At Borrego Solar Systems Inc., Aaron Hall encourages his roughly 60 employees to submit ideas on how the company can improve. The employee who submits the most innovative idea that quarter gets a $500 reward for helping the business move forward.
Innovation is the most important thing to the president at Borrego Systems, solar electric systems company, because he wants to make sure that his hot company doesn’t cool off due to complacency and staleness. Giving $500 for innovative ideas is just one way he combats that.
“It’s easy to fall into that trap when you don’t have to do work to get that phone to ring, but if you’re conscious about sustainable programs to sustain profits and growth, then you can’t take that position, so we do a lot of things to try to avoid that,” he says.
Smart Business spoke with Hall about how to drive innovation in business.
Create a strategy for innovation. Myself and the other executives, we dedicate a lot of time for uninterrupted executive retreats. We go off to a hotel conference room — there’s six of us now — and we don’t answer the phone, generally speaking, and don’t do the normal day-to-day business, and just think about the big picture and how our strategy should be formed. Think about competition and the big picture because you often get bogged down in the tactics of day-to-day.
It’s a long process. We actually went to a consultant, and we said, ‘Help us develop the process of developing our strategic initiatives.’ Not necessarily developing them, but the process was the most important thing. We met once a month for four or five months. In the end, we actually had a process and had developed some strategic initiatives.
[It’s] not only coming up with them but also being disciplined about executing them and then making sure you’re on track and kind of having a scorecard, if you will. That’s one thing to keep in mind. We actually sought outside help. It’s never a bad idea because typically you have people not in your industry, and they’re not blinded by the patterns that have developed and the status quo, and they come from a fresh perspective, and that’s always a great idea.
On top of that, we really look at the future. We’re looking about three or four years out and deciding what we want the company to look like at that point, how big do we want to be, what kind of customers do we want to be servicing, what kind of margins do we have, how do we stand out. Then we work backward. We said, ‘OK, that’s where we want to be, this is where we are today, how do we get there?’ From there, it’s easier to come up with a strategic initiative.
If you try to go from here looking forward, it’s a subtle difference, but it’s more difficult than going forward looking back because then if you’re starting from here, it’s hard to be strategic without just taking what you’re doing and making slight modifications to it or just doing more of what you’re doing and getting bogged down with, ‘This is what’s in front of us today.’ It’s part of the whole, ‘We need to continue to change.’