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Taking Care of Your Employees
And for good reason. “It’s a fact that employees have a lot to offer. When I buy a business—and this is a business that might be failing—I talk to the forklift operator or the warehouse guy, and I’ll say, ‘If you were running this business, what would you do?’ And he tells me 95 percent of what has to be changed for that business to be successful.”Hendricks is always looking for ways to reward his people. For example, he says, “we give 53 percent of the profits back to the employees in the form of bonuses when they do a good job.”
Many organizations claim their employees are like family, but Hendricks means it: His wife and five of their seven children hold key positions. All started at the bottom and worked their way up. One son, Kevin, followed in his father’s footsteps by skipping college and going into the roofing business. His “graduation” present was $100, a nail bag and a roofing hammer. Kevin started as a gofer and learned the business so well, he turned a money-losing store into the company’s biggest profit center.
Although Hendricks made No. 107 on the 2006 Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans, he doesn’t see a need for chauffeurs (he drives a Jeep), entourages and other trappings of wealth. After all, he says, “we all put our pants on the same way.”
What’s more important to him is loving his work and doing a good job. “Don’t let money be the motivator,” he advises anyone starting a business. Instead, he says, “understand what the customer needs and how you, as a business owner, can help him improve his company. When you help your customer grow, you grow. Very few businesses understand that. They try to extract as much money from their customers as they can. But if that hurts their customers’ business, the customer goes broke, so who wins? Nobody.”
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