By Leo Valiquette
“What we’ve done is turn our people into raving capitalists.”
Not the label one might think to apply to the employees of Canadian airline WestJet, but that was how Duncan Bureau, WestJet’s vice president of sales, characterized the company’s singular focus on customer service while delivering the opening keynote at the 2009 Ottawa Business Summit this week.
The summit was a joint effort between the Ottawa Business Journal, The Canadian Association of Family Enterprise and the City of Ottawa to provide business owners and executives with education, information and inspiration.
In a cut-throat, commoditized business that’s seen dozens of players fold in the past couple of decades, WestJet has in 13 years grown from an upstart, with three planes serving only a handful of destinations in Western Canada, to a fleet of 76 planes, 55 destinations, $806 million in cash and one of the highest earnings before tax margins among North American carriers.
Key to WestJet’s success has been its focus on cost efficiencies and finding ways to keep its fleet flying and generating revenue, such as partnering with Transat to fly its short-haul routes when Transat’s own narrow-body aircraft fleet for that purpose grew tired.
But perhaps the greatest difference has been made by a corporate culture that makes employees owners with a vested interest in the organization’s success. At present, about 87 per cent of WestJet’s employees are shareholders in the company. The value of profit-share payments to employees to date is approaching $150 million, more money, Duncan pointed out, than many airlines have made in that same period.
While this model may not be for everyone, in an industry where service is the strongest differentiator, the WestJet example includes a number of common sense lessons to achieve top-notch employee engagement and performance.
1. As Duncan emphasized, travellers are considered guests, and this emphasis on serving the needs of guests has resulted in 90 per cent of travellers who use the airline recommending it to others.
2. Build a culture of opportunity rather than entitlement, in which employees feel confident in taking the initiative to ensure an optimal customer experience. Employees are empowered to act and think like owners. At WestJet, “great customer service comes from the heart, not from a manual.” There is no weighty policy book. Nor do executives get the kinds of perks that create a divide with the rank and file, such as reserved parking.
3. Hire for attitude and train for ability. Except for pilots, of course. As Duncan said, he can’t make someone smile and demonstrate enthusiasm for their job.
4. Celebrate success and recognize excellence frequently and loudly.
5. On the flipside of that, don’t hesitate to sack the “duds” who don’t fit in or are not performing and threaten to poison the organization.
6. Communication. Communication. Communication. Maintain an active dialogue (which means the listening is happening on both ends) with employees.
7. And lastly, imbed in your culture the lessons learned in Kindergarten — share, play fair, don’t hit people, put things back where you found them, don’t take things that don’t belong to you, say sorry when you hurt someone, look both ways before you leap, and keep the balance between work, life and play.
Tomorrow I’ll offer the Dragon’s perspective from the afternoon keynote by Robert Herjavec, one of the five dragons on the CBC television series, Dragon’s Den.
By Leo Valiquette
It was business building 101 this morning at OCRI’s monthly Technology Executive Breakfast, with three executives representing different stages of a company’s growth offering pearls of wisdom and insights learned at the School of Hard Knocks.
Mark Edwards, president of Bent 360: MediaLab represented start-up companies; Rob Woodbridge, CEO of Rove, spoke for growing companies, while Jim Roche, founder and former CEO of Tundra Semiconductor and president and CEO of business and management consultancy Stratford Managers, represented established companies.
Here’s a rundown of the key points discussed by the panel:
1. Diversity among a group of partners or company founders is key to ensure one person’s weaknesses are offset by another’s strengths. Diverse backgrounds and skill sets are vital.
2. Focus. Focus. Focus. A company must have a clear understanding of its own identity. To whom is it selling? Why? What is its value proposition? As Jim commented, if an organization suffers from this lack of clarity, there will be confusion within the ranks, people will come to work at cross purposes and revenue growth will stagnate. Rob shared his experiences about the benefits of Rove’s decision to refocus around one single enterprise product rather than chasing multiple opportunities in both the enterprise and consumer markets with eight products.
3. There is no such thing as overnight success. Citing author Malcolm Gladwell and his book Outliers: The Story of Success, Jim talked about the 10,000-hour rule — the amount of hard work needed to truly master something and achieve success. He contended that behind every “overnight success story” there are, in fact, years of effort under the radar and behind the scenes.
4. Cold calling. Few people tackle this one with gusto, but as the panelists emphasized, if you start with people you know, your list of prospects will run out in short order. If you’re not making contact with clients or prospective clients on a regular basis, then you’re not in business. Mark himself aims to make five calls a day (not necessarily all cold). He emphasized the importance of using tools and databases such as LinkedIn, Dun & Bradstreet and Hoovers to develop contact lists. From there, the trick is to start calling and work through an organization until you have found the receptive individual who has buying authority, or can serve as your internal advocate with those that do. Just leaving a phone message breaks the ice and makes the follow-up call a warm one, he said.
5. When to shake up the management team or make a change was also discussed. Jim acknowledged that most organizations tend to be slow to identify and act on weaknesses that affect an organization. He emphasized the importance of executives acting on their gut instinct since they rarely have the luxury of making a decision with all the facts in hand. If you think there is a problem, there likely is. He considers it a sign of good leadership to be able to provide clear and consistent feedback on a subordinate’s performance with direct, and even brutal, honesty.
6. The value of mentoring was also discussed, not just in receiving it, but in giving it. According to Mark, the rewards flow both ways and he isn’t afraid to seek out as mentors people younger than himself if they have opinions he values and experiences that are relevant. Jim commented on more formalized mentorship in the form of advisory boards or boards of directors and spoke about the leads these people can provide into new customers or financing opportunities.
