Living in paradise

Cedar Hames sometimes knows more
about his clients’ business than they
do. The president of Paradise Advertising & Marketing Inc. says that
because his company is pushing messages
and brands into the marketplace, his
employees need to be aware of how the
marketplace is changing.

It’s all part of the constant quest for
knowledge at his $20 million firm. Hames
tells his employees that it’s not enough just
to keep up — they have to stay
ahead of the curve to succeed. For
instance, Paradise used to create
just print advertising for its clients.

Now, the marketing communications company has switched its
advertising presence over to the
online component of newspapers.

Smart Business spoke with
Hames about the science of planning for growth.

Q: How involved in the day-to-day
operations should a leader be?

I’m more of a big-picture person.
If you have a motivated team, you
shouldn’t have to be that involved
in the day to day. If you hire
bright, talented people and provide the tools for them, just step
back and let them do the work
they do best.

The biggest pitfall is for a CEO
to micromanage. If you’re micro-managing, you’re not only not
letting them do the work that
they should be doing, but you’re
not doing the work that you
should be doing.

Each CEO should have a different
approach to that, but in our case, one of my
particular rules is to do strategic thinking
and planning for our clients. We have a
team that does that, but that’s a lot more
important than me trying to edit a radio
commercial.

Q: How do you develop and communicate a
vision to your employees?

As far as the vision, it’s more a way of
doing business than anything else. We’re in
the communication business, and too
often, businesses do not communicate to each other, much less outside the business.
We try to open up that communication.

Of course, now with e-mail and such, you
get more communications than you want
sometimes. But we do try to have weekly or
monthly meetings where we try to share
knowledge with each other and get together.

They’re not gripe sessions. Sometimes
we exchange necessary information; other
times we exchange ideas. Communication
is a key factor, along with the knowledge that if you’ve hired talented, motivated
people, you don’t have to motivate them,
you just have to provide them with the
opportunities to do the work.

Q: How do you find those qualified employees?

In our business, we’re so specialized, it
makes for a small universe of talent that is
available to us. So, the best way to attract
exceptional talent is to do exceptional
work. If you’re doing that, talented people
will seek you out.

Regardless of the area we’re working, we try to be very strategically based and very
creative. That is the type of thing that
attracts good people and keeps them motivated: the ability to be creative.

Q: How do you manage business growth?

We try to be proactive in the sense that
over the past five years, we’ve had such substantial growth that we anticipate that each
year we’ll continue to have that growth. In
our staffing and in our office space and
other areas, we try to allow for at least
a percentage of growth and build it
into our budget plans.

There might be a lot of CEOs out
there cringing at that thought, but it’s
worked for us. I’m sure a lot of them
say, ‘When you get the business, then
you staff up, and you make those
arrangements.’ When we anticipate
(the growth) — and so far that has certainly been the case — then we are
already prepared.

Remember, with us, it’s not like we can
run an ad in the paper and have a number
of people lined up who would be qualified. It’s a specialized area, so we try to be
proactive, especially in the staffing arena.

Q: How do you anticipate the amount of
business growth?

We have different departments and a
formula as to the number of hours for
each person in a 40-hour week; we allocate what we call billable hours. That
may not be actual, but it will reflect the
cost of that person that we’re putting
toward the client. We know from experience that a certain type of work for a
client will take X number of hours per
month times these 12 individuals.

We know that we anticipate growth at a
certain percentage, and we can just do the
math and make sure that we’ve got the people on board that can accept that business.

The reality is that we would love to have
more business come in than we anticipated
and rush out and try to attract some talented people. But it’s certainly smart to anticipate that growth. Since we’ve had such an
ongoing record of bringing in business, it’s
worked for us.

HOW TO REACH: Paradise Advertising & Marketing Inc., (727)
821-5155 or www.paradiseadv.com