Q. How do you determine the
goals your team should aim for?
Goals stem from the fact that
you get better or worse. You
never stay the same. So every
single day that you are operating,
you need to be better than your
last day’s work or better than
your last year’s effort or better
than your week before’s effort.
We measure all of those
because we learn from all those
numbers. We measure our new
customers; we measure our lost
customers who haven’t ordered
from us in 120 days. We measure too many things sometimes,
but we do have a lot of tools to
evaluate whether we’re getting
better in those areas or worse.
When we’re getting worse, we
try to look at a number of things
to find out why. Is it the managing performance? Is it the marketing performance? Is it a store
performance? Is it wrong product, wrong place performance?
Once we’ve made those constant assessments, then we go
after our targets for improvement.
Q. How do you sort through
all that information?
There’s no rocket science to it.
You say, ‘What is the problem?
Is the problem profit?’ Well, our
sales aren’t down. So then
you’ve got to dial in on food
costs, promotions, average ticket, some of those issues.
You dial in based on where
your weaknesses are showing
up, then you do the same for
your strengths. Take a look at
your strengths and say, ‘What is
making us do so much better in
sales, but our profitability is
dropping?’ So you look for solutions in different directions.
Look at the strengths and the
weaknesses at the same time,
because one usually affects the
other in the short term and definitely during the long term if you
don’t move on your direction.
Q. How do you decide how to
fix problems?
You’ve got to say, ‘Did we raise
prices too much? Was our advertising weak?’ We do that by talking to our local store management team, employees, then we
do customer surveys. Basically,
we assess and evaluate every
piece of the process. Once we
decide to make a change, we
take our problem and our solution idea — which usually comes
from the field — straight back to
the people who sell to the customers. If they don’t buy in to it,
we usually don’t do it — because
they’ll either sabotage it because
they’re not buying in to it or it’s
just a really bad idea.
HOW TO REACH: Cowabunga Inc., (770) 777-2217 or www.cowabungainc.com
