Forty-nine year-old Tres Conrique is co-founder and CEO of Rancho Santa Fe Technology, Inc., a San Diego based company that works with IT managers and CEOs to design, build, and maintain the physical layer of a company’s mission critical computer network.  This includes providing services for structured cabling connectivity, technology upgrades, data center construction and “vreak-fix” of a company’s network components. Since the beginning, Conrique’s goal was not just to make money or to fancy himself as an entrepreneur. The impetus for starting the company was as much about his personal vision—to build a company that is customer-centric, employee-focused, and quality-driven – as it was about profitability.

As a teenager Conrique’s family economics required that he become a substantial provider for his family. As a result, his personal vision and core values were and are greatly shaped by his experiences.  “Over the years, I’ve worked many different jobs and, as a result, gotten exposure to many different things,” he notes.  At one point, Conrique tallied 33 unique jobs he had worked over the years, ranging from serving as a head groundskeeper, to teaching people how to drive buses, to cleaning septic tanks, to working as a locksmith.  Two jobs that significantly influenced his vision were teaching and being a college soccer coach. 

In 1991, with $3,000 in his pocket, Conrique co-founded Rancho Santa Fe Technology.  “I realized that unless I started a company, the chances of my personal vision and core values being interrupted because of business transactions [e.g. a merger or an acquisition] was going to exist.”  By 2007, Conrique and his team had not only successfully built the type of company that he had always dreamt of, but also a company with $17 million in revenue, over 100 employees, and offices in San Diego, the San Francisco Bay area, and Arizona, servicing 11 states.

Central to Conrique’s vision and core values has always been his desire to be a “servant leader,” even though he wasn’t aware of the terminology when he started the company in ‘91. The concept of Servant Leadership, first coined by Robert Greenleaf, director of leadership development for AT&T and professor at Harvard Business School, contends that leaders can be more effective if they serve their employees, customers, and community first. This belief about leadership had always driven Conrique.

But despite a compelling personal vision and strong core values, Conrique wanted to make sure he could continuously improve himself and thus, improve the company.  In 2001, he returned to school at the Master of Science in Executive Leadership (MSEL) program at the University of San Diego. “I knew that the organization was really going to be constricted or held back by my own leadership capability,” states Conrique.  After looking at the usual top programs such as Stanford, Harvard, and Wharton, Conrique felt that he was really looking for a leadership-oriented and a leadership-focused program like MSEL instead of a traditional executive program with leadership courses slapped on top of traditional business courses.

Coincidentally, the worst years of the technology industry downturn occurred during Conrique’s years in MSEL. The program helped the company get through tough times. “There were few companies in our sector that survived the downturn, but we did,” reflects Conrique.  “I applied the learnings of MSEL around creating a culture, developing individuals within the culture, and executing and improving our team-oriented culture.  A lot of the concepts I learned at MSEL were already a part of my vision and philosophy prior to my entering the program.  The timing of my attending couldn’t have been better in terms of helping me find ways to articulate and execute on those philosophies.”
  
Creating a culture of “hope” in difficult times and “passion for life” is part of Conrique’s view of what a servant leader should do. “We are blessed and have a lot of great things available to us on a day-to-day basis, and I want people to see that and see me as an example of someone having a passion for living. I want to be a servant to the organization as opposed to the idea that the organization is serving me. A part of serving is being able to create joyful new beginnings for people and inspiring them to really connect the head and the heart together.” 

Although Conrique led Rancho Santa Fe Technology by his personal mission right from the start, in the mid-1990s, Conrique and his team noticed that as the company had expanded into different cities, technicians were spread throughout a large geographical footprint and customers were demanding immediate answers the importance of enabling everyone to act was critical. It was at that time that the company’s core values were formally established.  “We wanted our people to be able to align themselves with and get excited about where our company was going, and make decisions at the point closest to the customer,” explains Conrique. 

To create, articulate, and make the core values a foundation of Rancho Santa Fe Technology, Conrique corralled 15 people from different functional areas of the organization. The goal was to let people describe, know, and teach what Rancho Santa Fe Technology stood for, both internally and externally. Using a process that required unanimous decision making, the team identified a set of 10 core values with a related definition that elaborated each value (see inset).

The team also instituted a recognition program as early as 1996, where employees could “recognize” other employees that they felt had exhibited one or more of the core values.  Each recognition was and is published to the entire organization demonstrating behaviors that catch the spirit that makes our mission of provider of choice, employer of choice and quality by choice attainable.  Beyond the recognition program, no formal core value measuring system exists. “We have discovered that we do not need to measure our values on a formal basis because the people in the organization are the ones demanding that this is how we live,” notes Conrique.

One of the key ways Conrique and his team ensure that employees live and breathe the company’s core values is by the care taken to hire people that align with Rancho Santa Fe Technology’s culture.  When potential candidates are interviewed, the core values are shared with them.  And interviewers attempt to determine whether the candidate could potentially buy into the core values. 

