Study the winners
To transform TCP from a wildly growing start-up to a company set up for long-term success, Yan studied the highest-performing companies in other industries to find out how they were successful.
“We shouldn’t just bury ourselves in our growth,” he says. “We shouldn’t bury ourselves in excitement and say, ‘Wow, we are doing so good.’ We should learn from everybody else. So we cannot just do what we are doing the best but also learn from people to operate this company the best efficient way that we can.”
Yan identified companies that epitomized the qualities he sought — quality and efficiency. It didn’t matter if they were in the lighting industry, the food industry or retail. If you limit your research to your own industry, you may be missing valuable ideas that can help you. Yan says everyday operations procedures are 90 percent the same, and only 10 percent of the procedures are industry-specific.
After researching several top companies that Yan wanted to model TCP after, he found out that being innovative wasn’t enough. The greatest companies don’t simply have uncontrolled growth — they are more disciplined in their approach to business growth, and they take the time to refine every stage of their business.
“For instance, Wal-Mart ended up where they are today because they have the best operation costs, period,” Yan says. “The last four or five years, we have grown at any cost. We grow to try to satisfy the market, and we grow to try to push the market forward, which costs us money.”
So Yan determined that the challenge facing his company was how to reduce those operational costs without sacrificing its growth.
“However, right now we are not just looking at how the company grows. We are also looking at how efficiently we are going to manage the company and deliver the growth.”
