The Fewer Moving Parts, The Better

Lots of people are talking about ideas on how they can be LEAN or more efficient in their businesses. One of the core principles to LEAN is how do you remove from a process to make it more efficient.  Here is a beautiful thing that actually removes the need for staples in an office…food for thought.

 

Coach Kevin’s Challenge

How can you apply this to your business or better yet, how can you apply this principle of removing something to make the process more efficient?

Article from Kevin Lawrence: How to Engage Your Entire Organization in Driving Business Results

Below is Kevin Lawrence’s article, “How to Engage Your Entire Organization in Driving Business Results”. We hope you find it relevant and insightful. You can also access other articles and subscribe to Kevin Lawrence’s email newsletter “Coach Kevin’s Insights” by clicking here. 

If you would like to reprint this or other articles, we ask that you leave Kevin’s contact information intact at the end of the article and notify us that you will be using it. If you’re looking for an article customized for your publication, please let us know.

Please contact me with any questions, either by email at Janice@CoachKevin.com or by phone at 604-313-2229.

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Many companies launch internal campaigns to boost morale or drive change within an organization.  The reality of these is that they’re often just corporate fluff and puff and really don’t create an impact.  Here’s an example of a leadership team who has created notable change, not only in the performance of the company, but in the level of service delivered to clients. An incredible theme aligned the entire company creating marked and measurable performance over a period of 90 days.

Victorian Epicure Inc.

Vancouver Island, on Canada’s West Coast, is home to Victorian Epicure Inc. which was founded in Victoria, BC in 1991, by Sylvie Rochette. Sylvie first sold her small selection of home spice blends from the back of her station wagon at community fairs and other events. Her vision was to make it easy for busy mothers to create healthful and delicious meals for their families.

From those humble roots, Victorian Epicure has expanded to an office and manufacturing facility situated on 80 acres of agricultural reserve land, which includes 7 acres of vineyard on the Saanich Peninsula, just north of Victoria. Sylvie’s original vision of helping busy mothers continues today, but the company now manufactures and markets over 300 high quality spice blends and gourmet food products, accompanied by a line of professional quality cookware and a Home and Body Care line.

In 1996, Epicure Selections® (www.epicureselections.com) was created as a catalogue division of the company in response to the high demand for the products. More than 6000 Independent Sales Consultants represent Epicure Selections® in communities across Canada, providing personalized service to sell Epicure’s products. Amelia Warren is the Vice President of Epicure Selections®.

Identifying the Challenge

In the fall of 2007, the senior executive team at Epicure met to plan their strategy for the fourth quarter, which included Christmas, the busiest time of year for Epicure. In the meeting, it became clear that the biggest challenge (and opportunity to improve) they faced  was the time it took to process each order during the Christmas rush period. This “in-and-out” time needed to be dramatically shortened: in previous years, it was taking up to ten days from the time an order was received at the Home Office facility until it was out the door for delivery. Depending on where the order was going in Canada, the shipping time could be an additional three to seven days. In the worst case, a customer would have to wait up to seventeen business days for their order.

Near Christmas, customers wanted to ensure their orders arrived before December 24^th. Because customers were uncertain about processing and shipping times, they would stop ordering at the beginning of December to ensure timely delivery. For Epicure, this meant the potential loss of two weeks of sales at the busiest and most lucrative time of the year.

During the planning session for the fourth quarter of 2007 there was much discussion around order processing times . In the end, the leadership team decided that they needed to get orders out the door in under three days. While the focus was on speed of delivery, the leadership team knew that customers also had the expectation of accurate orders. As a countermeasure to speed, they decided that the absolute minimum quality threshold would be 97% accuracy of orders (proper items selected, sealed and labeled properly, and packaged so that there would be no breakage during shipping).

Choosing a Theme

 The leadership team brainstormed on how to communicate the order processing goal of three days to the company. They wanted to engage each and every employee in making sure that the entire company would deliver the commitment to Epicure customers.

