•  Where could you be getting caught up in your own success in away that could lead to your demise?
• What can you do to get a good reality check?

One of my favorite business strategies is to leverage your relationships with your customers. On my recent trip to Mexico, I saw that strategy working for In-N-Out Burger.

You might know about the loyalty to these burgers. On our bus ride down to Encinada, 40 people were raving about them. Even before we got on the bus, they were saying, “We’re going to In-N-Out. You gotta eat there, it’s great!” Never in my life have I seen so many people get excited about a hamburger joint. People were evangelizing, saying how cool it was. So much so, that there was really no choice. I had to go.

If you haven’t gone, you get a burger, fries, and a drink or milkshake. And that’s their whole menu. It was an incredibly efficient business, and nice to see something so darn simple. Because it’s so simple, it’s easy for people to get behind it and tell the story. In-N-Out’s story is so simple that people go crazy about it.

This story is the subject of new book about In-N-Out.  I read the book review in BusinessWeek, and the article notes that a lot of the success comes from the fact that In-N-Out didn’t mess it up. They managed to stay true to their values and keep it very simple. I loved the marketing they did with free bumper stickers, where the company used spotters to enter drivers with the stickers in a vacation contest. They managed to make their story into a cult of hamburger lovers.

The story about the burgers was not only dead-on, but these customers were able to articulate it in a way that engaged me.

Coach Kevin’s Challenge

What would it take to get your customers out there, getting excited about your business like In-N-Out’s customers do? What is the simple message you would love everyone say about you?

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.

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?

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.

Does email boost or hinder your performance? It all depends on how you manage it.

Email offers countless ways to save time and be more productive, but when we don’t contain it, our attention becomes fragmented. When attention is constantly shifting over to email, our ability to focus on work and perform really suffers.

In 2005, a psychiatrist at King’s College in London administered IQ tests to three groups: the first did nothing but perform the IQ test, the second was distracted by email and ringing phones, and the third was stoned on marijuana. Not surprisingly, the first group did better than the other two by an average of 10 points. The emailers, on the other hands, did worse than intoxicated people by an average of 6 points.[1]

Yet, in a recent survey of 320 professionals, 17% check a few times per hour and 68% check email more or less continually – constantly breaking their focus on the primary task at hand.

There’s a very good reason that “crackberry” was declared the 2006 Word-of-the-Year by Webster’s New World College Dictionary. Blackberry addiction has become a cultural phenomenon.

If you are at all familiar with the concept of doing a daily huddle, you know that the concept is very simple and makes sense, however, it may seem like a cumbersome or time consuming thing to do.  The daily huddle is a group meeting with every individual in your company.

In his book The Rockefeller Habits, Verne Harnish reinforces the power of the daily huddle.  The best teams on the planet need to meet every day to ensure that everyone is on the same track and no one is on the line.

1-800-GOT-JUNK is legendary for revolutionizing the junk business.  Here’s an example of how they use the daily huddle to drive their company ahead and ensure that things continue to move ahead every day.  Watch the video to see for yourself what a competitive edge it brings.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=go5-PEhyIl4