The Ultimate Partner

Is your company growing? Do you have plans to grow it? Along with that growth will come the need for more of what I call the Big Three: people, money and systems. The most important of these is people. If you have good people, you can always get the other two. If you have great people, money will come knocking at your door. If you have poor people, you are probably dead in the water.

Now, let’s do some math. Say you run a small firm employing five people. If it grows by 25% annually (ambitious, yes, but modest by PROFIT 200 standards), it will double in size within three years — meaning you’ll have to hire five more people. One of them is likely to be your first senior hire, marking a watershed moment for your company. Hire a superstar, and your firm can continue on to greatness. Make a bad hiring decision, and you’ll be mired in all its consequences.

My first senior hire at College Pro was Paul Clements as controller. He was a superstar. He worked with the hard chargers at College Pro and stabilized our financial management. He grew with the business, retiring earlier this year as VP of finance and executive VP for The Franchise Company, which now owns College Pro and is 100 times the size of the firm I hired him for.

Hiring decisions matter, big time. Yet, I still find entrepreneurs often go about it on a very ad hoc basis. We are typically quick to hire and slow to fire. I was. Today, as a business adviser, I find myself recommending the reverse. There are three potential outcomes of a hire:

• The employee fits the culture and the role perfectly, helping you achieve new heights.
• The employee does the job competently, so you never fire him — but you sacrifice the 10 to 20 growth points that come with a superstar.
• The employee is a bad fit and needs to be let go or moved into a new role, a realization that develops slowly, allowing the rot to set in.

I got lucky with Paul, even though I had hired him with the help of a search firm. There is a better way. I would have been better to use the more intentional approach of Jeremy Behar, CEO of Cirrus Consulting Group, a Toronto-based health-care consulting firm. Jeremy realized early on that people would be key to attaining his goal of growing Cirrus to 10 times its size within 10 years. Consequently, he treated the “hiring” of his recruiter as he would the hiring of a key senior employee.

The first thing he did was recruit for a recruiter. He made a point of having lunch with one new recruiting firm per month, even when Cirrus wasn’t hiring. Jeremy wanted to gauge fit on values — the basis for any long-term relationship. When he met Bruce Powell of IQ Partners at a conference, Jeremy felt there was a fit. He intentionally cultivated the relationship by having monthly meetings with Bruce to share financial information on the company and its issues. Jeremy also accompanied Bruce to conferences of mutual interest. This sometimes involved travel, which gave the pair lots of “soft time” in which to build a relationship.

The two became allies and friends. In the process, Bruce got to know Jeremy and his business — its culture, its staffing needs, and its financial model. This proved to be a huge advantage when it came to finding the right hires for Cirrus. (Yes, IQ Partners got the business.)

More important than Bruce’s knowledge of Cirrus is the trust between him and Jeremy. I have seen the pair working together on a number of occasions, and there is an alignment of goals and interests not usually present in a “hired gun” relationship — even one in which you use the same recruiter for all your hires. The assiduous cultivation of their relationship has led to something different.

Following are some of the things that I have seen Bruce do that would be unusual for a search firm with a short-term focus. He actually turned down a search for a product manager because he felt Cirrus wasn’t ready to hire for the position. Jeremy agreed. Bruce reduced the scope of the job description (and, hence, his own fee) because he thought the original plan was too risky. Today, he will see people for Jeremy out of the blue, even when Cirrus doesn’t have an immediate opening. (Jeremy, like all great CEOs, is constantly recruiting and will create positions in order to seize rare talent when it’s available.)

Bruce’s preliminary evaluation helps Jeremy determine whether to move forward, although the process seems to spur the new recruits on. After they meet Bruce, they typically call Jeremy and say something like: “That is the most amazing interview I have ever had — he knows your firm as well as you do.” What they’re thinking, however, is this: “I want to work for a firm that thinks this way about the primacy of its people.”

This is obviously good for Jeremy. It greatly reduces the odds of damaging hiring errors. Bruce doesn’t want this to happen on his watch. This ongoing process is also good for Bruce. He gets a long-term client, a great reference and the tremendous satisfaction that comes from doing his job with excellence and making great matches that produce value. I wish I’d done what Jeremy has done with Bruce. If you want to stay on the growth track, invest in recruiting a recruiter. Interview many, let them interview you and, when you feel there’s a fit, do everything reasonable to cultivate a long-term relationship imbued with trust and shared knowledge. Even if your business is so small that a big hire is not on the immediate horizon, it’s never too soon to begin building a recruitment relationship.