In order to ensure success in achieving the goal, they used a process they have used a number of times before, which is called a quarterly theme.  As explained in the book Mastering the Rockefeller Habits by Verne Harnish, quarterly themes are designed to engage all employees of a company in achieving the number one goal for the company in that quarter. In the end, the theme they chose was so simple that everyone, customers and employees, could grasp it at once:

 “In & Out in 72”

Executing “In & Out in 72”

Much thought was given to aligning the entire company around the new goal.. Tangible ways were found to measure whether they were meeting the order processing in 72 hour goal. A bonus scheme was created to incent employees to achieve the quarterly theme. Epicure built a system that provided daily feedback to all employees on how they were doing. With the help of the art department, the leadership team created posters that set expectations for employees and showed the bonus levels while communicating the absolute minimum goal of 93% of orders processed in 72 hours with a minimum of 97% accuracy.

At Epicure, the employees are called the “Home Team.” At the same time that the Epicure leadership team was selling “In & Out in 72” to the Home Team, they made a bold move. They ran a six week marketing campaign to all their external customers promising them “In & Out in 72.”  Employees were featured in advertisements promising “We will deliver in 72 hours, period.” Amelia Warren, Vice President, said “(The ad campaign) was effective in that once we made our commitment public to our customers it also was engaging and reinforcing the importance to our Home Team, the importance of their jobs to the businesses and livelihoods of our customers.“

Running Hard to Christmas

The campaign was launched with tremendous enthusiasm and excitement. Employees responded positively to the bonus scheme. Everyone was held accountable.  Teams met in daily huddles and reviewed the numbers. The numbers were published daily, both yesterday’s orders and accuracy, but also the cumulative totals on whiteboards around the Home Office facility. There was no hiding from the results. Everyone knew where they were at. People did stumble, but there was one goal, one focus, and everyone had to work together better than they had ever done before.

Amelia says “I think it challenged everyone to look at, where are the gaps here?  Where are we stuck?  What’s the relationship between what I’m doing over here to what you’re doing there, and how does that all contribute to meeting or not meeting that In & Out in 72 hours?”

There were other changes that helped them drive to their goal:

• Management made it crystal clear that it was 72 hours from order receipt until shipment out the door. If the order arrived Friday at 11:59 pm the shipment was out by Monday at 11:59 pm.
• They moved to a seven day schedule.
• The pick list was tweaked to correct some confusing items. For example, they changed “Greek Oregano” to say “Oregano-Greek” as sometimes the “Greek Seasoning” was being picked by mistake.

Exceeding Expectations

The “In & Out in 72” campaign was a phenomenal success. There were 28,543 orders shipped during the campaign with an amazing 99.67% In & Out in 72 Hours. The average time to process an order and have it ready for shipment was less than 27.5 hours (just over a day) — which is two and a half times faster than their In & Out in 72 goal. They did all of this while maintaining an outstanding 97% accuracy for all orders.

“In & Out in 72” is the new expectation by the leadership team, the Home Team and for Epicure’s customers. There is a complete expectation inside and outside Epicure that orders will be processed and shipped within 72 hours. The accuracy rate has improved, rising from 97% to almost 99%. Not only did they improve the performance of the company, all of the employees pulled together and got to share in the satisfaction of being a winning team.

Lessons Learned

We discussed the lessons learned from this campaign with Amelia. She told us the following:

1. There has to be one person driving the whole process.
2. Clear measurable goals make the focus clear to the leadership team and give them a sense of what is happening with the rest of the Home Team.
3. Employees like having numbers to aim for. Providing daily feedback means that they know immediately where they are succeeding or failing. If you don’t know what you’re aiming for, you don’t know whether you are succeeding or not.
4. Having measurable goals helps everyone pull together and lets individuals know the role they are playing in the lives of Epicure’s consultants. When Management talks about meeting “In & Out in 72”, they can link it to feedback from a consultant in Nova Scotia who writes and says “Thank you so much. I was so excited to get my order.”
5. Keep it simple. You want the minimum possible administrative burden. The “In & Out in 72” campaign had two simple goals:
   1. At least 93% of orders out in 72 hours.
   2. At least 97% accuracy of orders.

The incentives don’t have to be huge.  It’s more about the energy and excitement that the theme generates and less about what the actual reward is.

