Teams can help cultures merge, Informer learns
DEAR INFORMER: I need to blend in many new employees who used to work at a remote office, and now are moving to our main office. How can I do this?
DEAR MERGING: Mark Hoffman learned a lot about merging two cultures when he completed his first acquisition last May, adding a handful of employees to Hoffman Communications in Minneapolis.
He’s putting those lessons to work now that he’s completed his second acquisition, and needs to get 45 people working together.
“We went back and interviewed everybody that came over” the first time, Hoffman says. “They were very vocal” about what worked and what didn’t during the transition.
It’s important to set the stage. Meet privately first with the staff members who will be affected by any change, Hoffman recommends. In his case, the owner of the company he acquired, Bill Juntunen of Juntunen Group, told employees about the sale, then brought in Hoffman to tell about himself and to answer questions.
His most workable idea, Hoffman says, is the development of nine different teams, each with members from the existing and new companies. The teams work on everything from the “creative process” to “moving.”
“I asked for volunteers,” Hoffman says, and charged each team with writing their own work rules. “You come up with how you want to function and operate. I will review. That way, they’re developing the parameters. They’re responsible.”
So far the plan is working “extremely well,” he says. “It got them to gel as a team fastr than ever before.”
A second advocate of teams to handle change is Rich Nazarian, president of Minnetronix Inc. in St. Paul, where office expansion is ongoing. Most of his employees are design engineers who have strong opinions about existing and new space.
“We’re engineers, so we like to watch the dirt-moving and the heavy equipment. We put a structure to that,” Nazarian says.
He has a standing team in charge of ongoing space management, “affectionately known as the space cadets,” he says. Plus, he’s created five teams to handle various aspects of the expansion project: communications, space planning, building execution, mapping and logistics.
“Everybody has their special thing” desired for the new space, Nazarian says. He’ll review them all and decide if it’s a go. “We try to implement what we can afford, and what we can’t, we put on the wish list for next time.”
Mark Hoffman, Hoffman Communications: 612.436.3601; markh@hoffmancommunications.com: www.hoffmancommunications.com. Rich Nazarian, Minnetronix Inc.: 651.917.4060; ranazarian@minnetronix.com; www.minnetronix.com
SUCCESSION
DEAR INFORMER: The owner of our company says he wants to “step back” from day-to-day operations, and he’ll go on vacation for a few weeks, leaving us in charge. Then he comes back and gets completely involved again. How can we fix this?
DEAR CONFUSED: You have the sympathy of Duane Thompson, a CPA and tax partner at EideBailly, the Bloomington accounting firm.“If you’re going to go, you can’t come back and take over,” Thompson says. “That’s just wrong.”
It’s also typical at many small firms, especially those where the founder is still in charge. The key is planning ahead for eventual succession. And if your CEO isn’t addressing it, you or another top manager needs to do so.
So, just ask him about it.
“Ask the question. I don’t know what the down side is,” Thompson says. “Don’t be intimidated by the owner.”
Keep it about business. Ask, what will happen to the business if something happens to the owner? Focus on the effect on customers, that customers may get confused if staff isn’t sure who’s doing what.
By asking some simple questions, you’ll start to get to the issues. For example, does he have a timeline in mind for when he’d like to retire? Is there a certain financial target the business needs to meet first? Who can be identified as a possible successor? How could that process go? Can you write good, clear job descriptions for those people who will be taking over someday?
Most often, the financial side of the issue is cut and dried and can be worked out. It’s the emotional side that becomes more complex.If the owner can start assigning responsibility to employees, he can start to get comfortable with the future.
Leaving everything a mystery, says Thompson, “potentially slows growth, because you take young people with ambition and desire, and they tend to wait for the owner to make the next move.
“The more they work together, the employees, the second in line, the more comfortable the owner becomes.”
Get started as soon as possible, because the “shorter the time period, the worse it is.”
Be persistent if the owner won’t listen. “You just try to keep working at it until they break down,” Thompson says.
“You really try to just get it out of them. Sit down and ask them 20 questions, and they’ll start coming up with the answers,” he says. “They have to come up with the answers themselves.
That’s a final tip: Remember that people such as your company’s CPA, lawyer or banker may help this process, because they should be bringing up the issue when they meet with the owner.
Sometimes a trusted outside adviser, especially one who’s paid a large retainer, will get the owner’s ear when employees can’t.
Duane Thompson, EideBailly: 952.918.3508; dthompson@eidebailly.com; www.eidebailly.com
HIRING
DEAR INFORMER: How do you go from running your company yourself to starting to add employees? That transition is so hard.
DEAR GROWING: Wendy Nemitz started Ingenuity Marketing Inc. in 1991, and ran it out of her house for about 10 years after her divorce made her a single parent. Then she started looking for a business partner, and added Dawn Wagenaar last year.
Now they have office space in St. Paul, an employee handbook (which Wagenaar recently took her to task for ignoring), and a few employees.
Her take on the transition: It’s all about hiring only the right employees, she said at a Minnesota Entrepreneurs meeting in February.
“Select your employees more carefully than you’d select your spouse, or more carefully than I selected my first spouse,” she says with a laugh. “He was so cute.” (No word on how she selected her second husband, whom she’s marrying soon.)
She thinks business owners, many of them baby boomers, have to drop their prejudices. “You have to disbelieve some of the myths about Generation X, that they’re slackers,” she says. They’re not.
Rather, they have “a profoundly different way that they identify with work.”
“I have to give a little in my expectations of them. We don’t have office hours. Well, we do have office hours, but they’re Tuesdays from 9 to 3.
“The Xers aren’t going to work like I do. I have to accept that’s how they do work.”
Her method is to find wonderful people, and then keep after them. “I woo them. I wooed my partner for 12 years. I keep a pipeline of people I think are awesome,” she says.
Wendy Nemitz, Ingenuity Marketing Group: 651.690.3358; wendy@ingenuitymarketing.com; www.ingenuitymarketing.com
