9 STRATEGIES FOR 2016
Y
Have your customer-facing team excel
in empathy and situational service; this
is the connective tissue of guest engagement and heartfelt hospitality.
SELL MORE. Think about all the
different ways a business can gross more
money: unit expansion, acquisitions, selling
by Jim Sullivan
new franchises, going public, selling assets,
etc. But the best route to a healthy balance
sheet is by simply 1) acquiring more customers and 2) raising likefor-like sales. Do so with great service and smart selling.
CONTROL COSTS. All money is not created equal. $100
in sales is $100 less taxes and expenses. $100 in savings is $100. Be
careful with inventory and train the team to think like owners do.
ALWAYS BE MARKETING. How and when you
advertise, who you hire, how you serve, what you sell all are
functions of marketing. Since most every other Fundamental
is dependent on marketing (without customers, service and
selling and hiring are irrelevant), smart leaders approach
marketing as a philosophy, not a department.
OUT-TEACH THE COMPETITION. Which companies
do you admire most for their people, sales and service? Odds
are those organizations are exceptional at training too. Teach
everyone on your team something new every shift. Hire people
with a bias for learning. And teach your team members how to
think, not just what to do.
LEAD SMART. Leadership is not a personality trait so
much as the ability to master variable skill sets and knowing
when and how to apply them. All leadership is situational. Smart
leaders prepare to win: since you don’t really know on which day
success will occur, you have to be ready every single shift.
EXECUTE. There are three elements of effective execution: 1) Habitual Consistency: daily and steady application of
the Fundamentals, eliminating barriers to execution along the
way. 2) Discipline: holding yourself and your team accountable
for excellence — and results. And 3) Focus: knowing where
and how the Fundamentals have to be applied if anything is to
be executed: The Shift. Which brings us full-circle to the first
Fundamental.
There was a time when focusing on the Fundamentals
really mattered. That time is called now. G
Jim Sullivan is the author of the Amazon best-selling book
“Fundamentals” and a sought-after speaker at leadership conferences worldwide. You can follow him on Twitter @Sullivision and
get his training product catalog at Sullivision.com.
GearedUp | 2016 Issue 2
ou can’t build a pyramid from the top down. A house
without a foundation will not stand. And any business
without fundamentals firmly entrenched and dutifully
executed can wither and shrink as small as the period that ends
this sentence.
Strong businesses build their brands on The Basics and
today’s competitive marketplace requires us to be unflagging
in executing the Fundamentals daily. So what are the critical
building blocks of successful businesses in 2016 and beyond?
Besides luck, pluck, nerve, heart and capital, here’s my list of
the essentials:
FOCUS. When companies start strong and stay strong, it’s
because they focused on the right things. (Being focused on the
wrong things can be more detrimental than having no focus
at all.) Focus is not just “clarity,” it’s about inspiring a shared
vision. Focus is not just knowing the destination, it’s following
the roadmap. Focus is not just “wanting to win,” it’s the willingness to prepare to win. Focus is not just being committed,
it means being disciplined. What do the best tenants focus
first on? The things they can control. Not the things they can’t.
Make the things that won’t change – Quality, People, Culture,
Training – ever stronger, ever better.
BUILD STRONG TEAMS. Everything starts with hiring.
We must have the discipline and commitment in place to
assure that only the most dedicated and most passionate and
most talented people are allowed onboard. Otherwise we
put weighty (and unnecessary) burdens on our frontline and
multiunit supervisors, forcing them to under-lead and overmanage. We don’t build “business,” we build people. People
build business.
SERVE BETTER. In case you haven’t noticed, the toprated customer service organizations are now online companies
like Amazon and Zappos, not traditional brick-and-mortar
stores with a face-to-face presence. What happened? For one
thing, these online companies anticipated and resolved 90
percent of their customer service challenges before customers
visit the site. By investing in a complex infrastructure, FAQs,
built-in suggestive selling and a no-constraints mindset and
makeup, they can almost guarantee a smooth experience –
providing you’re not a Digital Alien. But brick-and-mortar
operations like ours are dependent on a Freudian Smorgasbord
of people and personalities for service delivery, not the mathematical algorithms (and, it should be pointed out, a willingness to self-serve) that characterizes Web customers. The thing
is, the internet is digital, but people are analog. To build your
customer traffic, first understand that guests don’t want to be
treated like customers, they want to be treated like people.
55