Wrapping Up

Quarterly themes can be a powerful way to drive business results. A theme is an engaging way to get all employees in an organization to pull together to deliver on a tangible goal that makes a real difference to the business. Themes work best when they are backed up by simple daily measurable results that every employee can understand.  As with this example with Epicure, a quarterly theme is a powerful way to improve the performance in an organization while at the same time engaging the entire team in accomplishing something they can take pride in. Epicure performed two and a half times better than their unbelievable goal of 72 hours, while delivering 97% accuracy on all orders. To learn more about using themes and other strategic tools in improving your company’s performance, contact either Kevin Lawrence or David Greer.

The Gift Of Giving & Stretching Yourself In The Process

Two weeks ago I came back from Ensenada, Mexico on a trip to build a house for a family of nine who couldn’t afford it. I took my son who’s six and my dad with me, and it was an amazing experience. We stayed in an old hotel room with five bunk beds in it. Now, people give money to charities and that’s good. But I saw that when you can stretch yourself out of your comfort zone to give, it’s questionable who really benefits from the act. Is it the other person, or it is you? From what I experienced, I think both.

I got started much closer than Ensenada. In my hometown of Vancouver, the homeless people come to the Downtown East Side to survive the Canadian winters. A few friends and I wanted to help them directly. We sent an e-mail and a dozen people showed up to give out blankets and gloves to the East Side people at Christmastime. Two magical things happened. The first time we got onto the streets, we quickly realized these people felt more like a community than any neighborhood I’d lived in.

The second thing is that these people told us they didn’t really need blankets—they needed socks. By the time we did this four years later, we got together socks, gloves, hats, a thousand bags of these things to give out. It was all given away to people to needed it in just over 30 minutes.

We got out of our comfort zones to do this. Mexico was similar, a couple of days of building a house. I came away with these insights about both experiences.

 • We were helping people less fortunate, and that let us see how lucky we were in our own lives.

• We got to spend high-quality time with friends and family. It’s a very different experience doing charity work together than watching a movie or TV show.

• We met incredibly interesting people in an environment where almost anyone would be at their best.

 It changes how you feel about things, and what you see. Giving of yourself is about as equal to a win-win as is possible on this planet.

Coach Kevin’s Challenge

Look at ways of giving that are not only extremely meaningful for you, but create a change or stretch within yourself and your family. What would you like to do, but aren’t quite comfortable enough to commit to?

What really motivates employees…and motivates them to quit?

Business books are wonderful. But thousands come out every year, and there’s probably only a half-dozen that really count. I’ve found a hidden gem of a book in The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave, by Leigh Branham. These reasons make sense when I look at companies and careers.

This book has the elements of my favorite business books. When you read it, it dispels a major myth and creates a shift in the way you think. Second, it has tangible concepts you can understand — and apply directly tomorrow. Third, it’s based on credible research. These Hidden Reasons came out of exit interviews with more than 10,000 employees.

You might not believe it, but getting paid more is not the major reason why people leave companies.

One of the things that dispels that myth is Reason Number 4: Employees don’t see enough opportunity for growth and advancement. People need to see the path to get to where they want in their career. Many companies don’t make this easy for their employees. When you can show the specific steps to get them exactly where they want, there’s no need to leave.

The myth that people leave companies because they want to get paid more never really felt right to me. People don’t leave a business because of money. This book really shows that salary is only part of compensation—and the really smart people realize it’s less than half.

Most businesses miss the boat when they try to make people more loyal with just financial compensation. I always ask the employees in companies I work with, “Where do you want to be three years down the road?” Then I want to know if they can see the path they have in their current company. The sad reality is more often than not, they can’t.

Coach Kevin’s Challenge

Look at The 7 Hidden Reasons. How are you taking care of them for your employees? As the book says, how can you act before it’s too late?

How To Get A Higher Return On Your Learning Or Training Investment

I find that most companies need to work on getting a return on their training investment. Earlier this year I did a two-day training session for about 30 companies to learn the Rockefeller Habits. I use these Habits with all my clients to help them improve their focus and results. One table was a forum group from the Entrepreneurs Organization (EO). These nine people got lots of value from the session. But afterwards they realized they should’ve brought their executive teams with them, so the execs could learn and understand the training approach.

So the group asked me if I could train their executives. Now, a typical solution would be to give another a seminar for all those companies. But even though they could split that cost, it wouldn’t give a very good return on their investment.

