Chris Brauser has a situation that many companies would envy: his financial investigations and analytics company Gabriel Partners is experiencing hypergrowth. In fact, for a good part of 2015, he has been averaging five new employees a week.
“I don’t think that is sustainable long term,” he says.
The company has grown from 20 employees in 2013 to 100. The City of Cleveland Department of Economic Development recently awarded a Job Incentive Grant to the company for its substantial job creation.
Gabriel Partners works with companies, financial institutions and governments in support of the Bank Secrecy Act, anti-money laundering and counter terrorist financing operations.
The rapid development brought growing pains and challenges that forced Brauser and his team to formulate an on-boarding process —the site of the biggest bottleneck.
Two essential qualities
The first step in developing the process was to determine the basic qualities that a job candidate must possess. Job candidates are tested for aptitude in the job assignment area, but Brauser, CEO, says he really only looks for candidates to be smart and to write well.
“I can teach you the rest,” he says. “If you have those two pieces, you are teachable and I can work with you. That’s where we have had tremendous success.
“If you are 30 years old and can’t write, there’s not much I can do because you spent 30 years doing it one way, I’m not going to be able to convert you in six weeks on how to change,” Brauser says. “That’s going to be a multiyear process. But the younger folks that come out of college — as long as they demonstrate a way to communicate salient points in a professional way, that’s what we look for.”
One other practice Brauser follows is to hire military veterans when possible. They have been trained for years on how to identify and report, which is exactly what Gabriel Partners does.
“We found that veterans had a base of culture, knowledge and understanding that we wanted to be part of what we do,” he says. “The culture has been driven into these folks about how to identify different typologies and report upon them.”
Training is the lifeblood
The second task was to develop a comprehensive training program since finding experienced personnel, for example anti-money laundering investigators, was challenging.
Gabriel Partners developed a 10-week training program with two weeks of classroom, six weeks of live action training in a test environment and two weeks of one-on-one training in a live environment. Throughout the training, new hires are tested to ensure that they develop and grow. This is followed by a comprehensive quality control measurement process once candidates complete training.
“It’s like having stats as a baseball player,” Brauser says. “I know you’re batting .270, I know you have 41 doubles. That way we can have a real discussion on how you can get better.
“I wanted the company to be run like a football, baseball or basketball team. We are going to sit down and talk about what you do well, then what you don’t do well and finally about how to make you a better player. We are measuring your metrics in terms of efficiency and quality — those kinds of elements. We measure that on a daily basis.”
Avoiding silos
While that all sounds well and good, Brauser found a tendency for silos to develop at Gabriel Partners, an entity that grew out of several previous incarnations.
“We originally had what we called a team structure where things became fractured from an operational and cultural perspective,” he says. “There were silos that didn’t communicate with each other, they behaved differently from each other and the quality levels differed.”
Brauser decided the solution was to move employees regularly, from team to team, from client to client — and from desk to desk.
“We train them on new things in a constant way so that everybody is being challenged to do things differently and to work with different people,” he says.
“Nothing makes me more upset than when I see someone has 800,000 tchotchkes on their desk which symbolizes they have been at that desk for the last several years.
“We just had desk move day. People were excited: ‘It’s going to be a different view, I’m going to work on a different account and I’m going to work with different people’ — that’s how we’ve avoided silos.”
How to reach: Gabriel Partners, (216) 771-1250 or www.gabrielpartners.com
