Tony Grijalva

Don’t be afraid to grow. For a small business that grows beyond small and starts moving to the middle market, you have to realize that you are in the middle market. You need to spend money and do certain things which are different from what they were when you started. Understand your own success and realize you are in a different league. You are a little bigger and you can do things a little differently. Have a good layer of middle management, which is difficult because middle management and good management require money. But you have to make the decision: Do I invest in people in order to grow even more, or do I stay where I am and become content with that? Business is very dynamic, and things change constantly, either because of technology or new ideas. You have to constantly be looking for ways to reinvent yourself or re-engineer your processes to do better things and to diversify. That’s a constant challenge if you want to grow and compete.

Look at your industry and see the trends and understand that you want to be on the leading edge. If you don’t, it will be good for the short term, but it won’t continue. You have to be constantly vigilant.

Keep employees engaged. Evaluation is the only way you can measure where employees are. It’s critical that we align the evaluation with the job description to make sure that things are going the way you intend them to go. We try to do that every six months. It keeps them focused on results.

Make sure you keep them engaged by sharing responsibilities, empowering them to make decisions and by delegating. Sometimes, it is trial and error. As the employee develops, you start small. As they earn your trust, you keep giving them more.

Focus on being the best, and success will follow. For me, success would be being one of the best employers in town. To know that you created something that people brought to the next level, and your employees and families are well taken care of. Everything else seems to follow that. Personal success and contentment seem to be a consequence of that.

As long as you give, the receiving end will always be there. Humility is important in order to know your limitations. Understand your weaknesses so that you can seek the right help, and partner with other people that are smarter than you so your joint resources can accomplish something.

Realize that everybody makes mistakes. You want to foster the notion that mistakes are OK and not be so severe or critical of the mistake, unless it happens frequently. You can learn from those mistakes and strive not to do it again. You can have an open-door policy where consequences do exist, but candor is never penalized.

Understand that every failure is an opportunity to learn. You try to analyze the reason why things fail and dissect the problem in order to understand it. If you don’t, chances are you’ll do the same thing again.

Take it in and move on to the next item and try to do it right.

HOW TO REACH: G&A Partners, www.gnapartners.com