When you work at PACE Inc., you
get a lot of perks. But Mark Krebs
says it’s not the office massages, the putting course or the summer family
barbecues that drive his 100 employees to
keep the company growing.
“Work, although it’s serious, can be fun,
and it should be fun,” says Krebs, president
of PACE. “But without the ability to grow
and learn and prosper in an individual’s
career, no amount of those fringes makes a
difference.”
The water-resource engineering
firm has grown revenue from $5.6 million in 2003 to $14.8 million in 2006,
and Krebs says the key to fast
growth is maintaining a culture that
empowers people to seek bigger
challenges.
“Get quality people who are interested in what you are doing and help
them understand the direction,”
Krebs says. “Then get out of the way
and support them. Let them learn,
grow, struggle and succeed, and do
what they need to do.”
Smart Business spoke with
Krebs about the similarities
between a business and a family.
Q: What traits are the most
important to being a good leader?
It’s the ability to focus on a
course of action, and don’t be
deterred from that focus and that
direction. Yet, you have to see
opportunities in people.
We’ve done a good job with
coming up with a clear, strategic
plan that has set a course of
action for us in terms of the
types of projects and the geographic region
we want to be involved in. But it’s not
something you can set in place and blindly
go forward with it. You have to react to the
marketplace and to potential opportunities.
Define what you’re good at and what do
you want to do. Where do you want to do
it? What are the resources that you have to
move forward in your business? Have a
senior management team that meets periodically — more as we’re developing the
plan and less as we’re just reviewing and
updating the plan.
Q: How do you ensure you have satisfied
customers?
It goes back to making this connection
and commitment to projects that are interesting. People can be very creative and
innovative, and they can leave a part of
themselves on each and every project they
work on.
The level of commitment is when you
walk in, how is it presented? Make yourself a part of the experience. Everybody has
got a problem that needs solved, or they
wouldn’t be in front of you. Be creative and
innovative on how you solve those problems, and you’ll have an impact.
Q: How do you get your employees to be
creative and innovative?
Walk the talk. You have to live and
breathe what you are promoting to be the
vision of the company. Nothing beats the
day-to-day explaining of how to work on a project team. You’re advising the team on
how to move forward with the project. You
have an opportunity to bring in vision.
Bring in the long-term focus of the company, and supply that on each and every project.
We do annual meetings, and we do
newsletters. We do just a lot of different
ways to continually go back to that. Not
only does the president not lose focus on
what the vision is and what the plan is, but
eventually, all the employees understand
what the vision and what the
plan is, how each project they
are working on can make a difference toward working that specific vision and goal.
Q: What is the best advice you’ve
ever received?
It came from our chairman and
founder, Johan Perslow. Initially, it
didn’t really mean that much to
me because I wasn’t a parent at
the time. I now have four children.
His advice was to treat your
employees like your children and
like your family. It means in a
healthy family environment, there
is a tremendous amount of support,
trust and openness. That was really
what he was telling me.
The only difference between your
employees and your children is
you’re never going to fire your children. You do everything you can to
make it work out with employees,
and you don’t do it for them. Provide
the opportunity for them to do it for
themselves.
To develop the most well-rounded
children isn’t to solve all their problems for them. It’s just to make sure they
don’t hurt themselves. But they need to be
given the opportunity to grow and learn
and succeed on their own and fail on their
own and be supported so that they know
themselves when to go get help.
It’s all about creating an environment
where growth and learning thrive, not necessarily take all the challenge and the risk
away from them.
HOW TO REACH: PACE Inc., www.pacewater.com or (714) 481-7300
