The Power of Personal Growth
Every morning at 8:30 a.m. Rachel Torchia, the owner of Breckville, Ohio-based Gateway Title Agency, Inc., shuts off the phones and gathers her 17-person staff for a brief meeting. This is not your typical team get-together to hash over numbers or operational issues. Instead, the company spends this time reading aloud to each other. They read business, motivational and personal-growth books. And they discuss these books together.
The company has gone through a number of different books since Torchia instituted the morning readings, but one has played a particularly prominent role in shaping the organization and its values: Ken Blanchard's Gung Ho. The book recounts an organizational turnaround based on three key principles: the power of doing worthwhile work, empowering people, and offering employees encouragement.
Gateway reinforces these principles by recognizing employees who best embody them with "Gung Ho Partner of the Month" and "Gung Ho Partner of the Year" awards. The awards are determined by a company-wide vote and the winner is presented with a framed certificate, which lists comments made by the recipient's peers. In addition, the company presents a cash prize to the winning employee and his/her charity of choice.
Torchia says the company's unorthodox morning meetings help foster a team environment. They also play an integral role in developing her employees, not simply as workers but as people. "This first time I asked the employees to read aloud, I saw sheer terror," says Torchia. "For many people it was one of the most painful things they'd ever done. What I watched there in terms of growth was a miracle. As time went on, they all developed self-confidence and that is a growth thing."
Employee development does not stop with these meetings. New employees spend their first two weeks of work shadowing their peers. The company regularly provides employees with outside training, such as seminars and computer classes, and rigorously cross trains everyone. Torchia explains that the cross training serves a dual purpose: It allows the company to maintain a high level of productivity when someone is out, and it helps employees empathize with each other.
The unique nature of Gateway Title's business makes Torchia's emphasis on employee development vital to its success. The company is in the real estate title industry. Unlike their competitors, who rely exclusively on referrals from realtors and lenders for their business, Gateway actively pursues business from a traditionally neglected market: owners selling their homes without the aid of an agent. As a result, their title consultants are not simply processing paperwork but performing customer service, sales and marketing duties. These are responsibilities that are new to most title consultants.
"Learning and development is the basis for everything we do here," says Torchia.
Office manager/comptroller Anita Dobrowolski agrees. "What's kept me here is the fact that Rachel continually allows me to grow," she says. "She looks at us as her little rose bushes. The more she waters us, the prettier we'll grow to be."
Torchia says the company's workplace practices have translated into quality service. Gateway performs well on their customer surveys with a return of rate of 40 percent and a positive rating of 100 percent. The overwhelming majority of their customers describe their service as "friendly." More importantly, almost a quarter of their business now comes from customer referrals.
Title consultant Lana Stover was a former Gateway Title customer and liked the service she received so much that she decided to pursue a position with the company. "Anytime I had any dealings with the company, I got warm fuzzy feelings," she says.
Since joining Gateway Title she says she has come to understand what is behind the strong customer service she received. "They are very internally focused," says Stover. "They take care of the employees first and that has a positive impact on how the customers are treated."
Recently the company's employee-first approach was put to the test. For a period of six years Gateway Title handled a large contract for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to perform closings on their sales throughout half of the state. The contract accounted for 40 percent of the company's business and was overseen by a staff of seven people. In November of 2002, another company underbid for HUD's business and Gateway lost the contract, putting those seven employees' jobs in jeopardy.
The loss of the HUD contract marked a major crisis for the company. Torchia assembled her staff and together they came up with a plan to make up for the lost revenue. They decided to build up the home refinancing portion of their business, resulting in a program called the "Refi Price Explosion." The company developed special new refinancing price sheets, cutting costs wherever they could, and presented them to area lending institutions. The program was a resounding success. Gateway Title is on target to make up for all but 5 percent of the HUD business they lost. More importantly, the company was able to preserve six of the seven jobs jeopardized by losing the HUD contract, shifting those positions to the new refinancing department.
What's most impressive about this episode is that the company responded to the crisis as a team. According to Torchia, this is not uncommon at Gateway Title. She describes the company as a family and says that her people "know about trusting each other and taking care of the internal customer."
The company's family approach appears to be paying off, not only in a growing, successful business, but in outside recognition. In Sept., Torchia was honored by Winning Workplaces as part of our 2003 Best Bosses program. In recent years, Gateway has received a Better Business Bureau award, a Blue Chip award from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and an award from the Governor of Ohio for excellence in business among women-owned organizations. But, according to Torchia, running a business is its own reward. "Owning my business has far surpassed anything I could've dreamed it could be," she says.
Company: Gateway Title, Inc.
Web Site: www.gatewaytitle.com
Industry: Title and escrow services
Location: Brecksville, Ohio
Number of employees: 17
Sales: N/A
