Growth heroes: How to build greater employee engagement

This article is a part of our Risk + Reward series. Capital One Business and Inc. partnered to survey 314 business leaders in November of 2024 to explore the factors that affect how they weigh business risks and rewards in navigating modern business landscapes. View our key findings and other articles in this series.

When Ron Jumper purchased Bath Makeover of Arkansas in 2018, a bath remodeling company based in Little Rock, friends thought he was crazy. The business was losing money. “A lot of people looked at me like, ‘Why are you still doing this? You should shut that thing down.’ But I’m just a little too stubborn,” Jumper says. 

More than stubbornness kept him going, though. As CEO of Ron Sherman Advertising, a full-service ad agency specializing in home services businesses, Jumper had seen what home services companies can achieve. Bath Makeover of Arkansas had been Jumper’s client. He approached the owner, a family friend, about purchasing it, because he believed in the company’s potential and the strength of the bath remodeling sector. Persistence and resolve helped Jumper grow Bath Makeover from $600,000 in revenue to $9 million in under a decade. An engaged employee base was critical, too. Jumper prioritizes engagement and culture at both the ad agency and the bath company. Here are the clever strategies contributing to both companies’ high-performing cultures.

Ron Sherman Advertising relies on 25 full-time employees and a network of freelancers to produce 1,000 commercials monthly. Bath Makeover of Arkansas employs roughly 10 full-time employees, 10 design consultants, 11 install crews, and a handful of specialists, including a master plumber. To increase productivity while making work fun, Jumper organizes weekly contests. “People tend to think that incentives and competitions are only for sales, but if you can find a way to get your media assistant or your bookkeeper engaged and seeing if they’re being as productive as the other team members in their department, that helps drive everything,” he explains.

For example, to improve quality control and client satisfaction, Ron Sherman Advertising’s media department is incentivized to connect with TV station reps to ensure clients’ spots run correctly. “Whoever gets 100 percent or the closest to 100 percent comes in first place, then second, then third. You have to turn in your log by Friday at noon, so it makes it more deadline-driven,” Jumper says. The contest makes people try a little harder to get a TV station to return their call, because they want to win the prize, which is typically a gift card.

“We use our Capital One rewards as a way to buy the gift cards on a weekly basis,” Jumper explains. “It gets productivity through the roof by holding employees accountable. It also gets them excited because they have this ability to earn a gift card that could be anywhere from 50 bucks to 200 bucks.”

A pro tip if you are rolling out incentive programs, Jumper says, is to make sure you have the prize on hand, so the winner gets it immediately. Employees are disheartened if they must wait to receive their winnings.

According to recent research from Inc. and Capital One Business, business leaders see talent as both an opportunity and a risk to growth. To minimize talent-related risks such as high turnover, Jumper only hires one design consultant at a time so he can provide one-on-one attention during onboarding. “I see some larger businesses in my category that do classroom-style training. They bring in 10 salespeople at a time. Half of them barely make it through training, and only a handful make it a month or two. We want to keep more of a hands-on approach where we take our time,” he explains.

Jumper believes the weekly contests contribute to high retention rates, too, and help potential hires immediately understand the culture. The ad agency and the bath company both pay higher salaries than local competitors, which Jumper finds essential to attract talent. The investment pays off in reduced hiring costs and increased performance.

In 2025, Bath Makeover will open a third location. “I’m going to have my production manager and my office manager from the Little Rock location be the first two employees,” Jumper says. “It makes it much simpler versus starting from scratch and just hoping, fingers crossed, that people we’ve hired at this new location are going to carry on the same culture we’ve had at the other locations.”