Insurance
Sticking to your principles
How to grow a business without surrendering your values
By Carolyn LaWell
Smart Business San Diego | February 2009
Page 1 of 2
Paul Hering
CEO, Barney & Barney LLC
Paul Hering works daily to
balance his work life and his personal life, and maintaining that balance is one of the
core values on which he’s building Barney & Barney LLC.
As managing principal and
CEO of the insurance company,
Hering believes that balancing
the two leads to happy, productive employees. So he focuses
people on getting the job done,
while emphasizing the importance of life outside of work,
and he creates a positive work
atmosphere with incentives
such as a wellness program.
As Barney & Barney continues to grow its annual revenue,
which hit $53 million in 2007,
and add to its roster of 293
associates and 32 owners, the
biggest challenge has been
maintaining and communicating
the company’s founding principles.
“Any time a company compromises on its ethics and core
values, that certainly can be a
problem,” Hering says. “That
can be a downfall.”
Smart Business spoke with
Hering about how to grow your
company without sacrificing
the organization’s culture and
values.
Establish values you believe in. From a leadership perspective, I
think it starts with being the real
person, being authentic, knowing who you are as a leader and
not trying to be something that
you’re not.
You can seek feedback from
your peers to make sure you’re
being that way, but I think you
know it or you don’t.
When you can establish that
authenticity with people, I think
they can relate to you much better. And the other things that
you’re trying to accomplish
organizationally, I think it’s easier for them to get behind.
If somebody really doesn’t
believe in what they’re trying to
hold out to everybody else in
their company as a core value
or a strategy, then it’s going to
be very hard to get there.
Be a big-time advocate for it
and a cheerleader to some
extent, and make sure everybody in the organization
understands where they’re
coming from and why they
feel that way.
Communicate and demonstrate
your company’s values. We make
a real effort to make sure that
we’re constantly communicating who we are and what
we’re about as a company.
We have our core values
etched on the glass of our
boardroom that are there for
everybody in the company to
see.
In some organizations, people probably create a mission
statement and put their core
values on a piece of paper and
then that piece of paper gets
shoved in a desk drawer somewhere and nobody could come
close to reciting what it is. You
really do have to make an
effort to keep it out there and
in front of people.
I literally meet with every new
associate one on one that joins
our company. It’s a chance to
establish a connection with
them and convey what we’re
about as a company. I tell them
all that I don’t want to see them
working late on weekdays, I
don’t want to see them working
on the weekends.
While they need to get the
job done, we want them to
have a great life outside of
Barney & Barney. That new
associate meeting, that’s a
chance for me to face-to-face
convey that to them in total
sincerity and have them look
at me and say, ‘Wow, he really
believes that.’
It has to start at the leadership levels within the company. If the leadership of the
company doesn’t buy in to it conceptually, it’s just not going
to work. It really starts with
everybody agreeing (on) a key
core value that we share as a
company and modeling that
behavior. Demonstrating to
our associates that we value
that, and that’s how we’re
going to behave, and that’s
how we want you to be.
We communicate that message and hopefully emulate that.
