BECOMING A P.A.L. Connecting with the Community

by Rocky Coverubeus

All of us at Omni Funding are adopting a lifestyle of accomplishing good things through commitment and service.

We're all exhibiting that commitment and service in the office through the processes of encouragement, support, and reward that we have in place. We're also accomplishing good things through our support of the local P.A.L. (Police Activities League) program.

A theme all of us share who work at Omni Funding is involvement in support of our East County communities. The P.A.L. program represents one avenue through which we at Omni are reaching into the Brentwood community and seeking to make a difference in the lives of people who live here.

We're enthusiastic in our support of the P.A.L. program because we know that this kind of involvement is a wonderful strategy for all of us here at our company. For one thing, all of us parents together in the company have more than 30 children currently in attendance in the local school system.

The Lowdown on P.A.L.
P.A.L. is a great organization with the goal of confronting two increasingly more difficult and interconnected problems in our local culture: Poor relations between school-age children and police, and lack of leisure time activities for young people.

P.A.L. is responding to both problems with two wonderful activities: providing outdoor sports and leisure-time activities for Brentwood children and building bridges between members of the Brentwood Police Department and children in the community.

P.A.L. maintains an after-school program administered by the Brentwood PD. The program is designed to keep the Brentwood children safe and out of trouble during the hours of 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. These are the most critical hours for latchkey children because they fall between the end of the normal school day and the time when most parents get home from their jobs.

These hours also represent the time when over 80% of all juvenile crimes take place, and children become involved in crimes and acts of violence both as perpetrators and victims.

The P.A.L. program encourages kids to get out of the house, shut off the video games for a while, and get some exercise, have some fun with some cool adults in an atmosphere of fun and trust.

What P.A.L. Does
P.A.L. offers a variety of activities for school-age children during these late afternoon hours. By using police officers as volunteers, the P.A.L. organization builds a bond between cops and kids, with the expectation that the kids will come to view police officers as a friendly group of people rather than as bullies or enemies.

Besides these daily programs, P.A.L. conducts at least one special field trip every month. Past field trips have included a lot of fun outings for children and adults alike:

• annual snow play days
• annual campouts
• sport tournaments
• professional sporting events
• trips to the city pool and water park

Other exciting opportunities P.A.L. offers students include participation in roller hockey on the organization's professional scale portable hockey rink, participation in statewide sporting tournaments, and trips to see professional sporting teams compete.

P.A.L.'s Success in Breaking Down Stereotypes
The P.A.L program is unique because of the main participants. The police officers who are part of the program have a genuine desire to be actively involved with the children in our community.

Playing and laughing together break down false perceptions and useless stereotypes on both sides. The kids learn that policemen are real people. I have personally seen how the kids become naturally receptive and respectful of the men and women who are taking their time to do something with them that really does bring them pleasure and joy.

The children quickly realize that the officers are spending quality time with them because they really want to be there. It isn't just an assignment; these people who they see in their patrol cars with uniforms, guns, and clubs actually enjoy being with children. The smiles, laughs, and joking keep coming from both sides.

The P.A.L. program is offered as an after-school program at Loma Vista, Edna Hill, and several other area middle schools.

The P.A.L. program constantly receives encouragement from Chief Davies, who is a vibrant person with a real conviction to help people. He's easy to talk to and always takes the time to come over and thank us for our involvement in the program.

Getting Onboard with the P.A.L. Program
The involvement of Omni Funding in the P.A.L. program began when we became aware that the program was suffering losses and was in danger of being compromised.

Our office collectively made the decision to participate. The first way we did this was by donating directly to the program. We made the decision to contribute $100 to P.A.L. from every loan we closed. This resulted in our donating more than $20,000 to the program last year.

We also donate our time. We take the kids water skiing, camping, and fishing, as well as to various sports activities. We donate the use of our own ski boats to the program.

For example, last summer several of us attended the P.A.L. ski camp in the Delta. We had four boats of our own at the event and spent a week taking the kids water-skiing and wake boarding. The kids had a blast! It was a fantastic time for the adults as well. We really connected with the kids. Everyone had a lot of fun together.

This year we will continue our participation. Planned upcoming activities include several new sports activities, such as broom hockey, plus some of the events we participated in before, like summer camps on the Delta.

It becomes clear to everyone involved that the program results in wonderful outcomes for the children of families from our community. It has, frankly, been an awesome thing to be even a small part of the great things taking place through the program.

I am becoming a member of the P.A.L. board. A number of senior people from the town are active on the board. They realize how important this kind of program is even for people who don't have young children at home themselves. We're all working hard to make Brentwood a better place to live.

Fearless Fun
The P.A.L. program gives children opportunities to stretch themselves. For example, last summer we were impressed by a child who was intimidated by the water. She mustered up enough courage to climb on one of the rubber rafts and get towed behind a speedboat.

We all felt bad when she tumbled off the raft on one of the turns, banged her head, and started to cry. However, she quickly dried her tears, jumped right back on the raft, and tried it again.

The next day the same child got pulled on the raft, fell off, and got hurt again. Once more, she got right back on board the raft to do it again.

