“Ed Dunlap’s style was to reward people, which we still do,” says Kathy Slencak, manager of public relations. “We have roofers that become managers. And so back in those days, he’d find a young person who started on the roof and he’d promote them to management. He maybe needed an office in North Carolina and he’d say, ‘Son, would you like to raise your family in North Carolina? How about you start an office?’ He built a level of trust with different key employees and then those people went to start offices.”
It’s an incentive for a young roofer to see that there are opportunities. It’s in front of them with the managers and supervisors.
While CentiMark isn’t opening up new offices today, it still promotes from within when it sees promising employees who want to work and will take initiative.
The company also uses its scale to make its workforce more efficient. For example, CentiMark may send northern crews south in the winter, or if a hurricane goes through, it shifts crews to cover that area. Most of the time, Dunlap says they’d rather be working, even if it’s in another city, than laid off for a few months.
“A lot of these crews, they’re younger guys, so they’re single,” he says. “If you’re sitting around in Milwaukee or Cleveland in January or February and we say, ‘We’ve got a job in Puerto Rico or St. Thomas or Dallas, Texas,’ they’re fighting each other to get a seat on the plane.”
CentiMark also specializes its roofing crews. It has a production crew for reroofing and a service crew for roof leaks. Not only is a crew not being pulled off something to do an emergency repair, they are faster because they become experts at their particular task.
Retention takes work
But even with the opportunities that are available, CentiMark has to work at finding and retaining its employees. Dunlap says turnover is natural in an industry that’s transient with a lot of younger employees.
Word of mouth and referrals are still some of the best recruiting methods, so if you treat your employees well and provide incentives like benefits, bonuses and training, they will recruit their friends and family. They sell the company to others.
“We try and do over and above what a normal contractor would do to not only entice employees, but to retain them as well,” Dunlap says.
Plus, if an employer brings in a laborer or foreman that stays with the company for 90 days or longer, there’s an incentive for the employee who recruited them.
CentiMark also visits trade schools, looks at veterans and is developing videos that speak to the advantages of a career with the company. Dunlap says if the employee is inexperienced, the company is willing to take the time to train and nurture that employee to make him or her interested in the company and want to stay long term.
“You’ve got to work at keeping an employee. Those days of hiring an employee and them spending their next 40 or 50 years with the company are by the wayside,” he says. “The younger generation now, they’ll start and leave company after company if they think it’s a better opportunity or they feel that their next move gets them another step ahead. Nowadays, you have to pay attention to the employee.”
That need to develop employees hit home over the last few years when CentiMark had a few key employees retire.
“Fortunately, due to the loyalty and common understanding of long-term company goals, smooth transition plans were developed,” Dunlap says. “While these transitions are never easy, if an organization fosters leadership and the growth of employees, it does become easier.”
CentiMark had trained employees who were available to backfill those particular positions, which is why the executive committee spends time on personnel as part of its strategic planning.
“We sit there as a team and try to say, ‘OK, if X regional manager were to retire tomorrow, who would be his replacement?’ So, we try to identify that in advance and then we single that person out and actually start training him for that role long before we’re faced with a position of backfilling whatever it is, regional manager, group director (etc.),” he says.
