Hendee Enterprises faces transition challenges
By Sigrid Tornquist
In the mid-1990s Hendee Enterprises was growing so fast that the company needed to add a level of middle management. “That was a big challenge,” says Chuck Hendee, the company’s president. “It added a level of complexity to the business.” Prior to that addition all the major decisions were the responsibility of the president; after the change, middle management took on some of that role.
Of course that kind of a transition brings new challenges. Finding the right people to manage was first on the list, and communication came in a close second. “The difficulty is that the person actually doing the work is not the person you’re communicating with,” Hendee says. “It’s certainly not something a company would want to do in anticipation of growth. It should be a response to a need based upon the organization growing.”
