You’ve Been Served: Buying a $1.3m Process-Serving Company

Can you give us more color? in terms of actually what happened here?

Yeah. So one of the... There was no policies. So just a quick example without exposing too much is there was no policy in place for when the employees were supposed to come into work and leave. And so we had them coming in anywhere between 6 a.m.

And so coming in and just completely changing when someone comes into work and how much overtime they're allotted can have an emotional impact because it directly affects their paycheck and their daily routine as well. And so, yeah.

Do you think you moved too swiftly? Or do you think that this was just pain that was going to be necessary to go through, be it on day one or day 366?

So I talked to another entrepreneur and he said that as soon as there's a change in ownership, the best time to come in with changes are within the first 30 to 60 days because everyone has a positive bias towards change at that point. They're anticipating maybe even losing their jobs. So if you just tell them...

You know, rather than coming at six, you have to come in at eight or nine o'clock. It's better than not having a job anymore. You know, if you take away overtime versus taking away their job completely, that's still a better outcome than what, you know, the worst case that they could be anticipating.

And over time, if you wait too long, they get comfortable into what they were doing previously. And so the best thing to do is just come in and make all the changes you want up front rather than waiting. Yeah.

And do you feel like that is... Again, as we said, you're only 30 days in, but do you feel like that is playing out?

Yeah, it is. It is. Because everyone has adjusted to these changes. The worst case is not as bad as what they would have been anticipating. And there's definitely been a shift in the office culture that has promoted a culture of excellence versus being okay with mediocrity.

it's just you're just dealing with the discomfort of having to make these changes essentially yeah yeah so the discomfort came um pretty much the first couple of days after the changes were made but um the the best way to handle it for me was to just rather than you know pushing responsibility onto me articulating it in a way that made them feel that these were the best changes for the…

And I actually sought professional help for how to articulate the messaging and how to deal with the emotions of this as well. And what I was recommended to do is whenever there's any pushback toward the policies, just always refer back to the organization and how the changes are best for organization and how we're all facing the same challenges as a team together.