Nine years ago, Dawn
Brinson-Roark realized
that of her 100 clients, 102 were costing her money. As
founder and president of
Brinson Benefits Inc., she
always strove to help all of her
clients choose the best health
benefits for their employees, but
after seeing those numbers, she
realized her team needed to
focus not on all customers but
on ideal customers. Change didn’t come easy, and in the first
three years, the company experienced annual turnover rates of
about 40 percent.
“We even had a producer who
kept bringing in the wrong
kinds of customers behind my
back, getting my staff to work
on things that we had not
authorized,” Brinson-Roark
says. “We had to circle back and
say, ‘This is not working. Either
we’re going to change, or we’re
going to be out of business.’”
Despite the initial struggles,
the company has emerged a success, growing revenue 40 percent a year for three consecutive years, to post 2006 revenue
of $35 million and an estimated
$46 million in 2007.
Smart Business spoke with
Brinson-Roark about how to
lead your team through a major
change in focus to emerge successful on the other side.
Q. How do you lead people
through change?
We thought we could snap
our fingers and change our
model and immediately put a
memo out to everyone on staff
saying, ‘We’re only going to go
after this client.’ That didn’t
work. It was a harder process
than we first imagined, to get
people to change.
The first thing is to really
announce it and see who’s on
board with it. If you’re going
through a transformation or
changing your business in
some dramatic way, you have
to be honest with yourselves
and know that everybody is
not going to embrace that.
Q. How do you recognize
who is embracing the change?
When we were completely
honest about our losses with
our internal staff, people either
immediately understood
and respected it or they
didn’t. You can tell from
how they responded to
the facts, the evidence
that supported our need
for a new direction.
We could tell right away
who was emotionally on
board with us, understood
it and was willing to make
the change. Then those
who weren’t become
pretty evident within just
a few short months.
You see a lot of excuse-making as their first
response, especially in
the mind of the salespeople. As salespeople, we’re
almost always taught to
believe that any sale is a
good sale, and it seems mentally
impossible to abhor the idea
that it couldn’t be profitable.
You see that rationalization in
their responses. You see on their
face that, despite evidence that
reflects losses in a certain market segment, they were still emotionally tied to that segment.
They took it all in, but they did
nothing with it. It was their verbal
response, and then their actions
clearly indicated [otherwise].
Q. How do you deal with
those people?
It’s not easy — it never is. It
really came to an ‘or else’ kind
of conversation. When you’re
passionate about the direction
of your company and have an
intense desire to make it into
something valuable, it’s an ‘or
else’ approach — either you
come with us and buy in to our
new vision or else you don’t stay.
That’s a few of the conversations that we had, and they left.
Q. And for those who stay,
how do you get them excited
about the new direction?
The key was developing a plan
that was beyond just where we
were right at that moment. We
try to do one-, three- and five-year vision casting in our staff
meetings.
Once they see where we’re
heading and how rapidly we’re going to get there, they get excited. Once they witness what
it’s like to grow a company at a
rapid pace, they want to do it
again.
We spend time focusing on
the employees’ personal goals.
We give them eight categories
of life, and each person goes
through the process of identifying their goals — it could be
they want to go to Tahiti, buy a
new car, build a new home.
Whatever it is, they declare
those goals.
Instead of us managing to the
company’s goals, we are helping
people identify their personal
goals, and they understand how
their paycheck can help fuel
that. Instead of saying, ‘These
are the company’s goals — you
should love those,’ we want the
employee to say, ‘These are my
goals; that’s why I’m here, and
this company appreciates my
personal goals and is going to
do everything they can to help
me reach them.’
Q. With all the personnel
and strategy changes, how do
you keep moving forward?
Create a culture of continuous
change. The companies I know
that try to keep things the same
all the time, when they did decide that they were going to
grow or change, it is much more
difficult. If you create that in
your culture, and they understand that, the people that work
for you really understand it, you’ll
attract the people that are so
willing to change. We tell people
when they’re being interviewed
… ‘We don’t know what we’re
going to ask you to do, but we
need you to be OK with change
all the time.’ We know the one
constant here is change.
HOW TO REACH: Brinson Benefits Inc., (972) 788-9118 or www.brinsonbenefits.com
