Most furniture business owners dream of a referral-based business with quality leads that end up in a sale. Oh, and did I mention that most business owners also want to be multi-millionaires? This kind of stuff does not happen without a plan and without systems that make sense
Referrals bring sales— easier sales than starting from scratch. If you are serious about profiting in business, you must have a referral “system” in place. A big part of this referral “system” has to do with your employees and associates, so that’s what I will talk to you about now. You can actually create (that’s a good thing) or block (that’s a bad thing) your stream of quality referrals by how you approach hiring and by how treat your team members day in and day out.
Your employees are in direct contact with your customers, and customers tell prospects about you. One way or another, they share the good, the bad, and the ugly—nothing you can do about that fact. If you treat your employees just “O.K.” or “good enough”, that is precisely the energy and attitude they will have towards your customers.
Smart business owners regularly invest in the future of their business and in ways to constantly increase profits. You do all of these things by investing in you employees and in their well-being.
Hire Great People
Investment starts first with attracting and hiring the RIGHT kind of employees (JUST AS you seek to attract the right kind of customer), and then taking really great care of them all along the way.
It’s not who you know, it’s how they act! Hire the disposition, and train for skills later. A skillful snob, punk, or know-it all will do your business much more harm than good.
Part of knowing if someone has a good outlook lies in their attitude about work in general. As part of the application process (particularly with contract sales people), ask them to complete a simple task related to the type of job they are seeking, and ask them to return the completed task within a day or two. This will weed out the bumps on a log pretty quickly and save you lost referrals and lost profits later.
Avoid having a stuffy, formal interviewing process. That’s not a good way to see people in their natural light. Lighten up the interview session so you can see the better side of people, not the awkward side. Do something unusual or silly. You could for example, have an Italian soda bar in house, and as you are talking with recruits, make Italian sodas with them. It sounds insane, but don’t you want to get a glimpse of who they really are while you have them there? Create a relaxed atmosphere while interviewing. If you are saying “that’s ridiculous”, you are totally missing the point!
During the interview process, look for a smile, and keep an eye out for pleasantness— even with the “go-getter” or “assertive” types. Many assertive people are quite polite, pleasant, and happy. That’s who you want.
Treat your People Well
It’s really simple. If you treat your employees just “O.K.” or “good enough”, that is precisely the energy and attitude they will have towards your customers, which will work against the business you try so hard to build. It’s just not worth it.
Pay Your Great People Well
Don’t say you can’t afford to pay well. You cannot afford not to. Referral-based businesses are not the bargain-basement kind, and people who do business with a company based on a referral from a friend almost always expect to work with a business who has invested in great people. These prospects don’t expect to deal with unskilled people who work for base wages, who have sub-par attitudes and no sense of business “ownership”. Referral-type clients are a classier breed. That’s why they often pay a premium for the products and services that are important to them—so important that they depend on the recommendation of a trusted friend and not on a random ad. Pay your employees well.
Train Your People
Begin educating your new employees immediately. They should start off with a full understanding of who you are as a company, what your branding is all about, who your customers are, and what they mean to you. Their education should include learning about the pride you feel as a company when you serve each and every customer with amazing products and services. This should happen BEFORE an employee or consultant ever connects with one of your customers. Training should also include job skills, and ongoing training should include advanced career skills, and regular educational opportunities aimed at fostering growth, creativity, team-building, and innovation.
See Your People as Valuable Assets
Make a long-term commitment to treat each and every employee as a valuable asset and respected team member. This might start with dropping the term “employee” from this point on, and replacing it with something more meaningful (you decide).
Team members should feel safe, heard, valued, appreciated, respected, and admired for their unique contributions. Their expectations should not be a secret to management. Workplace expectations should be approached and discussed in a safe setting very early on. Don’t ever be fooled into thinking that if a team member is “happy”, their workplace expectations are being met. They may not be, but nothing may be threatening these “hidden” expectations at the time. If workplace expectations are never voiced and things change, you can easily have an unhappy associate and never know why. Have a comfortable system that allows people the opportunity to reveal their workplace expectations before things have a chance to go wrong, and continually keep the lines of positive communication, care, and concern open.
Allow for workplace autonomy. No one likes to be micro-managed or hovered over. If you feel you must do that, you are hiring the wrong people. Individuals, especially brilliant ones, need to feel they have a sense of control in order to flourish and produce their best work. This goes back to feeling valued and trusted. Personally, I would rather make little money and have great freedom in my work than have a lot of income with no autonomy, and most of my colleagues feel the same (as I am sure you do). Train and then let go. We are all adults here, and in order to be our best, adults need to feel in control, not controlled.
When it all comes down, it comes to this: Treat team members as brilliantly as you do your customers, because in a very real and not so indirect sense, they ARE your customers, since they connect with your customers on a regular basis! If your customers like what they see and love how they are treated, and if they are thrilled with your team members (which only happens when team members are treated well by the company), they will naturally tell others, creating powerful and trust-based referrals, and soaring profits. It does not work any other way.
Have a Wildly Successful Week of Great Tem-Building,
Margo
Margarett (Margo) DeGange, M.Ed. is a contributor to FURNITURE WORLD Magazine an a Business and Design Coach in the Home Fashions Industry. She creates and delivers custom training programs for managed businesses and their sales consultants to help them communicate better with customers and increase sales and profits. Margarett is a Writer and Professional Speaker, and the President of The DeGangi Group and The DeGangi School of Interior Decoration, with both on sight and on-line courses in Interior Decorating, Marketing, and Redesign. For almost 20 years she has helped individuals and managed business owners in the interior fashions and decorating industries to earn more while fully enjoying the process.
Two of Margo’s popular products for furniture store owners and their sales professionals are The Decorating School Crash Course Power-Ed Pack (9 design lessons on video/audio with 12 hours of content), and the matching Decorating School Crash Course Learner Files to measure learning, provide added interactivity, and motivate sales consultants to own their opportunities for growth.
Visit Margo DeGange’s website at www.DecoratingForProfits.com for more information. Send email and questions to her at Margarett@furninfo.com.