By 2005, the sales force was again selling, and Administaff’s annual growth had returned to 20 percent. Client retention numbers are also returning to precrisis levels. And Sarvadi says that the company’s internal surveys find that 91 percent of customers say Administaff is good value for the money, 94 percent say they are likely to recommend the company to others and 91 percent say the company meets or exceeds their expectations.
“Probably the most important lesson is that you have to keep the faith, you have to persevere,” Sardavi says. “You sometimes have to ignore what’s being said when you know that the perception doesn’t line up with the reality. Perceptions are a strong force to contend with, but you just have to persevere.”
When things are going particularly badly, when it seems that the sky is falling, that’s when you really have to dig deep and carry the responsibility you have for your people and your company, Sarvadi says.
“Follow your instincts to do the right thing, and then persevere through it,” he says. “It will pay off.”
In addition, he says, the company has developed a corporate culture to deal with adversity. Sardavi says upper-level management has to recognize that change is inevitable and talk about how it will deal with it.
“We literally put in writing that, in our company, we want to anticipate and respond to change as an opportunity to innovate and learn,” says Sarvadi.
The most important element to doing this is to build a senior leadership team that you can trust, but one that is also diverse in how the individual members think, he says.
“CEOs have to be brutally honest about what’s working and what’s not working, and they have to have the people around them who can be part of the solution,” Sardavi says.
For Administaff, a serious shock to the system led to a re-examination of how it operates, how it views its core competencies and how it organizes itself. Millions of dollars in profits were lost, and the company lost even more in market capitalization. But the end result more than four years later is a stronger company that is more self-reliant and less at risk to outside forces. From adversity, opportunity can really come knocking.
HOW TO REACH: Administaff, www.administaff.com
