Attaining scalable growth – increasing revenues without a corresponding surge in expenses – is no small feat. For an entrepreneur or a small-business owner, it can be an exciting prospect.
But attaining that kind of success takes careful planning and innovative thinking to put the leader’s vision into action.
To do that, Ken Lear believes, it takes an ability to put together the right team, to onboard employees who properly fit the mission and have the talent to make it happen.
For Lear, the president of 2313 Inc., a company founded in 2003 to provide outsourced sales and consulting services for service-based industries, it’s a conversation about onboarding people and growing staff and then growing locations.
Some of the conversation, he said, is about the challenges around the onboarding and the hiring of the right people, getting the right people in the right positions, and then “moving it to driving revenue in the business.”
“In my eyes, it’s a systematic onboarding process where someone has the same experience coming into an organization,” Lear said. “In my company, we do sales and retail stores.”
Lear recently had a call about onboarding, having just obtained a contract to staff 21 Meijer locations in the next couple of months. That means going from the current headcount staff-wise to nearly doubling it in 60 days.
“I have to think through how we’re going to do that, but systematically in onboarding and scaling it … day one, training’s the same. Day two training’s the same, what type of checklist we have, what type of inspection process we have when people get onboarded.”
Lear believes the onboarding process is so important because of the expense a business occurs when they get the hiring process wrong. And a good leader, he said, will be able to determine that fairly quickly, usually within the first 90 days.
“Unfortunately, the philosophy that I’ve learned over 23 years now of being an entrepreneur is to hire slow, but fire fast,” Lear said. “It’s not because I want to fire people, but in the first 30 to 90 days of employment, I’m going to find out if it’s a culture fit. We talk about it, we have people come in and oftentimes they see it.” Lear recently had an applicant come in who had an IT background with two master’s degrees family who wanted to get back into sales. He ran retail stores in his 20s, but said he doesn’t want to be sitting behind a desk all day or be on the computer all day writing code.
Lear brought the applicant into the office, had him meet the sales team and watch some sales training the company was conducting.
Lear asked him for his impressions at the end of the day, and the man said he’d been impressed.
“I asked him at the end, ‘Hey, what did you think?’ and he said, ‘I love the energy.’ I’ve also had people come in who say the opposite. But in recruiting, I think we try to figure that stuff out upfront.
“There’s nothing more painful than hiring the wrong people,” he added. “Then you have to start over and the time and the money spent in payroll and things is never fun.”
Yasmin Moaven would appear to agree. The CEO of fintech company Pipe, Moaven has worked with organizations expanding from zero employees to one to five to fifty. She calls employees “one of your most valuable resources.”
In a story written by writer Cassidy Horton for Forbes, Moaven said “it’s imperative” employers hire “10xers,” a startup term she said was for “hiring uniquely skilled individuals” who bring 10 times the value to the company compared to peers.
“A 10xer understands the goals are the baseline but isn’t worried about that because ultimately, they just want to see the product come to fruition, and they want to see it succeed,” Moaven told Forbes. “These types of people want to achieve above and beyond the goal.”
How do businesses go about finding the right talent? It varies, obviously, from business to business. Some use networking events, others go by word-of-mouth or internal networking (“Hey boss, I know someone who would be perfect for that job.”).
Lear’s company often sticks to the basics, collecting resumes from internet job sites like Indeed.com or LinkedIn. From there, 2313 Inc. leadership has developed a rating system considering things like an applicant’s background, employment history and level of experience.
“Then we bring them in for an interview where they do a virtual one-way video interview and we have a list of questions that they answer,” Lear explained. “We then watch and rate the videos and their people skills and their educational backgrounds.”
The applicants the team likes are then brought in for a Zoom interview with other employees, who then perform their own evaluation.
“And then there’s kind of two or three rounds of that process to sort out who’s who,” Lear said.
Lear and his team also use intuition. Lear, a former soccer player and coach, likens it to scouts looking at athletic talent. The folks doing that kind of evaluation develop a sense of what they’re looking for, an intuition for the right kind of talent.
