Industry Snapshot: Breaking Down or Breaking Through?

In a prior corporate life, I had a boss that held a weekly call with our geographically dispersed team. He was trying to generate better performance against goals that no one, not even he, believed in. Our mandate as a group had been changed, and no one in the field believed in the reasons for, or the potential for success of, this new approach to our business. People went through the motions of doing what was asked of them but not much more. Frustrations ran high and our weekly meetings became shouting matches. Sadly, management had a great information base for learning but was not open to it. In retrospect, it is amazing how long those meetings went on before people started quitting.

Contrast this with a recent example where we helped the CEO at one of our clients, a quickly growing company, get control of myriad challenges using a disciplined meeting every ten days. We would start the meetings by looking at the sales pipeline. This was a good way to look at the market, competition, product delivery, and whether there was repeat or referral business. With this information to give us perspective, we attacked marketing issues—focusing on their unique differentiators and what the right marketing vehicles were (trade shows and face-to-face meetings, as it turned out). We then shifted our focus to address staffing issues to accommodate the growth. This discipline has helped the company sail past their break-even point and, and they are now headed toward strong profitability with good levels of customer satisfaction and retention. The discipline of regular meetings has been a key element of this success.