Yasmin Dabboussi, director of human resources (HR) and operations at Yatco, has spent the last 13 years watching the chain’s front-line employees take ownership of their stores and connect with each of their customers.
“For me, it’s always great when you’ve hired great staff, and we’ve watched them grow from being a sales associate to the manager role and just watched their skills increase year over year,” she said. “It used to be just about pumping the gas. It’s not that anymore. Every station is like a showpiece.”
Dabboussi has been with Yatco in her current role since May 2012, where she has been responsible for all HR functions — recruiting, compensation and benefits, payroll, and compliance — in addition to IT and the wholesale distribution business.
Yatco currently operates 15 stores with an additional six that are dealer operated. Two more sites have planned openings within the next few months.
CStore Decisions is recognizing Dabboussi with an HR Award for her longtime commitment to Yatco and its employees, drive to keep the chain’s processes up to date and assistance in employee growth and participation.
Beginnings
When Dabboussi came aboard the Yatco team, she helped open the first office and begin the wholesale distribution business as well as institute any needed HR functions. Yatco was not her first foray into HR, however.
While she started her college degree in finance, she transitioned to HR halfway through the process to be better able to work with people.
She began her career at an IT staffing company that provided businesses with talent for temporary and permanent assignments. She focused primarily on 401k plans before adding other benefits to her responsibilities, and after 15 years, she left the company as director of benefits.
Now with Yatco, Dabboussi has found herself enjoying working with the team, and helping them solve problems and develop their skills.
“Watching (store associates and managers) take so much pride and run that store like it’s their own store is what I’ve really loved seeing over the last 10-12 years,” said Dabboussi. “And they’ve grown to now be looking at their numbers and managing their hours and cutting down all their expenses and making recommendations as to how we can improve the business. I love just watching them grow and increase their input and participation.”
Attracting Talent
One of Yatco’s largest challenges is recruitment and retention. Fortunately, many managers have been with the team for over 10 years, but hiring for sales associate positions can be difficult, particularly for 24-hour locations.
Dabboussi has used multiple resources to help, including Indeed, website posts, on-site postings, QR codes, and implementing hiring and referral bonuses.
“Hiring is definitely a struggle in this industry, especially having a 24-hour store, and I think that’s always going to be an issue for us as an industry as a whole,” she said. “We need to do what we can to make it more attractive for somebody that comes into the industry, make it exciting for them, to want them to stay and hopefully grow them into assistant manager and manager roles. Ultimately, that’s the goal.”
In addition to this agenda, Dabboussi plans to focus her time on automation in order to streamline responsibilities for current employees.
Yatco has several legacy processes such as time and attendance as well as onboarding that can be made more efficient in the near future.
“We want to be able to give the store managers back time for them to focus on running the business and reduce the administrative tasks that they need to deal with,” Dabboussi said.
Onboarding still being done via paperwork, for example, will be done automatically through ADP.
As Yatco continues to grow, Dabboussi is committed to the further advancement of both Yatco’s employees and the chain’s various operations.
“As corporate, you always have what you want the store to look like and how you want it to be managed, but ultimately, it’s really your managers and the sales associates with their feet on the ground that are implementing (any decisions or changes),” she said.
