Consumer Services

The heart of growth

By Carolyn LaWell

Print This Page

Send this page to a friend

Edelmiro ‘Ed’ Muñiz
CEO, MEI Technologies Inc.

---

When Edelmiro “Ed” Muñiz had a heart attack in 2004, his employees began to doubt not only the health of their founder, chairman and CEO but the health of the company, as well.

While he was recovering, Muñiz decided he needed to shift the focus of MEI Technologies Inc.’s employees from worries about him to a more positive concern, so he challenged them to double the size of the $30 million company in two years.

Redirecting their attention worked, and in two years, the company’s revenue had tripled. And in 2007, MEI posted revenue of $115 million.

“This problem that I had earlier just kind of went away, and I was very surprised that I was able to survive this from the company standpoint,” Muñiz says.

The next challenge became absorbing the company’s rapid growth. To do that, he relied on his three keys to growth — trustworthiness, listening to your customers and building a relationship with your banker.

Smart Business spoke with Muñiz about how to grow your company.

Assemble a team of trustworthy and honest employees. You’ve got a set of values that you decide you’re going to have as a company, and you start with hiring people with those same values. I’ve always valued integrity, honesty and ethics.

I try to hire people that have those characteristics very, very visible. It’s part of what makes a business grow.

I don’t have a problem with those who don’t know everything when they come here because they will learn what they need to know after they get here most of the time. But you have to be honest.

I read the resume first, and I try to look for inconsistencies. If something doesn’t make sense, I’ll flag that, and that will be the object of questions in the interview. Why do you say this here, and that doesn’t seem to jibe with what you said here?

If it’s a good response, I’ll take it for face value. If I suspect that somebody has kind of stretched it a little bit, I generally just write those people off.

If they’re not honest when they start with us, they can’t become honest later.

When I look at the keys to growth, trustworthiness I think it’s No. 1. If you don’t have trust and you’re not trustworthy as a business — and that means every employee that you have also needs to be trustworthy — then you can’t sustain a business. Your customers don’t trust you, your employees don’t trust you, your competition doesn’t trust you.

This is what allows you to get new customers, but, more important, allows you to keep the ones you’ve already got. You can’t grow without keeping what you’ve already got under your belt.