By Leo Valiquette
“Even if there’s blood on the street there’s always somebody making money. You just have to make sure you’re on the right side of it.”
The son of poor Croatian immigrants, he sold his first company for $100 million in 2000. His second company, launched in 2003, is now the largest privately held IT solutions provider and integrator in Canada. When not residing in one of his posh homes, he holds court in CBC’s Dragon’s Den.
Robert Herjavec is a living example of what hard work and vision can achieve. He took the stage to close out this week’s 2009 Ottawa Business Summit and treated his audience to his insights on what it takes to achieve business and personal success.
I scribbled furiously the entire time he spoke and have distilled his pearls of wisdom to the following:
1. There is no stereotypical external factor for success. Fame and fortune is not reserved for the beautiful people in the world, nor can a successful person be judged by appearances. One of his neighbours has a company with 12,000 staff, an original Monet on his wall and a 15-year-old car in the driveway. And, bad people do succeed. “There are people who beat their dog and run a great business.”
2. However, he has never met a successful person who didn’t have a purpose, and that purpose must be more than the accumulation of wealth. If all one pursues is money, they will hit a wall. Herjavec’s goal was to build the best company in its industry. The money followed.
3. Achieving that success requires vision. When he started his second company, the problem was too much available money and not enough vision about what it should be. Money keeps you in the game. It doesn’t make a good company.
(Geez, have we learned that lesson in Ottawa after the VC excesses of the tech boom?)
4. And on that note, with particular relevance to Ottawa: If you build a better mousetrap, the world will not beat a path to your door. There is no such thing as a good idea. It’s all about execution. Sales and marketing. And while he would hire the fellow who can sell ice to Eskimos, Herjavec would much rather have the fellow with the foresight to sell water in the desert beside a broken-down bus.
5. “Discipline is the art of doing what is necessary even when you don’t want to.” Inaction is easy. Citing his own recent experience running a marathon for the first time and the amputee with a prosthetic leg who passed him, Herjavec put it plain: “Winners find a way, losers find an excuse.” Which invariably means, “For you to win, somebody has to lose.”
6. The importance of leadership, which he defined as the ability to get people to do something they wouldn’t otherwise be able to achieve–lift them from their comfort zone.
7. It’s all about sales. “Nothing matters until you sell something.” Which also speaks to the value of branding and marketing to drive those sales. But after sales comes service – sales may sell the first night in a hotel room, but service will keep the guest coming back.
8. Business is a sprint. “You’ve got to go now.” It’s better to take action than sit around planning the next five days. Once you secure an opportunity, then it becomes a marathon.
9. Feed the whales, not the minnows. Especially in a tough economy, devote your time and effort to those prospects, those core customers, who will support your business in tough times. He didn’t cite the 80-20 rule, but it obviously applies. For example, Herjavec’s business positions itself around high value, high touch service. When faced with a customer who likes to shop around and bargain hunt just to keep his suppliers on their toes, his preference is to dump them in favour of more loyal customers who appreciate the value of what they are getting for their money.
10. And when it comes to suppliers for your business, it’s a love/hate relationship. At the end of the day, your business is your business and they’re looking out for their business, not yours.
11. Learn to focus, which he defined as the ability to make the most of the 24 hours in a day and “distinguish the truly important from the urgent that happens every day.”
12. Your business is not your family, it’s just business. Avoid emotional attachments.
13. Make it fun and be resilient. Nobody likes a negative person. What’s important is not what you say, but how you make people feel. There may be really bad days when you just want to walk away, but that just proves you care. What’s vital is having the resilience to believe that tomorrow will be a better day.
14. It’s not who you know, but how brutally honest you are with yourself. “The worst lies you tell in business are the ones you tell yourself.”