7. And then there was the cold hard truth that any company operating in the B2B space will have to look outside of its own backyard if it wants to growth. Jim said a Canadian B2B company should expect 70 to 80 per cent of its revenues to come from outside its home market. And though it is a challenge for an earlier-stage company to manage it, a presence on the ground in a foreign market, especially one as distant both geographically and culturally as China, is critical. The challenge is ensuring these staff remained linked into the organization and its culture through frequent contact with the home office, both by phone and in person.
8. And lastly, I can’t fail to mention Mark’s endorsement of engaging with a PR resource to help raise a company’s profile in its target markets.
By Leo Valiquette
If “location, location, location” is the axiom of real estate agents, then “reference customers, reference customers, reference customers” is the public relations equivalent.
Customers who have deployed a vendor’s product or service provide validation and demonstrate uptake in the market. They can speak in dollars and cents terms about why they adopted a particular product and the benefits and return on investment they have derived from it. This, more often than not, will make an editor sit up and take notice.
I’ve seen promising editorial opportunities with big name media outlets drift away for the simple reason that a client could not provide a happy customer willing to stand up and provide that third-party endorsement.
But is having the platinum, diamond-encrusted reference customer eager to shout your praises from the rooftops the ticket to piles of positive media coverage?
It certainly helps. However, that customer story must still be developed and presented in a manner that fits the current editorial needs of the media being targeted.
One of our clients, for example, has an enthusiastic reference customer on board who can articulate the pain points that were addressed by our client’s product and how it contributed to the overall growth and success of the customer’s business during a dramatic market boom.
However, the industry in which both client and customer operate is, like so many others right now, experiencing a downturn. Several of the media that I contacted no longer have the appetite for the growth and success story that was the obvious angle to pursue during the market upswing. That’s yesterday’s news. The angle that is timely and relevant now is how the customer is going to weather the downturn and how our client’s product will provide the operational efficiencies and cost savings that will improve margins and boost the bottom line.
As one editor put it, “It’s easy to succeed during a boom. The real test of a company’s viability is how it survives a downturn.” For many media outlets, that’s the story that is relevant now. Can we deliver that angle? Yes. But only by directly contacting the media most important to our client with a solid story angle and having an informal chat with each editor were we able to determine what elements of the reference customer’s story are the most important to garner the ink we want for our client.
By Leo Valiquette
Despite all the hype, hoopla and debate around social media as a marketing and public relations tool, there is one even more fundamental aspect of the Web that is far more pervasive: the search.
It seems weird to say “the search” without putting “Google” in there, but there are other services available to dig up information, Wikipedia being the most obvious. It used to be that information was power, now it’s an avalanche that overwhelms us. Intelligence is what’s important: the ability to filter through the overload to determine what is useful and chart trends or patterns that have meaning and relevance.
When all that information is so readily available and convenient, it’s easy to take it at face value without looking deeper and doing some good old-fashioned digging to verify facts and the credibility of the source. For a journalist on deadline eager to wrap up a story, it can be a trap. Take the example cited by Drew Benvie at Drew B’s take on tech PR, in which a fictional athlete was presented in an article as an actual person, thanks to a bogus profile on Wikipedia.
That’s not to suggest that Wikipedia is not a valid research tool, but it is vulnerable to abuse and demonstrates the importance of verifying facts and cross-referencing any online source of information.
For organizations sensitive to how their brand or image is being presented to the world, it is definitely important to keep an eye on such online information portals to ensure the accuracy of whatever information is being presented about them.
And while there are valid questions about the veracity of online information, what about the value of obtaining media coverage online instead of in print?
As a newspaper editor with only so many inches of space in the print product but much more on the website, I would often hear the complaint that running a story only online was somehow inferior to running it in print.
Sure, there is tactile satisfaction to be had in handling ink-stained paper, but it should be amply evident by now that content online lives far longer and reaches a far larger audience than the processed corpses of trees. In the newspaper business, I would get feedback on stories from readers on other continents after the content appeared online. The print product, on the other hand, was distributed in only one city. You do the math.
Kevin Dugan at the Bad Pitch Blog shares my sentiment and offers a video clip to help make the point.
By Leo Valiquette
How we communicate is just as important as what we communicate. And by “how” I don’t mean what tool should be drawn from the social media toolbox. I mean the language we use that either demonstrates frankness, sincerity and honesty, or obvious self-interest that will only push away your listeners. Timing is also key. It’s much easier to engage in dialogue with someone if they don’t feel your agenda is pressuring the conversation. If you only speak with someone when you expect or need something from them, you’ve conveyed the impression that this is nothing more than transactional relationship. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. Hardly the foundation for a long and fruitful association.
Today’s picks from the Blogosphere all touch on these points.
The first comes from Collective Conversation, where Kellie Major cites the example of a CEO who, in an address to his staff about cuts, demonstrates clearly and sincerely how he shares his employees’ pain.
In contrast, Joseph Thornley at Pro PR presents a somewhat different attempt at communication from the C-suite. In this case, it is RBC head honcho Gordon Nixon trying to reassure the bank’s customers that all is still right with the world and with the Canadian banking industry. Or is it really just a piece of self-promotional fluff that should have been distributed as a press release? You decide.
Lastly, we have words from the horse’s mouth about how to, and how not to, begin a dialogue with a journalist at Bulldog Reporter from Michael Singer, West Coast news editor for InformationWeek.com. And, no surprise here, he says waiting until you have a news release to peddle is not the best approach. He goes on to offer a number of other tips to keep in mind when chasing media on behalf of a client and how to make appropriate use of such avenues as Twitter.
