When the three partners of Relay Express make decisions,
majority rules. And because the person who comes out on the
short end of the stick may have a bias against the decision, co-founders Matt Seiter, Robert Smith and Mike Bernecker appoint
someone else to relay the decision.
“We try to give one voice to the people,” says Seiter, president
and CEO of the courier service. “There is that little bit of, ‘Hey,
they didn’t like my idea.’”
Seiter and his partners have grown Relay Express’ revenue 75
percent from 2005 to 2006.
Smart Business spoke with Seiter about how to deal with
employee mistakes, what to look for in employees and how pictures of family serve as a motivator.
Q: How do you give employees the freedom to work their own
way?
It’s tough to just let go when you see someone making mistakes time and again. I try to stay away from them. Not out of
the office, but out of their way. If I see someone making the
same mistake over and over again, then I can see they aren’t
getting it.
If they are making a different mistake, then I see they are
learning. If they are making the same mistake, then maybe it is
my fault for not teaching them the proper way to do it.
We do let people learn from their mistakes, and, in the long
run, they are self-sufficient.
We try to retrain or have someone else in the company help
them. I say, ‘They aren’t getting it from me. Maybe you can help
them.’ We cross-train everyone so there’s not just one person
who knows this part of the business. When there is a problem,
they may be a better teacher for that person.
Q: How do you know a potential employee has the qualities you
want?
When you go to interview somebody, if you like them right
away, they can change when they come to work for you. We try
to hire people we want to hang out or go to lunch with. If I like
to talk to you in an interview, then I’ll like to go to lunch or dinner with you.
Everyone we hire, we tell them upfront that there is a 90-day
period we want to have you work because they may not like us.
It is a fast-paced business. There can be some burnout in it
quickly. We try to eliminate the stress by having the personalities around that everyone can lean on everyone else.
Q: How do you retain employees?
We’ve had problems in the past with this where we have
brought them in, let them go, and that’s not worked. In the last
three or four years, we put up a picture board in the lunchroom
where it’s everyone’s family.
We try to do more family-oriented things and to give weekly
bonuses. ‘You did a good job, here’s a $25 gift card.’
That whole process of trying to get people involved in the
company and each other’s lives has helped us retain employees. They want to see what they are doing makes a difference,
and we have tried to show that in the last three to four years.
When we first started, we didn’t know what we were doing.
We would ask our employees, who were older than us at the
time, ‘What do you think we should do?’ Those first five to 10
years, we would go out to dinner with these people and their
families. It was really a family culture.
After we did this for 10 years, it got to the point where my
family started to come first.
So, we’d hire people to run the company for us, and the three
of us stepped back and got out of the way. That whole family
culture went away, and we had some turnover problems.
So we thought, ‘This isn’t working, we need to get back
involved in this.’ Not so much in the day-to-day basics but
involved in the people because they want to belong to something.
Q: How has having family pictures in the break room benefited the
company?
If you are happy at work, you will do your job better. If you
aren’t doing your job, you look at that board during lunch and
you think, ‘I’m not just letting down the company, I am letting
down these people.’
I know it’s been brought up quite a bit. People talk about it all
the time. When a new picture goes up, I may not notice it, but
a lot people go, ‘Did you see the new picture of so and so?’
I know it’s looked at every day. It’s like a motivator in there.
HOW TO REACH: Relay Express, www.relayexpress.com or (800) 860-6288
