For February 12-Seasons turns to the TOP 5 PEOPLE TOOLS for growing your top and bottom lines:

 Get employee engagement with WGM&MGD!
 Coach employees to treat customers NICER!
 Ask employees how to create customer CONVENIENCE.
 Regular recognition of employee greatness.
 CEO get involved & focus on customer service.
 
Here are some suggestions for implementing and applying these tools.

Employee engagement with What Gets Measured, AND MANAGED, gets done:  Clearly, posting a few key indicators that employees identify with is helpful, especially using Trailing 12-Month Charts.  Managers who also get “buy-in” or “employee engagement” by those employees will be all the more successful with What-Gets-Measured-AND-MANAGED-Gets Done!

Coaching employees to treat customers more nicely obviously creates far superior results, as evidenced by the unique approach of Southwest Airlines (now also emulated by WestJet).

Asking employees how to create more CONVENIENCE for customers will both engage the employees and at the same time improve customer relations.  It’s reported that 82% of all lost customers is due to employee apathy or just plain rudeness.

We’ve talked often of RECOGNITION as the most motivational tool with employees.  Check chapter 7 of the “CEO Tools” book for ideas here (available from Amazon at very low price).

Finally, the CEO and senior managers can set the example by focusing on customers in many ways.  Just talking positively about customers to employees or being with customers will do it.  Clark Johnson, the hugely successful of Pier 1 Imports, wrote a letter every week to all employees about customers; every week for over seven years!

We really hope  these few tools will boost your top and bottom-lines throughout 2013!

Kindest regards, Kraig

Our twelve seasons for December focuses on managing success throughout 2013!  The following thoughts will improve your business whether your industry surges or regresses in 2013 due to a possible economic slowdown or downturn.
 
To make the upcoming year more prosperous, undertake a simple 3-step technique:  first, build a mini-dashboard of just a few key indicators (less than one hour’s effort); then second, take one-half hour with your senior managers each month to review these together; and third, agree with each manager the specific, time-definite, actions that will be taken to make your business better in the coming month.

To help with this, all the CEO Tools at www.ceotools.com have now been UPGRADED FOR USE THROUGH THE END OF 2013 to help effect those three steps.  Grab the 4-Charts Tool NOW and start managing your destiny in 2013 with the 3-step technique. Even better, get the 5-Charts Tool, a mini-dashboard which includes the 4-Charts, and then add your own “WHAT CAUSES SALES” — the fifth chart all set and ready for your use now. Click on New Tools Catalog above-left at www.ceotools.com to see and get these tools for 2013. You can build them yourselves using the free PDF –or– download the Excel version and you can copy-paste your numbers into the data sheet and begin success planning and management immediately!

The idea here is to create that little key-indicator dashboard and take action!  Please print the free PDF for the 4-Chart and 5-Chart tools from “New Tools Catalog” and build that mini-dashboard.  Voila, you’re quickly on your way to an improved 2013 even before the new year begins in January!

May this coming year bring to you much success using these and other business tools!

Best holiday and Holy Day wishes to all,  Kraig

Another step you can take in developing your re-mix strategy is in the area of geography, or more appropriately demographics.

One quick example:  as I began my tenure as CEO at Snapper, the lawnmower manufacturer, my originally-Oregonian wife asked “what if you made a lawnmower to cut wet grass in the rain?”   This was a logical thought since she grew up in Oregon where it rains almost incessantly and we had just moved from there to Georgia where ther’s a lot more sunlight and lots more time to mow when it’s dryer.

At Snapper, we develped a lawnmower that indeed does mow in a downpour without clumping, clogging, or messing up your lawn while cutting it very nicely in the rain!  We did do quite a bit of research and found there was a need for such a product not only in Oregon and Washington states where it rains a lot, but also in England and parts of Europe with similar conditions.  A success!

This re-mixing of offerings is geographically focused, or perhaps to some degree demographically focused on the needs of particular market segments not previously served.  You might recall we suggested asking “what’s impossible?” or “where has a market not been served?” in prior editions of this series of remix articles.

This is clearly an adaptation, although very focused on the needs in geographic or demographic arenas.  Hope this helps you re-mix your strategic direction successfully.

Very best, Kraig

Today let’s look at another way of re-mixing your business for huge performance improvement, namely the product area.  This one seems like it might be just like customer remix or market segment remix, but perhaps the examples will offer a different look.

At Snapper, the premier lawnmower manufacturing company, we cut our product mix roughly in half to improve our top-line revenue by 50% in a single year and take our bottom-line profit from a loss of $54 million to a profit in just that one year of $13.7 million.  What did we do?

As background, the lawnmower industry had for years been introducing new lawnmowers in every dimension imaginable of cutting width, from 18″ wide (even some 17″ and 16″) to over 72″ wide cutting swaths in a single pass. In the “me-too” emulation mode, Snapper and many others just kept adding more products this way year after year, resulting in short manufacturing runs of lawnmowers in widths so close to each other that customers couldn’t even differentiate or choose.  At Snapper, we cut the number of product offerings from over 190 products to less than 80 which simplified customer choice, offered them better prices (since our manufacturing costs dropped so dramatically due to economies-of-scale in production runs), and allowed us the opportunity to focus on customer-desired product improvements in just those fewer products.

At the same time, we had done some customer research that indicated that the “manly” super-hefty lawnmower was good, but that over half the population cutting lawns were women and slighter men (like myself).  We made the decks easier to lower and raise on the riding mowers, made the controls easier to operate on the walk-behind mowers, made the seats more multi-gender, and so on.  We also focused entirely on lwan mowers, deleting our line of hand-held lawn products like blowers and string-trimmers (we were expert at lawn mowers and not those other products).  Perhaps this is a combination of “product” and “production”  focus, but you get the idea!

Why not look at your product offering to see if you’re even making, distributing, selling, or servicing the products that you’re good at?

Best product re-mixing wishes, Kraig