I find people learn during a workshop, but typically there are specific questions for each company. A generic seminar would’ve been okay, but it wouldn’t provide those answers. I didn’t feel right about that extra workshop, because I knew they were serious about using the Rockefeller Habits. They mastered the learning, but didn’t have a process for follow-though.

They came up with a brilliant solution: A half-day with all the executives, then about 1.75 hours for each executive team over the next day or so. During that short time we solved 5-10 specific issues for each of the companies. We moved them from being 20 percent to 50 percent effective with the Habits in just that time. These companies had my direct experience of going through the process hundreds of times.

Problems that could take a day to solve got solved in 30 minutes. We took so many roadblocks out their way because we could troubleshoot them one by one. You could do this over an hour or so of a Webcast or conference call.

Coach Kevin’s Challenge:

Can you use this kind of model to achieve better returns from your training? Is there an expert you could bring in to work with you?

Using Your Values to Create Value

In the book “Good to Great”, Jim Collins shows how every great company has a fundamental set of core values. At 3M, their core set of values includes “Value and develop our employees’ diverse talents, initiative and leadership.”

When Dr. Spencer Silver first invented the unique, repositionable adhesive that made Post-It notes possible, there was no one at 3M who could figure out a commercial application for the adhesive. Nine years later along came Art Fry, a new product development engineer at 3M who had a problem. Art was a tenor in his church choir. His bookmarks kept falling out of his hymn book. Not wanting to lose his place, Art came up with the idea to use Dr. Silver’s adhesive to coat a piece of paper that could be positioned over and over to mark each week’s choir music.

What made Fry’s inspiration come to life was his passion for the idea, which was supported by the entrepreneurial spirit which is at the core of 3M’s culture that values their employees’ initiative and leadership. Fry was also helped by an official “bootlegging” policy that let him spend 15% of his time on a project of his own choosing (another policy that promotes 3M’s core values).

There are now 600 Post-It products being sold in more than 100 countries.

Coach Kevin’s Challenge:

Great companies have a defined set of core values that drives the culture and people of the organization to deliver value to their stakeholders. Focus energy on these areas of core values:

• Make sure that your core values are written down and visible to all employees
• Design your compensation and reward systems to align employee action with your core values
• Recognize those people who are outstanding at pursuing core values to deliver results (Art Fry was elected to the 3M Circle of Technical Excellence)

Are your people living by the core values of your company?

Are you having a customer experience today?

Jim Skinner, McDonalds Vice-Chairman and CEO, leads a company that has seen a dramatic increase in results in the last few years (quadrupled their dividend to $1.2B over the past four years and raised the stock price from $25 to a peak of $65). Jim started out as a McDonald’s restaurant manager trainee in 1971 in Carpentersville, Ill and worked his way to the top job. Jim stays connected to his company, employees, and customers by eating a McDonald’s lunch every day – that’s right every day.

Skinner says “The moment of truth is the moment we interact with our customer.” He’s proud of the fact that he’s the same guy that went into the job. Yet Skinner has been leading a lot of change at McDonald’s, engineering a major turnaround and proving to Wall Street and to Main Street that the secret to peddling more Big Macs, McGriddles and Happy Meals is as old as the business of sales itself: Give the customers what they want.

Coach Kevin’s Challenge:

Most business leaders lose touch with the customers they serve. Try these solutions for getting a first-hand customer experience for your business:

• In a retail environment, talk to people coming in and out of your business who bought or didn’t buy something (ask outside the hearing range of your employees)
• Phone ten customers who purchased from you in the last week
• Email the last ten customers and ask them about their experience
• Talk to people in your service department to get feedback about people in sales
• Talk to people in sales to get feedback about people in service (with the appropriate filters)
• Make sure that you are using your own products or services and if possible, be a customer of your best competitors

What have you done today to have a customer experience with your products and services?

Make Sure New People Fit and Bribe the Rest to Quit

Zappos takes fanatical customer service and a high energy culture to deliver more than shoes over the Internet. Zappos CEO Tony Hsich is committed to an organization that constantly amazes their customers. He understands that companies don’t engage emotionally with their customers – people do. The Zappos senior management team is transperent in their thinking allowing employees to be free to do whatever it takes to make a customer happy.

