Terrie Gilligan manages
what she calls “the Ritz-Carlton of paving companies.”
While her $20 million asphalt
paving and maintenance business seems worlds away from
the luxury hotel chain, Gilligan
says her focus on customer
service is just as big of a priority
as it is to Ritz-Carlton.
The owner, president and CEO
of Parking Area Maintenance Inc.
instills that philosophy in her
100 employees, touting the idea
that a good reputation can help
a company sustain sales, even
in a down economy.
“It’s so important that your
employees realize they’re representing you,” Gilligan says.
“When our customers contract
with us, they know our employees will be professional.”
Smart Business spoke with
Gilligan about how to instill a
sense of “ownership thinking” in
your employees.
Q. What does it take to grow
a successful company?
The employees of the company are so important. You can go
out and buy all the metal you
want, but if you don’t have the
key people in place to operate
the company, it doesn’t matter.
Another key thing is our core
values. We live by our core values every day. If you were out
on a job site, and you were to
ask one of our employees, they
should know what they are.
Q. How did you communicate
that to your employees?
We have quarterly meetings
where we get together with all
the employees, and last fall, we
implemented ownership thinking.
Ownership thinking means it’s
not just me having to worry about
everything. It’s letting everybody
in the company worry about
everything. I used to take everything on myself, and now, we
share all the information and all
of the responsibilities.
We actually opened up our
books to all the employees, and
they were put on a bonus plan
as to how we do in 2008. It’s a
flat incentive across the board,
down to the field laborers.
We’re projecting it to be about
$3,500 per employee.
Q. How did you
implement this
ownership thinking?
We’ve always shared
information with everybody. One of our core values is teamwork, and
another is continuous
improvement, so it was a
no-brainer for us to go
ahead and implement this.
We sat down with our
employees, explained it to
everybody and compared
it to their mortgages and
their checkbooks. We said,
‘This is the way a profit-and-loss statement works,
and this is the way a balance sheet works.’ Everybody really embraced it.
We explained the company’s financials for the
last five years and where
we wanted to go with the
company. I had another meeting
where we touched on the economy and said, ‘We all have to
look at these things because we
have to be competitive.’ The
response was great.
Q. How did you get employee
buy-in?
I felt if my employees were out in the field or if they were on
the executive team, they deserved
the same amount because everybody’s contributing to this.
About 50 percent of our field
employees are Hispanic, and they
said, ‘We’ve always thought we
were owners.’ We brought in an
interpreter to help us implement
this, and those employees were
so excited about it and still are.
If you share the information
with your employees, they take
it upon themselves to look out
for the company as a whole.
Q. How has that benefited
your company?
Everybody’s looking out for
everything. For example, I have lunch with our employees of the
month. Through those lunches,
they’ve told me about waste
within the company. One of
them went to pick up a bolt for
a piece of equipment and never
realized it cost that much.
We also have a suggestion box
in our break room. Our HR
director checks it once a week,
and we get eight to 10 suggestions a month. We respond to
them on whether we implemented it or why we couldn’t
implement it. They need to
know that you saw the suggestion, and that you’ve given it
consideration. If you don’t do
that, they will think it has gone
upon deaf ears.
As long as you give employees
the kind of environment where
they feel their suggestions are
welcome, you will get ideas from
them that you didn’t even think
about — even down to the toilet
paper we buy for our office or
equipment we really don’t need.
For the last six months, it’s saved
us from laying off individuals
because we’ve been able to cut
costs in other areas.
Q. How can other companies
grow through ownership
thinking?
Case studies say it’s not about
compensation; the two top
things employees look for are
being included in things and being recognized. … It’s got to be in
your culture and in your core
values.
If you don’t take care of your
clients, by giving them not just
value-added services but extraordinary service, I don’t think
that you can grow a company.
And, if you don’t treat your employees well, they’re not going to
treat your clients well.
HOW TO REACH: Parking Area Maintenance Inc., (813) 880-9400 or www.easphalt.com
