Category: Leadership

February 13, 2013

Believing or Behaving?

I could probably fill up a whole page with “I Believe…” statements.

I believe… specialty independent retailers need to have better customer service than their competitors.
I believe… cash is king and sometimes more important than profits.
I believe… the store owner who quits trying to learn quits trying to grow.
I believe… what gets measured and rewarded gets improved.
I believe… we need to know and understand the financials of our business inside and out.
I believe… we need to stay true to our core values, but be willing to change everything else
I believe…

What do you believe? I challenge you to write it down. All of it. Take an hour and type up everything that comes to mind. It will be a powerful hour.

But then I’m going to ask you to do something else.

I was reading Drew McClellan’s blog (Drew’s Marketing Minute) and he said this…

“One of the sure signs of a person who is going to be successful is that they wholeheartedly behave in lifelong learning. I didn’t say believe in life long learning because I’ve found just about everyone believes in it. But few actually act upon that belief.”

I have some strong beliefs. But does my behavior match those beliefs? Can I prove it?

Can you prove it?

Write down underneath, next to, or over the top of each of your belief statements the behavior you are actually doing that proves your belief.

I believe specialty independent retailers need to have better customer service than their competitors.
I attend and teach customer service trainings, constantly look for new ways to train my staff on customer service, read books on the topic and explore new ideas and thoughts.

I believe cash is king and sometimes more important than profits.
I get rid of slow-moving merchandise regularly.

I believe the store owner who quits trying to learn quits trying to grow.
I attend workshops, read books and blogs, and teach (to teach something, you have to learn it deeply first)

I believe what gets measured and rewarded gets improved.
I praise regularly and am implementing new rewards programs in other aspects of the business.

I believe we need to know and understand the financials of our business inside and out.
I run reports at least monthly. I wrote a book on financials for the toy industry. I look at that book frequently.

I believe we need to stay true to our core values, but be willing to change everything else.
I have my core values posted on my wall and use them as a guide for everything we do, including changes for the better.

How does your behavior stack up to your beliefs?

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS You don’t have to agree with my beliefs. You are more than entitled to your own. Just live up to them. If your behavior doesn’t match your belief, maybe it isn’t something you actually believe in???

December 29, 2012

Sometimes You Have to Tear it Down

They are tearing down the hotel across the street. We have a front-row seat for the destruction as a crane takes it down piece by piece.

This is not the first hotel to be torn down in that general vicinity. I watched the previous one be exploded and dropped to the ground. Yes, two large hotels have been built, abandoned, and torn down in the same area in my life.

I guess this blog could be about location, location, location. But you already know that story.

The lesson that struck me driving past this building this morning was how progress and change often require some deconstruction first before you can construct something new.

Too often, we feel like the only approach to growth is to tweak around the edges. Radical changes are dangerous, risky. So we make minor changes, which have minor effects. But if you need major things to happen in your business, you need to make major changes. Or as Thomas Jefferson put it…

“If you want something you’ve never had, you have to do something you’ve never done.”

That might mean tearing something down. You can tear things down physically such as a wall or a display or an office or a bathroom to make a better version. You can also tear things down metaphorically such as your return policy, your dress code, your product selection, or your advertising.

The key is to remember that the tearing down, while messy, is necessary for progress.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS One of the biggest deconstruction/reconstruction projects can be your staff. Having the right people in the right jobs is the most important thing you can do for your business. If that means firing key people and starting over, do it! Yes, it will be messy in the short term, but the reconstruction will be better than the original.

December 17, 2012

The Preferred Way

I hire a lot of new people for the Christmas season. Then I turn much of their training over to the current staff. Every now and then we run into a problem. One staff person teaches the newbie one way, another teaches them a completely different way to do the same exact thing.

The poor newcomer isn’t sure which way to turn. Do it the way she was taught or the way she was being told to do it at that instant?

In our mid-season evaluation one of my newbies asked me what to do when that situation arises.

My answer surprised her, see if it surprises you. I told her…

Do it the way the other employee is telling you right at that moment – even if it is different than how you have been taught.

The issue here is that too many times we look at policies and procedures as black & white. Do it this one way, every other way is wrong. Yet, many times there are multiple right ways to do something. For instance, you can count back change from a cash sale a number of different ways. One way is better than others, but the others still work.

Do it the way you were just told is the only correct answer because of one thing and one thing only… The customer is standing right in front of you.

