In our latest episode of the Transform Your Workplace podcast, Brandon Laws interviews Greg Slamowitz, author of the 2013 book Flip the Pyramid: How Any Organization Can Create a Workforce That is Engaged, Aligned, Empowered, and On Fire. Learn how Greg left a career in law to pursue entrepreneurship and gain some fresh insight on building a framework for company stability and success.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Greg Slamowitz is a lawyer-turned-entrepreneur and the Co-Founder of Ambrose Employer Group, a highly-esteemed professional employer organization. He is a professor, investor, speaker, and author of Flip the Pyramid: How Any Organization Can Create a Workforce That is Engaged, Aligned, Empowered, and On Fire.
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
🔊 Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, sponsored by Xenium HR
🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
📋 In his own words: “The Transform Your Workplace podcast is your go-to source for the latest workplace trends, big ideas, and time-tested methods straight from the mouths of industry experts and respected thought-leaders.”
A NEW BEGINNING
“I went to law school and I did well. It really taught me how to be a disciplined thinker and a disciplined studier. But I quickly came to the conclusion that I didn’t like law, and that I just couldn’t do it for the rest of my life,” Greg explained.
That’s when he read an article in the New York Times about a failed PEO up in Albany, New York. Greg went on, “I really have to hand it to this New York Times reporter. She drove up to Albany and interviewed a bunch of clients from this failed PEO, and they had all lost money. Deposits weren’t made, health insurance and workers’ comp were abruptly terminated, and they couldn’t make payroll.”
Evidently, the founder was “a great salesman but a terrible operator.” Ironically, though, when the reporter asked the clients whether they’d ever use a PEO again — expecting, of course, that they would respond with an emphatic “no” — every single burned client that she interviewed said, “Oh no, it was the best thing ever.” It was then that Greg realized that there was a value proposition there.
“Everybody said that they were just going to find a more reputable, better-run PEO” instead of giving up on the idea altogether. So Greg spent a lot of time studying and learning about the PEO industry by reading books and going to conferences. Then, he found a partner to work with and the two co-founded the Ambrose Employer Group. From there, Ambrose grew at lightning speed, and Greg knew that he had found his niche.
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Unexpected Growth
“We tripled every year for three straight years. It was hard. Our business processes really didn’t keep up with our growth, and it was a real struggle to deliver what we were promising to our clients. Fortunately, we made a lot of money, and we kept it in the company. I think we moved our offices a couple of times. We were hiring people all the time — computers showing up every other day. I knew nothing about business. I was trained as a lawyer. I really wasn’t prepared for this kind of growth.”
Learning the Hard Way
“Then, it all came crashing down. The NASDAQ collapsed. I think that was 2000 or 2001 and 9/11. And we gave back over half of our client base, I think, in about 18 months. So we were in a free fall. We also knew that we needed to do a lot of work internally. And I couldn’t understand. I was very frustrated. We got our company up to maybe five, six, or seven million before the whole thing imploded. It was pretty profitable and we were exhausted.”
“And so I just started to read a lot of business books, and then I found this fella called Verne Harnish. It very quickly came to me that there are proven business strategies and tactics — proven organizational strategies and tactics that are tried and true — and that there’s really no need for original thinking to build an outlined organization that can scale.”
Taking Steps Toward Stability
“You come back from a conference. And everybody at work is just waiting for it to wear off. So I started passing out all of these books. And I started finding change agents in my company and asking them to read up on these ideas as well so that I could get their thoughts. Then, I took a couple of people to the next Verne Harnish conference. And so other people around me throughout the organization began to realize that there was a methodology there. I told them, “We’ve got to do this. We have no choice. Because we’re stuck and I can’t do it by myself.’”
A Certain Kind of Talent
“I’ll never forget. I had one fella come into my office, and he said to me, ‘Greg, I quit.’ And when I asked him why, he said to me, ‘I just want somebody to tell me what to do.’
When you have a growth-oriented company, if you want to win, you need everybody bringing their left brain and their right brain to work every single day. You need everybody engaged. You need everybody working on moving the company forward, you know, out on the court, playing their best game possible. Some people don’t want to do that, and that’s unfortunate.”
Defining Goals
“Setting goals is always a hard process. It’s mostly the responsibility of the senior leadership team. They should be objective, measurable. There’s a saying that I think I got from Verne Harnish: ‘a company with too many priorities has no priorities.’ You have to figure out the top three to five priorities that the company is going to focus on, that the whole company needs to get around.”
Staying Focused on the Goals
“You have to have them up on the wall. You have to have them on dashboards, on people’s screens. You need to be talking about them in all the weekly meetings. The whole meeting rhythm — the weekly, monthly, quarterly meetings — has to be driven by where you are with those goals. It has to be talked about almost every single day.”
LEARN MORE
Find out more about Greg by checking out his personal website at www.gregslamowitz.com, by connecting with him on LinkedIn, or by grabbing a copy of his book, Flip the Pyramid: How Any Organization Can Create a Workforce That is Engaged, Aligned, Empowered, and On Fire, on Amazon.