15. And lastly, business is like a game of Whac-A-Mole. Keep swinging until you hit something.
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 Francis Moran
Ottawa’s two start-up Scotts — I refer to their common first name, not their nationality, which would be spelled with just one ‘t’ — are in the middle of a six-city, two-country roadtrip to visit co-working spaces in each city and to spin the gospel according to Dex, the nifty CRM application now in beta from one Scott’s (Annan, that is) development company, Mercury Grove. The other Scott (Lake, that is) recently launched his own social media consulting firm and has been working on Dex with Annan.
The pair have been posting regular updates, including videos, at StartupOttawa. Besides catching Annan in the no-no act of texting while driving, the videos show co-working spaces in Ottawa, Montréal and Toronto, and report on the feedback Annan has been receiving for his new product. Next week should see reports from New York, Boston and Philadelphia.
Go down the road with these guys; it’s an interesting ride.
By Francis Moran
The quote in my headline comes from a beautiful little story that is warming the hearts of Canadians today. Jorma Hogbacka was a regular customer at the Tim Hortons coffee shop in his hometown St. Catherines. Apparently, he had a colourful way about him, part of which was to ask the coffee shop staff to help him pick his lottery numbers, with Jorma promising to share any winnings with them.
Well, Jorma won. Big time. His was one of three winning tickets in Saturday’s $43-million jackpot, netting the retired welder a tidy $14.8-million.
And his instant millionaire status did not cause him to forget his promise. True to his word, yesterday he handed a $30,000 cheque to former Tim Hortons staffer Melissa Grivich, who, according to the Globe and Mail, now works as a police officer. And Jorma is working with the iconic Canadian coffee chain to find four other employees he says are on his list to receive similar big tips for past performance.
I’m writing about this because I constantly harp on customer service and how it can be a sharp, effective and sustainable competitive advantage in a world where commodity pricing and reverse engineering rapidly erode any other leg up a company might initially have in the market place. And even though she is a paramount example of how things should be, the newly-enriched Melissa Grivich doesn’t think she did anything special.
“It was my job. I was serving coffee. It wasn’t the greatest job in the world, but I made the best of it,” the Globe quotes her as saying. “It’s just unbelievable how far customer service can go.”
‘Nuff said, Melissa. ‘Nuff said.
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Business building blocks
January 29, 2009 by Leo Valiquette
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 […]
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Reaping the rewards of a good reference
January 27, 2009 by Leo Valiquette
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 […]
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The value of shooting the breeze
January 23, 2009 by Danny Sullivan
By Danny Sullivan At inmedia, we frequently position ourselves against those whose perspective is that PR is “all about relationships.” And, while I wholeheartedly stand by our mantra that it is the ability to convey a story and not the relationship that dictates PR success, it cannot be denied that relationships are still important. They are even more relevant from the perspective of […]
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The double-edged Web
January 20, 2009 by Leo Valiquette
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, […]
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Why is a startup like murder?
January 16, 2009 by Francis Moran
By Francis Moran Why is a startup like murder? Well, according to two-time start-up veteran Shawn Griffin, it’s not because the long hours and uncertain outcome will kill you. Rather, as he told an assembly of alumni of OCRI‘s popular Entrepreneur’s Edge educational program last night, both murder and startups require the same three elements. […]
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Plain talk without the agenda
January 13, 2009 by Leo Valiquette
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. […]
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Could recession spell the end for print?
January 12, 2009 by Danny Sullivan
By Danny Sullivan “It is early days, but it’s already clear that 2009 will be a crucial year for news media.” Cautionary words from the Financial Times’ chief exec, John Ridder, as Brand Republic reports today that the business newspaper giant is laying off 80 staff, while still intending to expand its online presence. Coupled with other recent news […]
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Twitterpated
January 08, 2009 by Leo Valiquette
By Leo Valiquette Pondering the place of social media in the marketing and PR toolkit has been a familiar theme on this blog as the industry as a whole attempts to understand how best to approach and manage audience engagement with such a dynamic, informal and immediate variety of channels as those that fit under the general […]
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