Who says success has to stay stationary? Our guest today worked his way up the corporate ladder through different clients and seized different opportunities to learn, grow, and climb to the top. Today, Tom Dastrup is the CEO of Honeyville, a family-owned company that hired Tom a little over two years ago to develop their team and expand their business.

Tom found success through the intersection of sales, marketing, and engineering. When he started in this industry, it seemed like there were 10 people for every job. But today it’s as if there are 10 jobs for every one person, and really good talent is that much harder to find. He’s had to dramatically change the way he looks at hiring, and he’s evolved his hiring structure to meet the changing talent market.

We discuss the transition from temp agencies to hiring full-time employees and what it looks like to work with local colleges and programs to train your own people, but Tom has the unique perspective of working with a family-owned business staff. When your talent pool is centered around a family business, many of these employees have never worked anywhere else. Training and hiring become less about skills on a resume and more about developing programs to hone talent that honors the family’s vision as well as the current market.

Tom’s developed some significant training programs over the past two years and created an executive leadership team that helps the rest of the team recognize their own strengths, weaknesses, and preferences in the workplace. While some programs failed, others made glaringly obvious that Tom didn’t have as many people in key positions as he needed. This created new opportunities to find new employees to fill the voids, and new team members have ranged from salespeople to engineers to maintenance staff.

Turnover isn’t high at Honeyville, and Tom doesn’t mourn the few employees he’s lost over the past few years. No one left with hard feelings, but one of the most important lessons to learn as the leader of a company is how to let good people go. When employees don’t see themselves in the future of a company or have yet to seize an opportunity to grow themselves, you often have to give them that space to stretch and grow.

For Tom, someone who has grown with many companies over the years, he understands how important it can be to change your path. Listen now to learn how change and growth can change the way you create your own business plan as well as the plan for others.