A Chat with Fred Meyers, President & CEO, The Queensboro Shirt
CS: What's the biggest mistake you ever made in the business and how did you recover?
FM: I made some hasty decisions to hire key managers, who I thought were going to be key managers without thinking through the whole process. And that set me back a lot. There have been a couple... One of the lessons of organization building is that you really have to be systematic in how you add to your organization, but the lowest levels all the way to the highest levels. You don't meet someone and hire them. You have to have a process you go through. As much as you would like to short-circuit the process, they need to fit into the organization; they need to understand the culture; they need to have the skill and talents and the temperment to mix with other people. Early on, I made a couple of bad mistakes by not doing that. And the wrong people in the wrong places can really mess up a business. Particularly if they're involved with sensitive areas like finance or customer service. The way I got through that was to deal with the problems as soon as they were recognized. Fortunately, I'm one of those people that know a little about a lot of things, but not a lot about any one thing. So I've been able to go into the areas these people were responsible for, take over the areas, and fix them and get them back on track myself. And it set us back, it set us back a lot of years, but I'm getting better at it, and I've made some very good hires also. But there should be no luck involved. It should be the result of a process. I think that's a hard lesson to learn.