Dan Rodriguez is an
enabler.
The founder, managing partner and CEO of Veredus
Corp. wants people to succeed
at his staffing company, so he
invests in their training and
development instead of forcing them into a sink-or-swim
situation.
“It’s a two-way investment,”
he says. “They’ve elected to
come work for us. In turn,
we’re going to make an investment of time and development
to give them an opportunity to
succeed.”
Rodriguez’s approach to his
employees has improved retention at Veredus, which earned
$38 million in revenue in 2006.
Smart Business spoke with
Rodriguez about why training
your employees is worth the
investment and why you should
really think twice about adding
that new wrinkle to your business.
Q. What major pitfall should
business leaders avoid?
You have to focus on what
you know how to do. We’re a
staffing company. Our core
competency is going out and
finding qualified individuals.
We have relationships with
qualified individuals that can
fill jobs. We have relationships
with qualified companies and
managers at those companies
that will give us jobs so we can
place those candidates.
Sometimes, I’ve seen folks
creep out of what their core
competency is. They try to do
project work, or they try to do
outsourcing, or they try to do
software, or they try to do
training.
We stick to what we know.
We do what we do, and we feel
like we’re really good at it. We
don’t really creep too far outside
of our box. Because chances
are, if you’re looking to go out
and do something else, there’s
probably somebody else in that
space that’s already been doing
it for some time and that is
probably pretty good at it. So
we stay away from that.
Q. How do you avoid straying
from your core competency?
We remind folks every day of
who our customers are.
Our customers are our
candidates who are looking for jobs, our consultants that we have on
assignment and our
clients. Sometimes things
happen, and you take the
focus off the customer,
and that’s not good.
You’ve got to be focused
on all your customers all
of the time … or somebody else is going to come
and take your space.
Q. How do you make
sure everyone stays
focused on the
customer?
We talk about it. Our
management team just came
out of a management meeting
here recently, and we talked
about making sure all our folks
are focused on the customer.
You build internal processes
where you’re touching all three
of your customers on a regular
basis.
We do feedback surveys with
not only our clients but also our
consultants who are on assignment and our candidates. We’re
continually looking for feedback on how we can get better,
how we can improve.
It’s part of our culture, it’s one
of our core values and something that in our everyday discussions about business that
we focus on.
Q. How do you decide which
feedback to act on?
As a leader, I’m very introspective. I’m always looking at how
we can make our business better. How can we differentiate;
what can we do? A lot of our
management meetings are centered around feedback we’ve gotten from our surveys, feedback we’ve gotten internally on
how we can improve our
processes and make sure that
we’re doing things better.
I don’t know that there’s any
formalized process for bringing some sort of feedback in and
determining how we’re going
to address it. But overall, as a
management team, our mantra
is focused on how do we differentiate, how do we get better,
how do we make our company
a better place to work?
That’s one of my standard
questions as I’m going through
my reviews with my internal
people right now. I sit down
with everybody in the company, or at least everybody in
Tampa, and talk to them about
their goals and last year and
how they did and what they
want to do this year going forward. Two of my standard
questions are, ‘What can I do
for you?’ and then, ‘What can
the company do to make this a
better company?’
We are definitely asking that
question, and quite frankly,
some companies I’ve worked
for in the past haven’t even
asked that question.
Q. How do you implement
that feedback?
It depends on which of our
customers the feedback’s coming from. Whenever we get feedback, we as a management team
get together and determine how
we’re going to address the specific issue that has been brought
to our attention.
Many of the changes we’ve
made — big and small, from
process changes to the way we
do things on a daily basis —
have come from employees at
various levels that made a suggestion. We looked at it; it made
sense from a tactical standpoint,
and we went out and implemented it. That occurs on a
monthly, if not a weekly basis.
It’s a regular occurrence.
HOW TO REACH: Veredus Corp., (813) 936-7004 or www.vereduscorp.com
