At any major event in San Diego, whether being a San Diego Chargers game, the Buick Invitational Golf Tournament with Tiger Woods as an annual favorite, a Padres
game, concerts, conventions, or trade shows, professionally-dressed support staff and security personnel may be seen roaming the grounds and greeting guests. These staff members are a part of Elite Show Services, Inc., the largest provider in San Diego of security and other support staff for a wide variety of events and businesses.

Although seemingly in the background, these staff members actually have very important jobs anticipating and defusing all the things that could go wrong at major events. Before president and CEO, 42-year-old John Kontopuls and his brother, Gus, entered the business in 1995, the industry comprised mostly "guys who played on the high school football team," but the Elite team transformed the industry from a brute force business to one focused on customer service. By 2006, Elite was generating over $12 million in revenue annually and was profitable, despite being in a very competitive business; and had over 200 full-time and 2,700 part-time employees.

One of the keys to Elite's success was the company's relentless focus on its people, as revealed in its mission statement: "to educate and empower a diverse group of individuals to anticipate the needs of those we serve and consistently exceed their expectations." Although Elite's mission statement might sound like corporate jargon, the Elite management team had built, shaped, and grown Elite's business based on this two-pronged mission of first empowering employees who would then happily and proactively do their jobs.

"We've built our business model based on making sure our employees are happy and have a good quality of life," noted John Kontopuls. "If they're happy, then they'll make the guests happy at events and subsequently, our clients will be happy. If our clients are happy, then they will continue to renew our business and pay us a premium for our services. And if we can pay our employees more money and make them happy, then we have a nice cycle that's been working for us for more than 11 years."

In 1995, John was running his mortgage banking and investment company, Kontopuls Financial Group. His brother, Gus had been working for a Los Angeles based security company. Born and raised in San Diego, the Kontopuls brothers had plenty of opportunities to attend local sporting events and concerts. As an entrepreneur at heart, John Kontopuls was always on the lookout for potential opportunities: "Once I was at a baseball game and I saw a security guard man-handle a young kid for no reason at all and I thought the service was so deficient," he said. "I thought, 'the people of San Diego really deserve better than that.'"

It didn't take long to set up shop when John was just 30-years-old. "I had an office full of loan officers and our new security business slowly but surely engulfed the other business within months of our starting Elite."

Within three months of launching the business, Elite had landed a one-year contract with the San Diego Padres (while competing against 12 competitors), and without even getting halfway through the baseball season, the Padres were so happy with Elite's quality of service, they extended the contract for an additional three years. The initial pitch that won the Padres over was to upgrade security to become more guest services-oriented. After Elite won the Padres account, they quickly locked in numerous other major accounts in the area and business began to hum. Moreover, the Padres extension opened the door to Elite's expansion into a whole host of other services such as valet parking, ushers, ticket takers, meeting room monitors, cashiers, and registration personnel.

But getting business and keeping business was only one part of Elite's equation of success. If customer service was going to be Elite's competitive advantage, then Kontopuls knew that he needed to focus on the employees. For example, Elite was one of the first security companies in the state to provide extensive employee training of more than 40 hours as part of its "Elite University" years before the state mandated a 40-hour minimum of training.

"During our training, we put a lot of emphasis on risk management, safety, and guest services," said Kontopuls. "And we tell new recruits, 'if you've joined our company because you like to man-handle people or to be bossy, then this is not the place for you.' Elite is a company where we try to be proactive, provide excellent guest service, and be as tolerant as we can be." Training included CPR certification, customer service, stress management, sexual harassment, and defense tactics, amongst others. Elite wanted its employees to possess the skills to be able to reason with a group of intoxicated sporting fans, versus simply being a 300-pound staff member who could provoke a fight instead.

But the training "has nothing to do with employee retention," added Kontopuls. "It has everything to do with just trying to improve people's lives. We're continually trying to enhance people's lives. For example, we offer courses in nutrition and fitness, professional and social etiquette and are starting a course on career and life planning, which might sound odd because why would we want to teach someone to find a job somewhere else? But that's just part of what we do."

In fact, Kontopuls believed so strongly in helping his employees and others that he wanted to make sure that when faced with a variety of situations, his employees would always make the right choices: "At any point in time, there's going to be a moment of truth that our employees face where they can help someone or not help them. I want to have a culture that makes them want to help every time."[1]

Kontopuls' benevolent nature had its roots in grade-school when he read Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, published in 1946, about Frankl's five years in a Nazi concentration camp. The book greatly impacted his view on the world. Moreover, in high school, he had the opportunity to attend leadership conferences taught by MBA students at USC and Stanford. One of the ideas that stuck in Kontopuls' head was the idea of "servant leadership," developed by Robert Greenleaf, director of leadership development for AT&T and professor at Harvard Business School. Servant leadership contends that leaders can be more effective if they serve their employees, customers, and community first.

Kontopuls had a chance to reinforce the ideas of servant leadership when he returned to graduate school in 2001 within the Master of Science in Executive Leadership (MSEL) program at the University of San Diego. "My view is that you really need to have the servant leadership heart in you to begin with," he said. "The program really teaches you how to put your servant leadership heart to work."

"The MSEL program was just incredible," he added. "I can probably give you example after example of the application of how it has not only affected me personally, but also the organization as a whole and the individuals who work with me. And frankly I'd like to think that servant leadership has affected the families of the individuals who work with me, as well as the community at large. That program has made that big of an impact on the San Diego community."

