Richard Glikes sees the change coming, and he’s telling everyone he can about it.
As the executive director of Home Theater Specialists of America, he knows that people have changed the way they think about home entertainment drastically in just the last few years — and the more technology improves, the more they’ll expect.
So at HTSA, the 60-member cooperative of home theater and systems integration specialists, Glikes is constantly pushing the group to be ready for tomorrow.
“The business model is changing rapidly,” says Glikes of the group, which did $450 million in sales last year. “Our members who are retail stores are going to end up being like general contractors, they’re going to be like technology specialists … and there’s going to be a lot of new technology that we’ll have to understand and communicate to them.”
Smart Business spoke with Glikes about how he keeps his priorities straight while keeping up with those changes and about what Bob Dylan taught him about training.
Stay on track. I had a directing project in graduate school at Villanova, and I had a scene that had about 15 people and I called a rehearsal and I’d gone to all my friends and said, ‘Do you want to be in the play?’ And they all said, ‘Sure’ and about five people showed up. I called it again and eight people came. So what I did was I cut out the scene. Basically what that taught me to be was flexible — you have to be able to adjust on the fly, and you can’t be rigid.
You have to be able to adjust to the situation and be intelligent about it, and a lot of people get overwhelmed. If you have 10 different things you have to get accomplished, my way of business is you attack them one at a time. Other people get overwhelmed because, ‘Oh, I have 10 things I have to do; I can’t get them done.’ That’s because they’re trying to deal with 10 things at once. I will sort them out and deal with them one thing at a time. The same with personal problems: People have three or four personal problems, they get overwhelmed, they get stressed out. Deal with them one at a time.
I try to prioritize; I make lists every day. I have a yellow pad that’s on my desk and I try to prioritize who I’m going to call, and then I check them off as I call them, and I work through a list on a daily basis. You also have to prioritize where you’ll get the most action. I’m fortunate I have some very good assistants that I can delegate specific responsibilities to, and they do a very good job.
If you write it down and refer back to it, you get it done. If you just leave it to your imagination, you’ll get distracted. It’s much easier for me to have it down on paper, in front of me, and I know I’ll get through it. I don’t believe in calling people back the next day; I believe in calling them back the same day.