Building the Team

Hiring, firing, and training in a new era.

We walked into 600 Corporate Park Drive in St. Louis with 15 minutes to spare. As we were greeted by a friendly person at the front desk and began to sign in, I turned to my team to make sure their expectations were set appropriately.

I suggested that while we had flown to St. Louis from New York specifically for this meeting, it might not turn out to be what we were expecting. We were there to meet with Andrew C. Taylor, chairman and chief executive of Enterprise Holdings, which owns Enterprise Rent-a-Car and has been ranked No. 20 on Forbes’ list of the largest private companies in the United States with estimated sales of $13.5 billion.

This was November of 2011 (Mr. Taylor is now executive chairman). At the time, H.Bloom was one and a half years old, and we had just introduced our SEED Program. We started the program to recruit ambitious people who aspired to run their own business some day. We put them through rigorous training so they would be prepared to manage an H.Bloom market if they graduated successfully. We believed that this would enable our company to grow fast by promoting from within and putting people in leadership positions who had already demonstrated success at H.Bloom.

While we were proud that this focus on training and talent development seemed to be unusual for a start-up, we believed there must be other companies – older, more established companies – that had employed similar strategies. Surely, those companies that had built their own talent-development programs over the course of decades would have a lot to share with a young company like ours. If we could learn from folks who were smarter and more experienced than we were — and that seemed like nearly everybody! — we were eager to do it. We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel.

We did some research and learned that Enterprise Holdings had a renowned management-training program, with more than 8,000 recent college graduates trained each year. Once we identified Enterprise as a company to emulate, we tried to figure out how to meet with them so we could learn how they built their team so effectively. It turned out our vice president of sales, Tom MacLeod, had a connection. Mr. MacLeod’s parents had grown up in St. Louis and had gone to high school with Mr. Taylor. So, we asked Mr. MacLeod to send an e-mail, acknowledging that the likelihood of a response was low. Within 24 hours, however, we received a response from Mr. Taylor, inviting us to visit Enterprise headquarters in St. Louis.

As we were waiting in the lobby, I suggested the following to my colleagues: “Mr. Taylor is a busy man running a massive organization. It is possible that he will have someone else in his organization meet with us today, or that this meeting with H.Bloom has been overlooked altogether.”

Just as I finished my comment, Mr. Taylor’s executive assistant came in to the lobby to welcome us. After a warm hello, she led us in to Enterprise’s executive briefing center, a massive room with a large U-shaped table that made the space feel like a slightly more intimate version of the General Assembly Hall at the United Nations. Starting at the head of the table (the middle part of the U) and fanning out from there were placards in front of each chair, with the names and titles of all of the participants: “Mr. Andy Taylor, Chairman CEO, Enterprise Holdings,” “Mr. Bryan Burkhart, Founder CEO, H.Bloom.” I turned to my team: “Well, I guess they are expecting us!”

Minutes later, a door opened in the wall, and Mr. Taylor, along with several senior executives entered the room. After we exchanged pleasantries, poured coffee, and took our assigned seats, Mr. Taylor welcomed us with very kind opening remarks. He started with the following (which I am paraphrasing):

Welcome to Enterprise. I am impressed that a company like yours, just over a year old, is focusing so much energy and passion on talent development. Our own focus on talent development has enabled Enterprise to achieve whatever success we have had over the years, and it is something that we discuss with much more mature organizations every day. In fact, just yesterday we hosted executives from one of the largest banks in the world, who were here to talk about how we handle talent development at Enterprise. It’s a big deal that you are thinking about it already. Over the next three hours, I will walk through a high level presentation of how we manage talent development at Enterprise, and then our management team can answer questions.

Mr. Taylor and the members of his team were extraordinarily gracious. I am still amazed by and grateful for their willingness to spend half of their day with a team of upstarts from New York. We learned so much, and I will use my next post to enumerate the most important takeaways.

Today, though, I want to underscore an important lesson that we have learned: It really is important to avoid wasting time reinventing the wheel. Figure out the type of team you want to build; go look for great companies and people to emulate; and find a way to meet with them directly. Leverage your personal and corporate network. Follow people on Twitter and try to engage with them. Reach out over LinkedIn. Send an e-mail out of the blue. The worst that can happen is nothing at all — but there is so much to gain.

The good news for all of us is that there are exceptionally accomplished people, like Mr. Taylor, who are willing to take the time to teach. I hope to do the same one-day once we have achieved a modicum of success at H.Bloom.

In my next post, I’ll write about what we learned from Mr. Taylor.

Bryan Burkhart is a founder of H.Bloom. You can follow him on Twitter.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/13/maybe-someone-else-has-already-figured-this-out/?partner=rss&emc=rss