Incredibly, the very same thing happened again on the third day.

That kid had true grit. Even through the bumps and bruises the child continued to have fun. She could have become a poster girl for the kind of attitude the program tries to create. Get out there; have fun; don't be afraid to try something new, or to keep trying something difficult until you master it. She was setting a good pattern for facing all parts of life.

Serving While Working
The Omni Funding connection with P.A.L. is just one example of the way I try to run my business. I'm continually discovering how ready Brentwood is for this kind of blending of business and community service.

We moved to Brentwood six years ago from Walnut Creek and experienced culture shock. Making the decision to leave Walnut Creek for Brentwood was a tough one. It was a big career change, but proved to be the best move we ever made. As we began to adjust to the new environment, we found that the town really embraced us.

A wonderful community spirit pervades this part of the East County. As sooon as people learned that I was willing to get involved in community outreach activities, they began contacting me.

The great thing about those early days was that the people did not want merely to get my money. The contacts were much more natural and wholesome than simply being touched by professional fundraising organizations. I was continually contacted by people who were, themselves, joyfully working on community activities. It was easy to get involved; staying unconnected from community outreach would have been difficult.

Commitment to Trust — A Key to Business Success
We carry our community development interests right into our business and are propagating a sense of community spirit among the employees working in our office. Willingness to be involved with the community has become, in effect, a requirement for working here. As a result of this standard, we have put together a team made up of people of unbelievably high quality.

Our Omni Funding team is different from the teams of weary and stressed-out commuters you usually find working in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and even in Walnut Creek. For the most part, we all live right here where we work and spend our money right here where we make it.

Our people are happy; they love it here. I've been in the real estate lending industry during all my adult life and have never seen a group of people with the energy, commitment, professionalism, and integrity of our present team.

Our industry, for the most part, is going through a period of regression, but we're as busy as we ever were. Our current success is directly attributed to our hard workers.

Some of the success we are having in instilling this work ethic comes from having a team composed of people with 5-minute commutes. However, we also encourage that commitment by running a business that focuses on building trust.

Focusing on the Right Thing
My wife, Tracy, and I are running this enterprise together. She and I have concentrated on sending the message to our employees, “This isn't simply about making money. For sure you will make money but only as you concentrate on building trust.”

Our service-centered business model is succeeding. We're not dropping mailers out of hot-air balloons, we're building trust among each other and in the minds of the clients who are coming to us with their business.

To put it another way, we're trying to run a business in which making profits is the by-product of serving others. We refuse to regard the bottom line as a product to be maintained by ruthless business practices.

We're treating each other and our clients within a framework of building personal relationships. We are constantly learning that this is a more effective model than one that focuses on the bottom line to the exclusion of the other parts of life.

We are also continually discovering that such an approach makes our jobs a lot more fun than just slinging loans could ever be.

Becoming an Employer of Choice
I realized a long time ago that the way to succeed in business is to build an organization that becomes the employer of choice for employees. Success in accomplishing this is driven by the work environment as we create a place where people love to come to work.

My recruitment strategy is simply to build an organization that people will love to be a part of; to create a team that they will want to join. Our people all want to work here because we reward them when they do a good job and let them know when they need to improve.

As a result of my attitude towards work and towards the people who work for me, I've always had the best people in the business. People want to make a lot of money, for sure. However, all of us want more than that. We want to be able to enjoy coming to work. We want to have fun doing what we do. When you get good people working hard because they enjoy what they do, you don't even have to think about competition. It just evaporates.

As a result of our non-Dilbert approach to business management, we have almost no attrition whatsoever against a national average that experiences a turnover averaging 38 percent per year. We've shut the revolving door and we've locked that thing tight. Our first two employees are still working with us.

You can't achieve this kind of cheerful, effective office culture by trying to run a popularity contest. You create an excellent work environment by setting standards and then encouraging people to operate to those standards.

Come Right in, Brother
One standard we encourage is to treat people as if you were related to them. If a beloved brother or cousin were to come to work for you or come to you for a loan, how would you treat them? What would you say? How friendly would you act? How pleasant would you be? That's the right way to treat everybody.

It is both easier and more fun to manage business this way than to employ management by intimidation. One secret of this is to build an environment where people can be free to grow at their own pace. People need to be free to try things out, make mistakes and then learn from the mistakes, try other things, keep learning, keep experimenting, keep having fun....

I'm having a lot more fun than Dilbert's pointy-haired boss ever had; and there's not a Dilbert or a Wally anywhere in sight in our office. The happiness of my employees makes me more happy than the money I'm making.

I'm not just pleased by the current success of our organization, I'm sometimes baffled by it. In my entire life I never was part of such an group of people as the one we've got here at Omni Funding right now.

When people trust you and believe you, you don't have to work and sweat to try to force them to do the right thing. Doing the right thing becomes the easiest thing for them to do, in most cases.

So we get out there with the P.A.L. organization, help those great kids have the time of their lives, not just as one more aggravating thing on an already-too-busy schedule. That happy service takes its place as one natural part of the complete picture of who we want to be and what we want to do for the community in which we are glad to live, work, and play.