“If you grew up in the world of baseball, you played baseball, you kind of get an idea like, man, that kid’s got some talent and you kind have an eye for that talent,” Lear said. “It’s pretty similar in business after a few years.”
Not that it’s easy. Lear said he’s got people with 10 or 15 years of experience, and Lear himself has been recruiting, hiring and developing people for 20 years.
There’s a lot of conversation about talent, he said, why this person in your eyes? How did they work out? Hey, this person was fantastic, this is their trajectory, and how do we find more people like them?
“I’m constantly training, retraining and tightening the bolts with those individuals because I think the recruiter in any company, just like an athletic team, the scout can kind of find some diamonds in the rough,” Lear said.
Do they always get it right? Nope.
“Well, oftentimes you don’t, to be fair,” Lear said. “I’ve picked wrong for sure, and that’s a learning experience for them, for us, for everybody.”
The employees Pipe’s Moaven calls 10xers Lear refers to as “five-star athletes. Having played soccer in high school and at Penn State, Lear figures to be able to spot a five-star athlete fairly quickly.
He figures it’s “pretty obvious” these are the kinds of talents that, through their level of experience and their confidence, have shown they can be successful pretty much anywhere.
“So, I can tell right away if they’re a 10xer because of how they show up, their resume, their confidence,” Lear said. “It’s like showing up to the baseball field and start throwing the ball around. You’re like, ‘Oh boy, this guy’s good.’ And they walk away from my interview thinking, ‘I do have a lot of options, but there’s something about that business, there’s something about that leader, that entrepreneur, that person that my life will be better if I’m hanging around them.
“And it’s not just going to be about the business because in my eyes, it’s not what people do every day that matters,” he added. “It’s why they do what they do. People can be in nursing, they can be in sales, they can be in it. It’s more about why they do it and the human connection. They walk in, you can tell they bring positive energy. Those things are pretty obvious to me.”
Lear’s 2313 Inc. is an outsource sales company. AT&T has been a client for “a very long time,” and they’ve taken on other clients, energy clients, office supply clients and even a trash company at one point.
“These companies outsource us and we are essentially their salespeople,” Lear explained.
Lear started the company at the tender age of 23, and the industry has certainly seen its share of change (remember dial-up internet?) in the intervening 22 years.
Like nearly all companies, 2313 Inc. saw its share of pivoting when the Covid pandemic hit in March 2020. For instance, in pre-Covid times, interviews were conducted nearly all in-person, with candidates driving a half-hour or more to make the appointment.
That’s still how they do it if they have a candidate in whom they’re seriously interested. But more often now recruiting is done online.
“I actually have a company behind the scenes that’s out of Ecuador that actually reviews resumes and makes the initial phone calls to book the digital interviews that we have, and we set those up,” Lear said. “So, I don’t even have that internally in the U.S. I outsource it to partners of mine that we built the business around.
“It makes me very proud that I can have a business there that can help people in that manner,” he added. “We review things digitally, we do things over Zoom, and all of that is because I started to realize Covid changed us as a business.
Of course, it’s not only a matter of finding the right talent. A report from the Duquesne University Small Business Center points out the complexities involved as a business shows growth.
According to the report, things that worked flawlessly when the business was smaller could rapidly become inefficient as the business scales. Building scalable operations, according to the SBC report, focuses on creating “repeatable, efficient systems that adapt to increasing demand while maintaining high-quality outcomes.”
According to the report, key steps to streamlining to allow for growth include:
• Assess Existing Workflows: Map out your current processes to identify bottlenecks, redundancies, and areas that struggle under pressure.
• Standardize Procedures: Develop clear Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for critical activities to ensure consistency.
• Leverage Scalable Tools: Adopt tools designed for larger operations, such as cloud-based platforms that can handle increased data, transactions, and users.
• Delegate and Automate: Focus human effort where it matters most by automating repetitive tasks and delegating effectively.
• Measure and Iterate: Use performance metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of your changes and continuously refine processes.
“Scalable operations are the backbone of a growing business. By standardizing processes, investing in technology, training your team, and monitoring performance, you can build a scalable infrastructure that supports sustainable growth,” the report said. “Embrace these strategies and tips to streamline your processes and position your business for long-term success.”