If someone who seems to have authority tells a new employee how to do it, you do it that way for the sake of transferring confidence to the customer. It may not be my preferred way, but if I have trained my staff well enough, it is still an acceptable way, which for the moment is good enough. The customer is happy, confident and still trusts us.

I then told her that the next time something like that happens, come tell me which two methods you have been taught. I’ll tell you which is my preferred method and why.

Two benefits from doing this… First, they rarely ever do it any way other than the preferred way after that. Second, when they are unsure of how to do something they can more often fake their way through it, keeping the customer’s confidence in the process, until they find out how to do it better.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS It makes evaluations easier, too. If you lead off with everything they’ve done wrong, it makes them defensive. Instead tell them they did it right, but there is a better way to do it, and you will see them grow faster and stronger in skills and confidence.

December 15, 2012

Head Cheerleader (re-posted from Dec, 2010)

(This was first posted Monday, December 20, 2010, but worth repeating)

(Nine) shopping days until Christmas. In the home stretch. You’re tired, run down and stressed, just counting the days. Your friends and family are encouraging you to “Hang in there, it’s almost over.”

Sorry to burst your bubble, but you need to do more than just hang in there.

Of the hundreds (thousands) of customers who come through your door this week, many are entering your store for the first time.

Now is the time to WOW them so they become lifelong customers.

So no matter how tired you and your staff are feeling, no matter how many hours you’ve worked, how many sleepless nights you’ve had fretting about the business, you have to find that reserve inside you that makes this week the most special experience your customers have ever had!

And you need to fire up the staff, too. Your new role for the next 5 days is Head Cheerleader. Here are three things you can do to keep your staff going strong until the end.

Praise them. Tell them specific things you have seen them do right in the last few days. Share their praise with everyone.
Cater lunch. Not just some sandwiches and chips but a real sit-down meal with silverware.
Hire a masseuse. Give the staff 20-minute breaks to get table massages.

These next few days are not only critical to your holiday sales, they are critical to your future because you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Get your store ready, get your staff ready and get busy!

You can do it. Rah rah rah, Sis boom bah!! I’m pulling for you!

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS Regardless of whether your business is doing well or not, you need to adopt the attitude right now that this is the best Christmas ever. Fake it until you make it? Sure! The better your attitude now, the better your results later.

December 12, 2012

Measuring People

“What gets measured gets done.” Frances Schagen

This is not a post about Financials. You can read more about financials here.

This is not a post about Inventory or Open-to-Buy. You can read more about those topics here.

Numbers are important. Very. Important. But at the end of the day it is people who create those numbers. If you are measuring your numbers, you also need to be measuring your people. Here are some ways to measure your greatest assets.

Observation

Do you regularly observe your staff? Do you stand back and watch them interact with customers? Without their knowledge that you are watching? One way to do that is rearrange a display within earshot but not directly facing the employee. Get busy with your work. But keep an open ear for the conversations they have with customers. Another way is to grab a clipboard and start counting something.

Seem sneaky? Sure. Here is what makes it worthwhile… When you catch them doing something well and praise them immediately after it happens, two majorly good things happen:

You reinforce that behavior and get it far more often.
You make them more comfortable having you on the floor with them.

Interviews

Have you ever sat down with an employee and interviewed them again? You would be amazed at the different answers they will give you than when you first interviewed them for a job, especially when you ask such questions like, “tell me a time when you went above and beyond the required work just to help a customer out.”

We hire a lot of seasonal staff that I have to train in a short window of time. I make it a point to meet with them from time to time and let them talk. I also make it a point to interview them at the end of the season. The Exit Interview can be a valuable tool because people on the way out the door are often more willing to share the negatives.

Goals

Do you set goals? Number of interactions they should make per hour? Sales goals per day? or even a checklist of daily duties? Goals are great, but often goal-setters forget two very important elements.

After you set a goal you need to come up with tasks to meet that goal. Tasks are simply the activities used to reach the goal. For instance, if my goal is to sell 25 yo-yos by the end of the day, my task is to play with yo-yos all day until I can learn three new tricks, and also to teach at least half of the kids who come through the door how to do one trick on a yo-yo.

At the end of the day you have to be accountable to the goal. Did you reach it? Yes? Good job. No? Why not? What can you do differently next time?

For goals to be successful, you need to assign tasks and evaluate progress.

