Risk & Business Magazine Moody Insurance Spring 2017 | Page 15

ONE DAY A WEEK
“I will go back in three weeks, and I won’t
have a single thing on my desk.”
BY: VERNE HARNISH
CEO OF GAZELLES,
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLING AUTHOR
a multi-pronged approach, one drawn
from the Scaling Up system for growing a
company. His friend at the hockey rink had
introduced him to this approach, described
in my book by the same name.
OWNING A NICHE
One key step was getting clear on what to
sell. When Seward purchased his stake in
the company, it was doing business mainly
in Canada, focusing on holding ski and
rafting trips for corporate clients. Some
events, such as the ski trips, relied heavily
on outsourcing to subcontractors and had
low margins. “We got out of those low-
margin product lines to focus on what was
profitable and scalable,” says Seward.
With the reality TV show Survivor
attracting a huge audience, many of the
firm’s best customers starting asking if
Seward’s firm could amp up the adventure
theme. Soon the company had created
its own Survivor-style event. It was a big
hit, and as word spread to other parts of
Canada, demand for the events grew.
“This light bulb went off,” recalls Seward.
“We were not having to outsource the event.
The margins were really good.”
The company had soon built on the
success of that event to create another,
spun out of the idea of The Amazing Race,
another hit reality TV show. Meanwhile,
it expanded into cities such as Toronto
and eventually into the U.S., where it is
known as American Outback Adventures
& Events. Today, the firm sells all over the
U.S. and Canada, with all sales centralized
in Vancouver.
Once Seward’s firm identified the right
products, it built quarterly goals tied
into selling them. The company held its
leadership team accountable for achieving
daily key performance indicators (KPIs)
that flowed into those targets, such as the
lead-to-sale ratio and customer-inquiry
response time. “We are doing our darndest
to get down to a 10- to 15-minute average
response time to leads,” says Seward, whose
ultimate goal is to achieve more zero-
response-time interactions.
MARK CUBAN-STYLE MEETING
RHYTHMS
Another key piece of the puzzle was
establishing regular meeting rhythms—an
idea from Scaling Up that gelled when
Seward heard Mark Cuban speak about it.
When asked how he successfully juggles
all of the businesses he owns, Cuban
mentioned that he does a weekly catch up
call or email with the leader of each one of
his businesses. During that conversation,
he’ll ask: What isn’t going well in your
business unit currently and what can I help
you with?
Seward found that by adopting this
approach himself, and including a question
about how each leader is doing against
his performance agreement, he gave
his executives the freedom they needed
without him “poking and prodding.” In one
recent conversation, he helped an executive
navigate a challenge with the CRM system,
with which Seward has some niche
expertise. They cleared the roadblock.
Once the system of holding weekly catch
up meetings, calls and Skype sessions was
in place, Seward was able to pare back his
time in the office to one day a week.
CANDID COMMUNICATION
Are the executives truly candid about what
is going wrong during the huddles—even
when it may point out their own inability
to solve a problem? Seward says yes. To
make sure that they are, the company often
stresses positive examples of employees
who have followed the firm’s core value of
being open and honest. One thing that has
helped is using the Topgrading system for
hiring, which helps in selecting employees
who will make the transition to the
company’s culture successfully.
PAYING LIKE THE CONTAINER STORE
Seward, who admits he once paid his young
team the bare minimum, has also greatly
increased what he pays them, after hearing
Container Store chairman and CEO and
Uncontainable author Kip Tindell speak
about how the chain became so successful.
“He is a proponent of paying people way
more than what you think they would get
paid—and his results have been fantastic,”
says Seward. “In the last two years we
have really cranked up compensation.
Our turnover has gone down. Our Net
Promoter Scores have gone up.” That
has eliminated the need for employees
to work second jobs, which drained their
productivity. He has also given his team
the flexibility to do things like take the
afternoon off to go fishing if they prefer
to work at night or attend to matters in
their personal lives during the business day,
given that employees are willing to cover
for each other.
Nonetheless, Seward doesn’t bat an eye
at taking three weeks off to go to Mexico,
which he did recently. When he mentioned
it to a group of other CEOs, they were
incredulous. “Aren’t things going to
explode?” one asked him.
He told them, “I will go back in three
weeks, and I won’t have a single thing on
my desk. Everything is being taken care
of by the people I work with.” And he was
right. “The people I work with care that
much,” he says. +
Verne Harnish is founder and CEO of
Gazelles International, a global executive
education and coaching company, Verne
has spent the past 30 years educating
entrepreneurial teams. He’s the author of
Scaling Up that uses approaches honed
from over three decades of advising tens of
thousands of CEOs and executives.
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