The Zappos corporate culture is bursting with personality. To continue creating the legendary stories about Zappos staff and their customers, Zappos management must hire people who fit their culture. They have introduced an innovative way to help weed out those that don’t fit early in the process – a small practice with big implications.

Every new Zappos employee must first take an intensive four week training program that immerses the new emplyee in the Zappos’ strategy, culture, and obsession with customers. A week after completing the training session and working at Zappos, new employees are called into a meeting and offerred a payment for the work they have done with a $1,000 bonus to leave. The new employees who do not fit the corporate culture take the money and run — about 10% of new call center employees take the bonus offer and leave.

The new employees left are the ones who work for the love of the customer and the experience of working with incredibly committed and high energy people. If you want to create a memorable company, you have to fill your company with memorable people.

Coach Kevin’s Challenge:
Knowing what you know now, who are the people on your team you would be happy if they told you they were leaving today. Why tolerate having those people on your team and what can you do about it?

Try bribing people to quit instead of bribing people to stay.

Article from Kevin Lawrence: How to Turn an Industry on Its Head: Become Masters at Delivering on Big Promises

Things are shifting…Now What?

Economies are changing and it’s time to get back to basics: creating lots of value for the customers we serve in our businesses.

Over the past 10-20 years there are many businesses that became quite successful without being that amazing at what they do or creating tremendous value for their customers…In some cases, businesses just rode the wave of growing economies.

Reality check time…are you creating real, tangible value for your customers in a way that is meaningful to them?

Here is a case study we just completed on a Vancouver, BC based business called Provident Security. I met the owner, Mike Jagger earlier this year and was impressed with how he has taken a basic business like security for businesses, homes and events and built it into a precision value-creation machine.

Read the article, “How to Turn an Industry on Its Head: Become Masters at Delivering on Big Promises” and then, using him as inspiration, ask yourself 3 questions:

1. What is the #1 thing that our customers value most about our product or service when compared to our competition?
2. How can we quantify and then increase that value to our existing and potential customers?
3. How can we articulate the tangible value we create in a way that will position us far ahead of our competition?

If you’d be interested in attending a conference call with Mike Jagger to learn more about how he made these changes in his business, let me know.

Make it a great day.

Kevin

Rockefeller Habits Executive Training – Coming to Vancouver, B.C.

The Rockefeller Habits methodology is, quite simply THE BEST way to improve the performance, profits and growth of any business.  These Habits are clearly applicable to any industry, as proven by over 20,000 companies using it worldwide. 

 

After using it for the past few years with my own clients, I can certainly see why the book, Mastering The Rockefeller Habits, is consistently ranked in the Top 20 strategy books on Amazon.

 

I invite you to come spend 2 days with me  (January 28-29, 2009) for an executive development program for leaders of mid-sized firms with 30 to 2,000 employees. Come experience the power of this system and explore what it could do for your company.  

 

Scheduled over two days at the end of January, it’s the perfect opportunity to map out a strong, strategic course for 2009.

 

You can register online or call me at (604) 313-2229 to learn more.

 

Designed for TEAMS led by C-level executives and division heads, this event teaches the practical application of high-caliber business-building concepts. Participants walk away with a concise, one-page strategic plan – a customized framework for business development for the coming year.

 

This two-day event is designed to position you to:

▪         Recognize and act on high-payoff initiatives

▪         Keep everyone in your organization aligned and accountable

▪         Create customer loyalty that makes price irrelevant

▪         Fuel growth with smart cash-flow management

▪         Multiply cash flow and profits

▪         Drive your company to the next level

▪         Catapult ahead of competitors

▪         Know what’s working at today’s mega-growth businesses

 

If you haven’t read the book, which includes 10 illuminating case studies from client companies achieving stellar results, let me know and I’ll send you a copy.

 

Bring your executive team for this 2-day event and save on tuition. If you bring a team of 5 or more, we will give you and your team a complimentary half-day follow-up session.

 

If you know an entrepreneur, company or colleague that may benefit from the Rockefeller Habits, I want to send them a free copy of the book so they can see if this program is a fit for them. Send me their contact information and I’ll mail the book today.

 

For more information, including FAQ’s and takeaways for this event, please click here.