Measure your people and your numbers will be even more fun to measure.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS You might be asking yourself when will you find time to do all this measuring. Here is sometimes the hardest lesson to learn. The more often you measure, the more time you will have because your employee productivity will skyrocket.

PPS Want to learn new and better ways to measure your people? Join Tim Miles and me at Wizard Academy for our two-day workshop on Shareworthy Customer Service.

December 11, 2012

Snapshots in Time

One thing that used to drive me crazy in retail was when we had just finished with a huge rush of customers, finally got a moment to breathe, and at that exact moment my father would walk out, see us standing around and yell at us to get busy since we were obviously loafing.

Had he walked out two minutes earlier, he would have seen poetry in motion as the staff expertly handled all the customers, the giftwrapping, the phone calls, and the interruptions with grace and ease. But no, he caught us two minutes later taking a deep breath.

I made a pledge that when I was boss I would never make snap judgments on the snapshot in time.

One brush stroke does not make a masterpiece painting. One snapshot does not make a complete album.

Let’s play a little math game (feel free to skip the next paragraph if you’re not up to math today).

Yesterday we had a decent day serving 256 customers. I had 97 employee hours scheduled which breaks down to 2.6 customers per hour per employee. The average actual interaction with a customer is around ten minutes of their time in the store, or 26 minutes out of each hour. That means each employee had more non-interactive time than interactive time. The likelihood of me walking out of my office and catching them not engaged with a customer was greater than catching them engaged.

(Okay, math over)

The key for me is to walk out enough to catch them when they are engaged and observe how they handle that engagement.

There are ebbs and flows of customers in any retail business. If all you ever do is catch your employees goofing off, before you yell at them, realize that the real problem might be that you aren’t leaving your office enough.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS I reminded one of my new hires today that we are not just creating sales today, we are creating sales a generation from now when the kids in the store today have kids of their own. Kinda changes the engagement when think like that, don’t you think?

PPS Remember also that there is a fine line between goofing off and having fun. Since Having Fun is part of our Character Diamond, it is almost impossible for me to catch them goofing off. Such is life in a toy store:-)

October 9, 2012

Don’t Hide Your Agenda

I was about to write a blog about the importance of the little details, like a clean bathroom, and how even those small things need to be consistent with your branding, your Core Values, otherwise they could undermine all the good you do.

I saw a headline and a survey that said 62% of customers think a dirty restroom is a sign of poor management. Odor, dirty or clogged toilets, and bathrooms that looked old were the three most common problems.

Then I read the source… A plumbing supply company. Made me pause for a moment. Made me wonder if there was some sort of bias in the survey. Made me wonder if there was a hidden agenda.

You, too?

And that, in a nutshell, is why consumers don’t trust us. They think we have a hidden agenda. That Hot Toy list that Toys R Us recently published? I watched it get trashed in a blog for being self-serving.

What if the plumbing supply company said… Hey, we’re in the bathroom supply business so we did a poll to see what the main complaints were that people had about public bathrooms. Not surprisingly, smell and odor was number one. We also learned some other interesting information about bathrooms. They make a big impression on your customers, both good and bad. Sure, we’re telling you because we want your business. More importantly, we’re telling you because we want you to stay in business. Without you, there are no public bathrooms for us to update.

Wouldn’t seem so self-serving, would it? Just by being up front and honest about being self-serving, they sound less self-serving. Ironic? Yes. People trust an open agenda. They distrust a hidden one.

How can you be up front and honest so that you don’t seem to have a hidden agenda? Here is one way we do it. I constantly tell customers that we will help you install your car seat no matter where you bought it. I then tell them up front that I have an ulterior motive for doing it. If the car seat is installed safely, your child is safer. If your child is safer, your child lives longer. If your child lives longer… wait for it… you have to buy more toys.

Always gets a smile (we’re here to make you smile, remember?).

Be honest about why you do what you do. Tell your ulterior motives. Tell the downside. It helps build trust instead of destroy it.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS But please be sure to clean your bathrooms! It does make a difference. In the book Retail Superstars George Whalin talks about the bathrooms as a positive feature in a number of the stores in the book.

October 5, 2012

Third Time’s a Charm

I did a new talk for the Monroe Chamber of Commerce’s Business Summit three weeks ago called “Better Your Business by Being Your Business Better”. It is a mix of lessons and case studies of companies that are staying true to their Core Values and reaping the benefits. Works well as a keynote or workshop. Full of stories to make you laugh, make you cry, make you understand how Values play a key role in your success.