The interview process at Rancho Santa Fe Technology is focused on embracing the responsibility to a candidate and the organization to make more great hiring decisions and fewer mistakes. To this end, the interview process can last up to 45 days in some cases, with five to six face-to- face visits. The point of such rigorous interviews is to find people who have the greatest capacity to fit and serve as ambassadors of the culture.  “We don’t hire people on any time deadline,” says Conrique.  “We hire people who are the right people, for the right fit and figure out how to deal without a person if we can’t find the right person.  We’re hiring for a relationship not for a position.”

Potential candidates are first screened with the Predictive Index  profile, a personal assessment that matches primary disposition strengths with the elements best suited for the expected team member’s contribution. After candidates complete the Predictive Index, they are brought in for an interview and asked unique questions like: You are driving up the street and you pull up in front of the bus stop.  At the bus stop are three people.  The first is an old lady who needs to get to the hospital or she may die; the second is a man who once saved your life years ago, and the third is your soul mate, who you’ve never met before and risk never meeting again.  You only have one extra seat in your small sports car.  What do you do?

“There’s not a right or wrong answer.  We’re testing for fit - just trying to find out how people think,” explains Conrique.

Beyond a rigorous interview process to find candidates that fit the culture, Rancho Santa Fe Technology as a whole is organized in teams, a structure that took nearly six years to establish.  The team structure buttresses one of the company’s core values, “team builder,” and serves as a mechanism that helps to enable the other core values.  Four teams exist—one on customer relationships both internally and externally, a second on productivity and efficiency (how you deliver on your promises and claims), a third on financial performance and metrics, and finally a fourth on employee learning and growth. 

“We’ve structured our organization around these four areas or objectives,” Conrique explains.  “People work cross-functionally and so related to the customer objective, if a team member is in the accounting area, they could have more customer interaction than the technician.”  Staff Team Leaders, representatives of the various teams, meet to coordinate to ensure that there are not any duplicating efforts. Importantly, the team structure makes monitoring the company’s core values everyone’s responsibility. 

The company’s compensatory reward system enables and reinforces the effectiveness of the core values and the team concept. Each and every employee receives the same performance reward—the system is based on the team, not the individual.  This reward system is dubbed “The Game of Life.”  The company has performance targets. Everybody has a role in achieving the targets. The goal is to create excess and to share that excess equally across the board. Rewards are independent of position level, responsibility, or accountability. Base salaries differ, though, and people receive increases to base salaries if they get promotions with a different set of responsibilities.

 “Because each year, our customers want our services for less than the previous year, we need to be creating productivity and efficiency all the time so that we can maintain our profitability, so the idea is to create excess.  The Game of Life was created with these challenges in mind,” elaborates Conrique.

Team structure has implications for recruiting too.  If one person during an interview process “says ‘red’ on a candidate,” then the company ends the conversation with the candidate.  “You can’t rationalize intuition,” Conrique notes.  “We don’t want to be talking our colleagues into hiring someone they don’t feel comfortable with.”

Conrique also does not need to worry about the company if something were to happen to him as a result of the team structure. “If I get hit by a bus, there are different people in place so I don’t really have to worry about succession,” he explains. “With the team structure I don’t have to mentor one individual who is going to take on all of my responsibilities, and thus it makes us a more fluid and flexible organization.”

But despite the company’s values and culture, Conrique was quick to point out that the culture is not one of automatic entitlement.  “We’re a culture where people take care of each other, which is different than one where people feel entitlement.  The people who generally don’t do well in our environment are people who have come from very structured environments with very little teaming, interaction, and creativity, and where things can be more by-the-book.”

The company’s culture does not mean, however, that Conrique and the team overlook results.  By renaming typical job functions, they kill two birds with one stone— focusing on results while simultaneously creating a more human culture.  Human Resources is called the “Learning and Growth team,” accounting, financial, and score-keeping, the “Decision-making team,” operations, the “Delivery Time team,” and sales, the “Development team.” 

By renaming typical job functions, Conrique re-emphasizes that he hopes to avoid the traditional corporation’s focus on compliance and risk or “catching people doing things wrong.”  “If I’m just trying to catch you doing things right, then you’re going to be doing those things more and I don’t have to police you. We’re working towards results, not risk,” he argues. 

Along the lines of an anti-policing culture, Rancho Santa Fe does not conduct formal performance evaluations: “Performance evaluations happen every day,” he said.  “I’m telling you when you’re doing wonderfully, and I’m redirecting and helping you when you’re not doing well.”

Rancho Santa Fe’s culture seems to be working, for the company has a 92% employee retention rate, while the industry average hovers around the 85 percent level.  “What’s even more important than the retention figure is that we don’t lose people to industry,” notes Conrique.  “Rather we lose people because they have children and want to be closer to family, for example.”  Moreover, the average employee tenure is nearly 10 years, meaning many people have been on board since the very beginning.
  
Conrique has come a long way since working numerous jobs beginning at age 12 to help support his family.  He has successfully built a company based on core values that matter to him. “Truly, this organization is a ministry,” he says.  “Our goal is to create a better environment, not only for ourselves, but for our families and the community.”  It might sound fuzzy and pie-in-the-sky, but at Rancho Santa Fe Technology, 100 people are living, breathing, and embracing those core values on a daily basis.