Staff Smarter,
not harder
2016 Issue 3 | GearedUp
In order to have a rock star marketing plan that will contribute to your bottom line, you need to first have rock star employees to help you pull it off. That was franchisee Alex Choquette’ s thinking when Anchor Management Group completely revamped its advertising strategy at the beginning of 2016 – a strategy that has already saved the company over $ 700,000.
Choquette contends that one of the best ways to increase revenue is to rethink your marketing dollars and make sure your team is up to par before you start planning new and unique promotions.
Earlier in the year, Anchor Management implemented a program where members who referred a friend were entered to win a monthly grand prize. The new process of advertising and giving away these prizes called for a shift in how employees operated, but Choquette has a few best practices that has allowed his team to excel in the midst of all the change.
Beef up your payroll. When Anchor Management began rolling out its new promotions at the beginning of the year, the company realized it was going to need more hands on deck.“ Everybody wants to feel important,” said Choquette.“ A company may have 25,000 customers, but each one should always feel like they are the most important.”
This goal to go above-and-beyond customer service expectations and keep up with promotions led the company to expand its payroll by roughly 15 percent, adding one or two new employees per club. In addition to team members, Anchor Management also brought on an by Christina Cannon operations manager and a merchandise manager to further ensure the monthly giveaways were running smoothly.
The merchandise manager organizes and tracks club inventory, marketing promotions and creates any merchandise sales the clubs have going on, while the operations manager tracks statistics, same-store sales, organizes and creates a monthly playbook, SMART goals and staff banks. The position also heads up monthly manager meetings and communicates all essential items to club management teams. This allows managers and team members to focus more on implementing marketing initiatives instead of having to create and track them.
“ We really wanted to make sure we had more staff that could handle all of the promotions that we had running,” said Choquette.
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