Smart Leaders
Maintaining flexibility
How to grow your company and stay adaptable
By Carolyn LaWell
Smart Business San Diego | January 2009
Page 1 of 2
Robert Christie
president and CEO, 3E Co.
Three years ago, Robert
Christie sat down with his top executives to outline a long-term plan for 3E Co.
But since then, a whole new
set of environmental laws has
been created, and things have
changed — and the company
needed to change, as well.
The president and CEO of 3E
— a provider of environmental
health and safety compliance
services — says that flexibility
is the key to handling the challenges of hypergrowth and of
constantly changing compliance
issues.
“One of the failure points that
I see for companies is they set
a goal and they don’t want to
change it,” says Christie, whose
company posted 2007 revenue
of $47.6 million.
Christie sees flexibility as a
crucial element for any company to be successful, and it’s a
component he makes sure his
management team, infrastructure and growth plans all contain.
Smart Business spoke with
Christie about how to plan for
the future and maintain flexibility to grow your company.
Prepare for something to go wrong. When companies go through
growth, the thing that can bring
them down is not being prepared for something to go wrong
— and they will go wrong.
The best-run companies in
America expect things to happen
that are going to be mistakes or
issues that they have to recover
from. If you don’t have a disaster
recovery plan, if you don’t know
how to deal with a mistake, the
best-laid plans are useless.
Most people think of a disaster
recovery plan in the case of
thinking about their computer
facility. Or, ‘Oh my gosh, the
telephone lines went down,
nobody can call in or call out.’
Those are the easy ones
because you can always have
backup plans. It’s the things that
you don’t think of. Good companies sit down with all their managers and ask, ‘What if?’
In the case of Southern
California, how do we as a company recover from a fire that
took place last year and devastated San Diego?
We happened to be in a fortunate position to have planned
for people to work from home
and to be able to dial in to our
computers from home. Our
employees that talk to our customers still had access to our
network to talk to them.
Seize opportunities by knowing
your clients. You need to figure
out what the markets are that
you do business in and how
they might be changing.
Find a way that you can make
sure you can have a competitive
advantage.
It’s a lot of market research,
and it’s a lot of spending time
with your customers. Your customers every day are struggling
with issues. The closer you are
with your customers, the better
the opportunity is for you to be
successful.
