“Good vision without great people is irrelevant,” business consultant Jim Collins wrote in his bestselling book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t. Every businessperson knows the importance of setting goals and articulating leadership principles, but at the end of the day, a business’s success rides primarily on its workers. For this reason, owners and managers should give the same attention to hiring and developing talent that they would to any other critical resource, like finding the right suppliers or locations. There are very few principles that apply to all businesses regardless of size or industry, but the maxim that “people are a company’s most important asset” is as true for a car wash operation as it for a Fortune 500 mega-retailer. Successful businesses make the most of this asset through strategic hiring, training and promoting processes.

Capitalizing on the hiring process

Tech giant Amazon attributes much of its success to its 10 leadership principles, which have been infused into every aspect of the company’s culture. One of these principles is simply “hire and develop the best.” Verbiage on Amazon’s hiring website, Amazon.jobs, elaborates on this principle: “Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They recognize exceptional talent and willingly move them throughout the organization.”

To put this ideal into practice, the company added a new element to the traditional hiring process: “bar raisers,” highly successful employees who take time out from their responsibilities to interview and evaluate applicants. Bar raisers come from every department and are sometimes asked to evaluate applicants for other departments, even if the bar raiser has no knowledge of the applicant’s field. The process may seem counterintuitive, but it’s this kind of innovation in the hiring process that enabled Amazon to transform itself from an online bookseller to the web’s most popular seller of everything from e-readers to entertainment to Epsom salts.

Many successful companies use the hiring process as an opportunity to begin training early. Before offering applicants jobs, these companies require them to participate in short training session that typically includes an assessment. Such programs give employers a snapshot of not only an applicant’s job-related skills but also their soft skills, such as their ability to take direction or work on a team.

Bernie Moreno Companies, an automobile dealership that grew from one Ohio location to 21 in just a decade, uses a training program as part of its hiring process. Company President Bernie Moreno said in an interview published on Cleveland’s Chamber of Commerce website, “We have a highly formalized program to hire individuals based on their strengths rather than experience. The initial program is four days long, during which time the new hire can be terminated if they do not meet and exceed our expectations of focus, attention to details, commitment and performance.”

Training programs such as this give both the applicant and the employer real insight into one another. In a very short amount of time, the applicant has an accurate understanding of the company’s culture and expectations, and the employer has a much clearer idea of whether the applicant is a good fit for the company.

Rising Tide Car Wash, a Florida operation that hires and trains autistic individuals to be successful industry professionals, developed its own new-hire training program. General Manager Kevin Wolyniec explained, “They [applicants] are required to not only interview and pass an assessment, which gauges their speaking ability, their physical ability and their cognitive ability. Then they go to a three-day training seminar and are required to pass an assessment of their ability to clean the inside and wax both the driver’s side and passenger’s side without any mistakes in under six minutes.”

This training program prepares new hires for the job while simultaneously introducing them to an organized, systematic work environment that, as Wolyneic explained, is ideal for autistic workers. All 36 autistic employees at Rising Tide are trained in exactly the same way. Everything from greeting customers to wiping windows to waxing has been organized into a set of steps that the employees repeat for every car. Wolyneic said, “If you or I had to do the same thing every day, the exact same process, we’d go crazy. It’s not in our nature for us to do the same thing over and over again. But for these guys, the fact they are able to do something successfully over and over again when they’ve never been told they are good at anything is huge.”

Nurturing talent

Once workers have been placed in jobs that match their natural talents, then managers can encourage them, giving them opportunities to grow professionally. At Rising Tide, Wolyneic said, “We’re harnessing what a lot of people would consider a disability. For us, it is just a pure ability.” After Rising Tide employees master cleaning and waxing cars, as well as greeting customers, they become quality-control inspectors. “They begin to check out the cars before they go back to the customer. And they start to take a sincere interest in the newer employees because they see how far they’ve come themselves,” explained Wolyneic.

Jeff Bezos, CEO and the founder of Amazon, also understands the importance of utilizing and nurturing talent. His second leadership principle, “Ownership,” encourages employees to “act on behalf of the entire company,” and his third principle, “Invent and Simplify,” empowers them to become innovative problem solvers. When these leadership principles are used to motivate workers with an entrepreneurial spirit, they are the most fulfilled and, as a result, perform at the highest possible level.

According to an August 2015 New York Times article about Amazon’s company culture “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace,” Amazon operational executive Stephenie Landry contributed to a discussion about how to speed up product delivery times so customers in cities could receive shipments in under an hour. Less than four months later, the team had launched the new service, Prime Now, in Brooklyn and Landry was leading the operation, overseeing the delivery of a popular doll to a customer in 23 minutes. Landry is quoted by New York Times as saying, “We’re trying to create those moments for customers where we’re solving a really practical need.” Landry and the team she was working with was able to accomplish so much so quickly because Amazon embraces its employees’ natural drive to not only innovate but also bring those innovations to market to improve the customer’s experience.

Striving for excellence — a team effort

In the most successful businesses, managers are not the only ones who encourage workers to grow and contribute — fellow employees also support each other as they move toward success as a team. At Amazon, employees have access to a software application called the Anytime Feedback Tool. This tool (which will soon be available to the public through a software development company called Workday) gives employees the ability to provide managers with feedback about a coworker without his or her knowledge. This feedback could be anything from a notification that employee needs more training or praise for excellent work.

Wolyneic said the supportive work environment at Rising Tide Car Wash is a product of both the company’s founding principles and the natural dynamics between workers. He explained that individuals with autism struggle to express their needs and desires, and after age 22, when they age out of school, there’s very little for them to do. Wolyneic said, “When they are surrounded with guys who are in that same boat, they really support each other along. They don’t want to see somebody else fall behind. They really want to see them grow.”

Albert Einstein once said, “Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” Similarly, if managers hire people who lack the skills or temperament for a job, they shouldn’t be surprised when the employee flounders or stagnates. Instead, managers are in a position to populate their workforces with people whose particular talents are valued and encouraged. At the end of the day, this creates the most fulfilling experience not only for employees but also for their managers — and, perhaps most importantly, for the customers.