If you don’t believe in the power of the
written word, Paul Bordner II has a
book for you — a book that changed the way his company does business.
Several years ago, his Gahanna-based
company, Laser Reproductions, was growing fast, capturing good market share —
and becoming arrogant.
“Our customer service was lousy, and we
had to grow up and look at how we were
servicing customers,” Bordner says. “This
book really hit the nail on the head.”
So how did the company’s president
discover “Customer Satisfaction is
Worthless, Customer Loyalty is
Priceless” by Jeffrey Gitomer — the
book that became required reading
for his employees?
“One of our top customers sent us
a copy and said, ‘I think you guys
better read this,’” he says. “When we
first got it, we didn’t realize what
they were trying to say, but once we
read it, we knew exactly what they
were trying to say. They respected
us enough that they thought, ‘We
need to bring this to your attention.
You guys need to do something
about it if you want to keep us
around.’”
That customer has remained
loyal to Laser Reproductions,
which specializes in rapid prototyping and product development.
Bordner’s company now employs
45 people and has increased revenue from $4.9 million in 2004 to
$6.75 million in 2006, with a
strategic goal of reaching $20 million by 2012.
Smart Business spoke with
Bordner about how he turns good advice
into a growth strategy.
Q: How do you grow a company?
Utilize outside advisers in seeking advice
and then implement the advice that they
give. A lot of the advisers we have say it’s
nice to finally have a company implement
what they suggest.
That tells me that a lot of companies
bring advisers in but don’t implement
what’s in front of them. We strive for continuous improvement, and we can’t do it
alone, so we seek outside advice.
Outside advisers share what works and
what doesn’t work, and they give us different ideas to try. We try to create an atmosphere where it’s not a sin to fail, but you
have to learn from your mistakes.
Q: How do you create and communicate
that culture?
We award our weekly Helping Hand,
which is given from peer to peer, to somebody who’s helped out or come up with a new idea. One of the simplest ideas was
given by an employee years ago: differentiating products using different color folders. Something that simple is still with us
today.
We also spend 10 to 15 minutes as a company in daily morning huddles. We stand
up — you’re not allowed to bring any food
or drink to the huddle — and we first read
our mission and our vision statements. I
would challenge anyone to come in our
door and ask any of our employees what
our mission or vision statement is, and they
should know it.
Then, we’ll hand out the morning cartoon, which is typically work-related but
funny. Then we’ll do our What’s Up review:
what the salespeople are doing, is anyone
touring the facility, who is sick or on vacation. It can be personal things, too. If somebody did something really exciting over the
weekend, they can share it.
During the second portion of the meeting, we review financial numbers for the
day. The more information you can feed
the employees, the more they feel part of
the decision-making. We used to get too
detailed with the numbers, and they
would walk away with the glazed-eye
look like, ‘Oh my gosh, what are all
these numbers?’ So we’ve really
made it simple: We look at top-line
numbers and bottom-line numbers;
we don’t look at anything in between.
The last thing we do is the
Information Funnel. Employees can
bring anything to the huddle that may
be a roadblock, something that’s keeping them from doing their job or ideas
that may help them do their job better.
Those will get logged, and then we try to
eliminate the roadblocks on a daily
basis.
Ninety percent of the huddle’s pre-typed and ready to go; everybody comes
in, and we review everything. We’re not
there to solve anything, just to spit out
information and review it. The solving
comes later.
Q: What advice would you share with
leaders of other fast-growth companies?
To provide good service; you should
always have a warm body answering the
phone and willing to help whenever possible. Right after we read the Gitomer book,
we hired a director of first impressions and
got rid of our voice mail system.
The other rule of thumb here is, if a customer calls, and the management team is in
a meeting, the customer is offered the first
option of getting us out of that meeting if
he needs to talk to us now. Sometimes the
customer may need to take advantage of
that, and it’s nice to give him that option.
HOW TO REACH: Laser Reproductions, (614) 552-6905 or
www.laserrepro.com
