Sometimes it’s hard to get your employees excited about your business. But Bill Koeblitz has a bit of an advantage there, because most of his 200 employees at MobilityWorks come to work not just to punch a time card but because they enjoy creating the handicap-accessible vans that help disabled people maintain an active lifestyle. That enthusiasm has paid off for the company, with 2006 revenue of about $40 million. Smart Business spoke with Koeblitz, president of MobilityWorks, about how he manages growth and motivates his employees.
Free your mind. Think big. Don’t think of where you are right now; think big of what could be. Dream.
It’s just as easy to think big as it is to think small. Don’t think about taking your one place and growing it 10 percent; think about getting 10 places and grow 1,000 percent. Think about what you can do with this.
Almost any business has very, very large potential if you think of it that way. Whether you have a dental practice or a car wash, you have potential to do something really big, really significant. It’s often your narrow thinking that holds you back.
A CEO needs to see the possibilities — both good and bad — that you can achieve with your business. They have to be realistic about them.
It is critical to have perseverance and tenacity. If you think you see where it could go and you stick to it, learn from your mistakes and be willing to change course. Keep looking ahead, and keep persevering.
Don’t pass the buck. Someone can become a good leader. If you have integrity, character and a lot of drive, you can learn a lot of the other skills. As to how you can manage effectively, you can learn financial skills, you can learn marketing skills.
What you have to come in with is a sense of being personally responsible. Maybe you’re raised with it. The opposite would be someone who sees their life as being determined by others. They’re not personally responsible; they blame others, or they blame the circumstances for a situation. That would not be a good CEO.
You can’t teach someone to stop blaming other people. You have to be personally responsible and have a goal you want to achieve and be willing to do what it takes to get there.
With authority, they then become personally responsible, and they will make something succeed, even when you’re not sure it can. For their own pride, it motivates them and gives them a reason to want to accomplish it.
If I tell them what to do, they may choose to prove it can be done, or they may choose to prove it can’t be done. If they tell me what they can do, they’re definitely going to choose to prove it can be done.
Don’t believe the hype. You can be misled by your success and get into a state of complacency and find yourself in trouble before you know it. So don’t believe the press that’s written about you.
The biggest danger is hubris; you can get a little too proud. Staying humble is critical.
Recognize how blessed you are to be in the position you are in, and that it’s the people you are working with who allow you to achieve what you are achieving. Pride and just being full of yourself is a potentially big pitfall.
You’ll do something stupid because you think you’re smarter than other people. So you won’t listen to other people because you think you know better. You’ll think you can do it yourself.
Avoid that by being participative. I don’t sit on a throne and make any edicts. Everything I do is with a group of people. We’re equal in that room, throwing ideas out.
When we debate, people are very honest and open in saying what they believe about our direction. So make sure you hire good people and give them a lot of authority. Listen to their voices. We use a lot of group think. We decide together where we’re going and what we’re doing. There’s a lot of wisdom in a small group of good people.
Take the long view, but get specific for the short term. Everyone participates in setting our goals, and I’m very demanding on achieving the goals we set. The executive team gets together and sets the priorities for what we want to accomplish in the next one to two years, because everything changes so quickly.
They get a rough sense of what’s critical for next couple years, and we especially home in on what needs to be accomplished in the next quarter — then we get specific on what needs to be done by whom by what time. We agree on that and make sure it gets our company where we want it to go, and we agree on what we need to do in the next quarter to make things happen, and we meet every week, find the positives or nonpositives for those specific goals.
Keep your workers accountable. It rolls through the whole company. From each manager down to the people they are working with, it’s the same kind of process.
The key to all that is we’re growing the business, so there’s growth priorities you’re trying to accomplish. Then there are operating priorities, which are key metrics that we have.
For instance, we have 10 stores, so we have to know that the revenue at this store will be at this level. We figure out what the most important metrics and we make certain the managers keep them on the track.
Those metrics get converted down to the individual employees. For instance, revenue is made up by salespeople in a typical store, so each salesperson has their own targets they need to be achieving.
It’s real clear what your role in the company is, and how it all rolls up, by having good metrics, regular reporting on it and agreeing on goals and demanding we accomplish them.
HOW TO REACH: MobilityWorks, (330) 633-1118 or www.mobilityworks.com
