here’s what we need to do,’ [is better]. I think they’ll prove me wrong.

Don’t try to change people. We do basic personality profiling here, and it’s very useful. Starting with just the basic personality profile and understanding people’s DNA is important.

I don’t think you can fundamentally change certain things about people. So knowing that somebody is particularly structured in their approach or conceptual or data-driven or using these different quadrants that you might have of people lets you understand that you can’t try to change them.

You’ve got to work within their strengths, and if they have weaknesses, figure out how you are going to shore those up, either with a structure, with some help, with somebody else on the team that can help them with that. I think it’s a failed plan to try to have somebody who is not structured, for instance, do a very structured activity.

When I was getting the business going, I tried to believe [that] with intent, you could make somebody anything they wanted to be. I’ve learned over time that it’s more about aligning people’s strengths and weaknesses and not trying to change people.

Establish a communicative environment. You do it every day. You do it when you walk by somebody in the hall and how you say hi to them. It’s body language.

I do block out an hour probably three different times a week where I just walk around. Not everybody is here, but I walk around ... and say hi to people. I say, ‘Is there anything I can do to make your job better?’

If they give me something, I follow up on it. I say, ‘Let me look into that. Let me figure out what we can do.’ It could be something as mundane as their chair is broken.

Find a balance with your success. There is always room for improvement. It seems like, over time, whenever you are satisfied with where something is, it goes backward.

Things are always movingupward or downward. So getting too comfortable is a potential pitfall. Being overly uncomfortable is a potential pitfall because people can feel like you are so never satisfied that they’re worn out by it.

It’s as much art as science. It’s being conscious about the fact that we just had a tough meeting about something, and now I need to go pick somebody up. It doesn’t do us any good if people are walking around with their heads down if we don’t perform well on something.

At the same time, that doesn’t mean all the meetings are going to be roses. I think a lot of it is just being conscious about the fact that attitudes matter.

Put your money where your mouth is. If you say, ‘We are going to focus on training and development this year’ [and] if they don’t see anything happen, then you lose credibility with people.

When they see that you go out and hire a director of learning and add a couple of resources and put money behind things that you say you are going to do, the people know they can trust me if I say, ‘This is what we’re going to do over the next year.’

If we don’t do it, it’s not going to be for lack of effort because we have a history of doing what we say we’re going to do.

HOW TO REACH: Paycor Inc., (800) 381-0053 or www.paycor.com