While in the MSEL program, Kontopuls had the opportunity to use his own company as a laboratory to test out new ideas. For example, he had his entire management team and all of his corporate full-time employees take the "DISC Profile" test, which is a personal assessment test similar to the Myers-Briggs test. "These types of personality tests are pretty commonplace in companies now," he said. "But back in 2001, I'm not sure how many people were actually doing this. It's a real eye-opener to understand that people learn in different ways and respond to things differently." But it wasn't enough to just take the DISC Profile; everyone's profile is posted in the break room. The first portion of each department and senior management meeting is dedicated to the introduction of one person's profile and additional personal preferences. The goal is to highlight a person's strengths and give their peers the opportunity to reflect on how to help that person enjoy an environment where they will excel.

The DISC Profile also helped Kontopuls himself: "Before I attended the MSEL program, I took a tremendous amount of pride in doing whatever my senior management team wanted to do," he explained. " I tried being the benevolent, wise leader and I shared this in Ken Blanchard's course ["Preparing for Leadership"] and proudly reported that I had never overturned a decision made by my senior management team and Ken just turned to me and said: 'That's not leadership. Leadership is being able to make top decisions and going with your gut and you may go against the grain sometimes, but your people are going to respect you for it.' That was a big 'a-ha' moment for me."

Originally, Elite's mission was "to be the biggest and most profitable event staffing company in California." It was through an MSEL course that the company changed the mission to the much more people-oriented focus, touched on earlier: "to educate and empower a diverse group of individuals to anticipate the needs of those we serve and consistently exceed their expectations."

Kontopuls explained: "We always had a mission statement, but we needed to grow one organically. This time, we built a new mission statement, a new vision statement, and analyzed our personal values and thought about which values were important to the organization. Our new mission was very different from where we started. The change was driven by our values and what's important to us. It's all really centered on the care, respect and enlightenment of our employees."

Kontopuls also applied what he had learned in another course called "Optimizing Individual Learning" to his workforce. "This course was about individual ways of learning and putting people in the workforce in low-stress environments and in their preferred environments to enable success," he said. "Everyone in the office knows everyone else's preferences for communication, for example - if they like email, face-to-face, or phone...if they are internally or externally motivated or whether they like authority or not. We also try to find out if people are more visual, kinesthetic [movement-oriented], or auditory. We go as far as trying to create an environment where we try to accommodate people's desires for dim or bright lights; hotter or colder temperatures; cushiony or formal chairs; noise or quiet, etc."

Moreover Elite implemented an employee satisfaction survey based on Kontopuls' new learning. Every six months, Elite administered a survey that measured "just about everything." The management team closely analyzed results and compared results to prior surveys. "If there's a dip in a particular area, we put together a strategy for the next six months and have a Supervisor Summit where 200-300 supervisors convene and discuss how to change survey results within six months."

Kontopuls did other things with his people in mind, such as going to every office every night and saying "good night" and then repeating the same process each morning with a "good morning." He also encouraged people who didn't know each other in the office to spend time together by buying them a gift card and telling them "you're going to lunch." He matched people together based on the company's "who knows who" survey. "People were tentative about this," he said. "But everyone always comes back and says, 'it was really cool to get to know that person.'"

Although Elite's people-focused corporate environment and culture might sound back-bending to some, both financial and turnover results speak for themselves. Elite dominates the San Diego market, being the only major player in the area, quite unusual for the industry. Typically in major metropolitan areas, the local stadium uses one company, the arena another, the ball park another, the convention center another, etc. "For us to have taken over most of the market in San Diego is very rare and we give that credit to the employees," noted Kontopuls.

Beyond market domination, the company's corporate turnover rate is "virtually zero." Before implementing the noted changes, Elite's corporate turnover was much higher. Turnover at the field-level was different than at the corporate level - Kontopuls didn't mind higher turnover rates because that meant that the more temporary employees were moving onto bigger and better things: "We have a lot of students working for us and it's an incredible feeling to have someone tell me that they're quitting to be an elementary school teacher or that they're going to law school," said Kontopuls. Many of these people end up returning to work for Elite in a part-time capacity, just for the love of the work and the camaraderie.

By 2001, Elite had expanded its services from staffing to consulting. The company was often called upon at the blueprint stage when a new facility such as a stadium was being developed, in order to assess parking, pedestrian traffic, security needs in certain areas that might require walls to be removed, etc. Often Elite is hired to manage and train another company's staff during a big convention, trade show, or sporting event such as the NFL Pro Bowl Game in Honolulu or the Las Vegas Bike Fest.

"Consulting is really our future," said Kontopuls. He added: "I don't have a desire to open up an office in every city in the United States. That model doesn't work. It's been proven to fail by companies who do that. The level of service becomes sub-par and we hear that from franchises and organizations across the nation. Part of the magic of our success is our focus on our people and thus their focus on customer service.

Kontopuls added: "It's not all about profitability - I know this sounds a little bit corny, but it's about making a difference. I don't want to open up an office everywhere, knowing that the service is going to be average. I don't want to be average. I didn't go into this business to be average. I went into this business to be the best and to make sure that the people who work for me have a great quality of life and if I can't guarantee that everywhere else, I just don't want to do it. By improving our peoples' quality of life, we hopefully improve the quality of their family's life; and as a result of that hopefully the quality of the community. I know it sounds very pie in the sky, but that's really what a vision is. Why not have something to reach for?"

---

[1] Michael Kinsman, “Secure in their Services,” San Diego Union Tribune, December 13, 2005.