'Eradicate Entitlement'

REVIEW SUMMARY
Business. Symbiont Service Corp., Englewood
Industry. Pool heating and air conditioning
Key. Firm places a premium on employee training and development.

A sales rep at Sandy King's pool-heating and air conditioning firm, Symbiont Service Corp., approached her one day late last month with a burning desire to learn Spanish.

The new saleswoman's territory includes Miami, so in one sense it was a logical aspiration. Still, learning a second language isn't in the training manual for most Gulf Coast installation and service firms.

King's response: She quickly got online and ordered Rosetta Stone Spanish. The online language education software cost $534. “We are all about leadership and training here,” says King. “I'd like to think we're a step ahead of everyone.”

King has indeed created a bastion of sales and management training at Englewood-based Symbiont, a 40-employee firm that projects $6.3 million in 2011 annual revenues. The firm holds a niche position within a niche industry. It sells and installs geothermal pool-heating systems and air conditioning units statewide. It has done work in more than 30 Florida counties, and clients include several Gulf Coast YMCAs and dozens of parks and condo complexes.

The company says its proprietary and trademarked geothermal systems, created by King's father and company founder, Roy King, are more efficient and environmentally friendly than traditional gas-powered pool-heating pumps. The Symbiont system uses water from a well, lake or cooling tower to heat Freon. The water goes back into the ground after heat is absorbed.

The training and development incubation, meanwhile, comes not only in second languages, but in a variety of mandatory seminars and classes. Offerings range from Dale Carnegie self-improvement classes to Ownership Thinking sessions, which are based on a book of the same name that preaches personal responsibility in the workplace.

Run out of a 4,000-square-foot facility, Symbiont also holds internal lunch-and-learns and maintains a leadership development library of books in its conference room.

The 2011 employee training budget, says Symbiont Finance Director Rick Krieger, was $32,500 — $812 per employee, on average. The Dale Carnegie classes, which only one or two employees attend a year, cost $1,500 per person for 12 weeks.

The training budget further covers paid time for employees for some day classes and certain travel expenses. Symbiont, for example, will pay for gas or provide a company car for employees to drive from the Charlotte County headquarters to the Dale Carnegie training centers, either in Sarasota or Fort Myers.

The company-wide emphasis on training, says King, has played a major role in the company's recession survival efforts. Symbiont grew about 20% a year in the boom, through 2007, when it peaked at $6.8 million in revenues. It since dropped to less than $6 million, though King expects this year will be up, slightly.

The training has also created a company culture of spiffy sayings that promote teamwork and accountability. A recent gem King especially loves: eradicate entitlement.

Decreased profits
Moreover, King says the commitment to training has essentially produced a company of employees who value systems in every nook of the business. That works because King says she has learned that when companies have a breakdown, “nine out of 10 times it's not human error, it's a system error.”

For instance, King, through Krieger, recently learned employees who make up the installation crews, people who travel statewide to worksites and regularly stay overnight, were earnestly over-tipping. Sometimes, according to reimbursement receipts, the employees were tipping 28% and 30% per check when they ate at roadside restaurants.

“A lot of mistakes are people just not paying attention,” King says. “But when you have 40 employees that can add up pretty fast.”

King reined in the generosity with a game called tip the cow, from a concept she learned at Ownership Thinking. Now employees who travel get 12 make-believe cows per quarter, with a goal to tip a cow over each week by completing three steps. The employee must turn in all receipts; have tips that don't exceed 15.5%; and post average meals for the week that don't exceed $25, including tax and tip.

If an employee tips 10 cows in a quarter, he or she is eligible for a baseball hat prize — and the pride of winning. For other prizes, the firm has prepared Monday breakfast for all the employees and attended a minor league baseball game.

All the games and programs follow the same mission: to increase profitability. King says that philosophy would be well-timed in any economy, but it's pitch-perfect these days. “Our costs have grown,” King says, “but our profits haven't.”

One profit program the company just started is PAMB: Profitable Action — Mutual Benefit. It's an amped up version of the tipping game, designed to get every employee hyper-focused on a company first mindset.

Business decisions
But even though King is an outsized proponent of training and development, she's not going for growth on self-help alone. She has made some recent business decisions she hopes will hone Symbiont's competitive advantage.

For one, the firm recently spent at least $500,000 to buy a directional boring rig, a move King is especially excited about. The machine enables the company to install pipes and cables underground — the crux of setting up a geothermal system. The firm previously contracted out the work, but this past summer, King decided to buy a rig and hire an employee to run it.

“Now,” says King, “we do it all in-house.”

That boast, adds King, matters because other firms that bid against Symbiont have to use an army of subcontractors. King says Symbiont can do the entire job with its own employees.

King also recently hired a salesperson to pursue more business in air conditioning, both the traditional kind and geothermal approach. The pursuit is working: Symbiont recently won two jobs for geothermal air conditioning, one in Sarasota County, at an RV resort and campground, and another one on Anna Maria Island.

At less than $750,000 in annual sales, the overall air conditioning business still pales when held up against geothermal pool heating, says King. But she expects that sales figure to at least double next year.

King, overall, strives to combine the best business decisions with the best training, so she can comfortably make projections like that. King actually goes through all the training the employees do.

But back in college, at the Florida Institute of Technology in the early 1980s, King never saw herself in the family business.

Figure it out
Roy King founded the business in 1974, when he bought an air conditioning service and repair firm in Englewood. He had just moved his family to the region from Cincinnati. King invented a geothermal system in 1983, mostly to keep employees busy in the winter, when few customers need AC work or installation.

The firm installed its first geothermal system for a pool at the Japanese Gardens in Englewood. It has since installed the systems on more than 1,000 pools in Florida, from the Keys to Florida State University in Tallahassee.

In 1984, Sandy King, who was an oceanography major at FIT, helped her father with an updated version of the original Symbiont GeoThermal Pool/Spa Heater. King went to work for the company a few years later.

By 1996, Symbiont had eight employees and was closing in on $1 million in annual sales. King bought majority ownership of the firm that year from her parents. And soon after that, King began to take classes, read books and do anything to gain business and industry knowledge. “Since I went to school for oceanography,” says King, “I've had to learn things to figure this out.”

And now, with revenues going back up, King has targeted a new goal for herself and Symbiont's employees: to become a $7.5 million company.

Of course, personal development will always be a primary goal for King, no matter how big Symbiont becomes. “I wish,” says King, “I had more time and capital to do more training.”