It’s been said that team culture can make or break a company. Without a strong foundation built on shared values, work standards, communications and processes, it can be very difficult for a group to accomplish business goals as a group.
Leaders set the tone in this regard — something Melissa Gravitt understands well. So she quickly made changes to create an environment that would more effectively attract and retain company staffers. She significantly contributed to the company’s growth in other ways as well.
Quick evolution
The MVP for The Pool Butler came to the pool industry by chance. She was a stay-at-home mom looking to get back into the workforce when a friend suggested she work for a pool business. That was in 2010.
Four years later, she started at the Hiram, Ga.-based service firm as a maintenance scheduler. That position provided her a quick education on the basics of pool/spa maintenance. After taking a break to care for her sick father, Gravitt joined a newly opened location as office manager. “I was actually the only person in the office,” she says. “I did all of the maintenance, billing, scheduling, ordering — everything — and I did that for three years.”
Through this exposure to so many aspects of the business, Gravitt gained an intricate understanding of the company’s workings, enabling her to become company trainer for both locations.
In this capacity, she played a key role in growing The Pool Butler’s newest location. When she started at that facility in 2018, it serviced about 49 pools per week with one technician, she recalls. It now has nine technicians who maintain about 90 pools each week.
Company owner Tim Bolden credits his MVP with making the decisions and running the location as if she were the owner. “Basically, this office started from nothing,” he says. “I gave them 40 accounts from our other location, and within three years, they created a million-dollar office process from the ground up.”
Those numbers alone are impressive, but Gravitt takes pride in another important fact: “We’ve actually retained almost all of our employees. When they’re hired, they don’t leave.”
For all these reasons, Bolden considers Gravitt the backbone of the company.
Tight-Knit group
She views her biggest achievement as developing an office culture that has fostered employee retention, even through the challenges brought on by the pandemic.
“We set forth guidelines as far as what is expected, and it’s communicated and it is enforced,” she says. In this case, enforcement doesn’t mean scolding an employee for doing something wrong, but rather talking about what happened, learning and devising a better way for next time.
In addition to clearly communicated policies, Gravitt also worked to establish and maintain a solid relationship between the office staff and technicians. She worked to set that foundation from Day One and has clearly been successful. The first technician at her location started with her in January 2018, and she hired a second the following month. Both remain with The Pool Butler.
One factor in building a team culture is having regular social outings together.
“We’ll take half the day and we’ll go bowling, or we’ll go do something on a Friday where it’s just showing appreciation for the hard work that they have put in,” Gravitt says.
Keeping this strong company culture across office and field staff begins at hiring. Gravitt oversees every interview for new office positions, while the director of maintenance does so on technician interviews.
Then during training, Gravitt sits with new hires to see how they’re working and offer tips to improve efficiency. She’ll say, “Let me see how you do this, so that we can work on it together to get it done the way it needs to be.”
After her promotion from office manager to trainer, Gravitt taught all the new office staff how the company systems work. Once they were trained, she was promoted again to director of operations.
“Now she’s kind of handling everything that I do, so I can step out of the picture and start growing another market coming into the winter,” Bolden says.
He describes Gravitt as a solid role model for staff and someone who leads them as a group rather than taking credit for what she has done. That becomes apparent when she quickly points out that it takes a solid team to deliver for the customer and build a good reputation for the business.
“The fact that I’m successful is only because the teamers I have under me are,” she says.
