Curt Janzen's company hired almost anyone in its early years, creating chaos. The shift came when they hired a friend with no experience but the right attitude, then worked with consultant Dan to define three core values: Belong, Create, Mastery. Using these as a hiring filter let them triple their team and keep people who actually fit.
Back in 2006, I started this business with my brother-in-law Kevin, and we were owner-operators, him and I versus the world, trying to grow something from scratch, literally picking ourselves up by the bootstraps, as they say. We had some pretty good success at the beginning, getting some really nice contracts with a few builders and drywall companies that really scaled our business and made a massive need to hire people. The problem back then is we had no idea how to hire a good person. So if you had 2 feet and a heartbeat, you pretty much had a job with us. And what we found is one of the most stressful times of our life. We hired people that loved their mom too much or not enough or were addicted to something or were liars. And it was above my threshold of stress during that time. In about that same kind of cycle of kind of trying to find good people or figuring out what that looked like, we hired a friend of mine who had no experience in the installation division. which all our previous installers had. But we hired him because of his attitude and his effort, and we trained him how to spray. And it was a massive shift in our mindset of what we should be doing as far as our philosophy on hiring people. And so as this new employee kind of came up the ranks, it didn't take very long. Within a year or two where the people that had years of experience were going up to him and asking for advice because he was the right person. Eventually, we were able to hire another person of the same type of quality, and they grew as they got more skills. Kind of around the same time as that, we sat down with a friend. His name is Dan, and Dan does corporate forensics, looking at culture of companies, helping people with their branding, and making sure that they're really aligned with their culture, their values, and all that. And at the time when we sat down, there's only about 5 of us in the room at that point. We built our 3 core values. We weren't that excellent company. We weren't that highly relational company that we really wanted to be. But that was the benchmark that we put ourselves to. And then at that point, day after day, we just measured ourselves to those core values. Well, fast forward a number of years, we've been able to kind of grow our team triple in size. We have a lot of families that we are helping provide for. And it's pretty exciting stuff based on these kind of older values that we had. And so we decided that we needed to rebrand our logo. With that, we thought we should probably rebrand our core values and really dig into who we are now and what we want to do moving into the future. And so we brought Dan back a couple of years ago, and he sat down on an all-day Saturday event with as many of our team members as we could. With their significant others, their kids, if they had an aunt or an uncle or a mom or dad that was actually impacted by Beyond, we invited them all and bought some pizza and had an amazing day. Well, that day consisted of us doing a bunch of exercises on figuring out what are the functional and emotional differences of different types of companies that we deal with on a day-to-day basis. From there, we started working on what is Beyond's functional and emotional difference. And it was a pretty overwhelming day for me hearing the people talk about how Beyond had impacted their lives, their families' lives, what they got from it, the joy, the vision, the advancements, all those things. It was pretty neat for me to sit there and be part of that. At the end of that day, we came up with our 3 core values, which are the Belong, Create, and Mastery. And those are like those functional things that we want But the emotional side or the personality side and the things that we really want our team to feel, clients to feel, our vendors to feel are that whole idea of being— we're a loyal people, we're an optimistic people, and we're principled people. And those are those principles that we try and push on our people every day. And the ones that love it, that fit that DNA, they'll never leave. They love being at Beyond. They want to keep on growing here. If you're not that type of person, It's not like we don't like you. Maybe this isn't the best place for you to work. And we shake their hand and we let them go. And with being able to do that, we've been able to increase the strength of our company, grow, and work with people that we absolutely enjoy being around.