The audience loved it! I have received multiple requests to do the same talk to other groups. In fact, I’ve already done it twice more since then.

As much as I liked the first presentation and the positive feedback it received, there were a few rough spots the audience didn’t notice but I knew were there. There were a few transitions that needed polishing, a couple slides that were unnecessary, and a few stories that needed tweaking. I made some changes and the second presentation received equally strong praise. But I knew it still wasn’t where it could be. More tweaking followed.

The third time I knocked it out of the park! The crowd was completely into it. They were laughing out loud. They were nodding in approval. They were clapping and carrying on. They were getting all the inside jokes. They were in tears. They were fully vested. Every transition flowed perfectly. Every story and lesson fit like a well-cut jigsaw puzzle. Yes, the third time was the charm.

Don’t get me wrong. The first two were pretty darned good. One person told me after the first presentation that it was the best thing he had ever seen. So unless his bar was really low…

I could have stopped there and left the presentation alone. Good enough. Both of the other groups would have been every bit as pleased seeing the first version. But I didn’t. I knew I could do better.

I think many business owners, myself included, are guilty of this. We know we are already pretty darned good at what we do. We know we are already doing a better job than our competition. We know we are giving the customers a really good experience. Why try harder? Where is the return on investment? Will the customer even notice?

Here is the nugget of truth… Good enough is only good enough today. Right now. Tomorrow you have to be better. Olympic Gold Medalist Mary Lou Retton reminded us “…the gold-medal performances of today are just the compulsory exercises next time.” Yes, the customer will notice. So you better take notice, too.

What are you doing pretty darn good today that you can make better tomorrow?

I’m already working on how to make the fourth version of this presentation (which is already booked) even better.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS Better Your Business by Being Your Business Better is now up on my website under Speaker for Hire. If you are looking for a talk that will motivate, get people to take ownership, and teach everyone two lessons that they can take to the bank, this 50 minute presentation rocks! Works for owners and employees. Works as a keynote or as a workshop. Works with twelve people or twelve hundred. Get in touch.

October 2, 2012

Every 80 Years

“The reason history must repeat itself is because we pay so little attention to it the first time.” -Blackie Sherrod

Go back in time to the early 1940’s. What was happening? Easy question… World War II.

Go back another 80 years to the 1860’s. What was happening? Another easy question… The Civil War.

Go back another 80 years to the 1780’s. What was happening? If you said The Revolutionary War, you get an A for history.

See a pattern?

It goes back for centuries through the Western World. 1700’s? Great Northern War. 1620’s? The Thirty Year War and so on…

Every eighty years, like clockwork. In fact, there is a well documented pattern of a shift between two general mentalities of the population of the Western World, a shift between the two extremes of “Me” and “We” that has been swinging like a pendulum for the last 3000 years. It takes eighty years to complete a cycle from one extreme to the other and back again.

We’re currently heading toward the peak extreme of another “We” generation, one that has caused wars and conflicts for centuries. Knowing these two extremes, how we get there as a population and what to expect as we approach another peak is possibly the most important information you can have.

I want you to have this info.

I have been studying this pendulum swing since the first time I heard about it from Roy H. Williams at Wizard Academy in 2005 and the evidence blew me away. I’ve seen it in the toy industry, in the baby industry, in retail as a whole. I’ve seen it in politics, in advertising, in the movies and music. I’ve seen it in our schools, in our homes and even online. Now Roy has teamed up with Michael Drew to present you with two ways to understand this pendulum shift and how it affects the world around you better than ever before.

The first is their book which launched today – Pendulum (link to Amazon order page but don’t go there until you read the next paragraph).

The second is the creation of the Pendulum in Action website. Follow that link and it will take you to a special offer where you can get the book for only the cost of shipping ($7) and also get access to five modules/presentations on the Pendulum Swing and how to understand it from the perspective of your business.

Talk about ROI? Those will be the best seven dollars you spend. Ever. Go click that second link now.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS If it isn’t the best $7 you spent on your business, tell me why. I’ll send you something else also worth more than $7 to make up for it. Yeah, I believe it that much I’m willing to stand behind someone else’s work with my own money.

PPS Yes, the pattern says in the 2020’s we could most certainly be at war. I’m not trying to sound apocalyptic or anything, but the pattern has existed for millennium Knowing it and knowing what to do about it are the first steps to preventing the worst from happening.