Know yourself
What do you want to be when you grow up? It’s not just a question for a young child or a student entering his or her college years. Instead, it’s a question that Kim says you should be asking yourself about your business.
“We always start with, ‘Who do we want to be when we grow up and who are we as a brand?’” he says. “We always keep that top of mind in terms of everything we do.”
Kim wants Red Mango to be the leading retailer of healthy and delicious treats, using frozen yogurt as the first platform to do that.
“So now you know what you want to become,” Kim says. “How are you going to get there? What are the values that are important to us? What are the values that are important to our customers?”
Identifying your company’s values may seem like a tedious process, but it boils down to what you believe in.
“It really depends on who you are and what’s important to you and your company and your managers and your founders as a team,” he says.
For example, if you’re in the computer industry, maybe being environmentally friendly is important to you or maybe it’s building the smallest computer. Neither one is wrong.
“But if you start wavering between the two, you start losing your own focus and start losing the focus of your management team and your resources,” Kim says. “Most importantly, your consumers get confused as to who you are.”
Identify what you’re most passionate about so that you stick with those values.
“Make sure you’re passionate about them, and the reason why you want to be passionate about them is actually so you don’t waver back and forth between the different passions,” he says. “When you’re passionate about something, that keeps you on track.”
Kim created a brand trifecta that says that Red Mango is a convergence of health, taste and style, so anything Kim does should support those things. He also created a “MangoFesto,” which is a two-page document that outlines what the company stands for, its values, objectives and goals. He’s taken that document and made it into a poster for each store so that the employees know what the goals are and to make sure that every decision is consistent with that brand philosophy.
This may sound all well and good, but how do you create your own version of the MangoFesto?
“Writing one is very important, but I guess the question is how to go about writing one,” he says. “For me, it’s keeping it very simple. Some people will have 10 or 15 objectives — we have three.”
His three objectives are get people to try the product, get them to know it’s good for them and give them a great in-store experience. He could have added other things like make sure your floors are clean or make sure you train people properly, but instead, he looked at the bigger picture.
“At the end of the day, kind of boil it down to what are the three most important things that you need to do that will enable everything else that you want to do and make those possible,” Kim says.
Then the objectives you come up with will naturally encompass the other things you want to accomplish. For example, if you make sure your floors are clean, it’s going to help the customer have a good in-store experience.
“The thing that you can do that’s not cool is you write it once, and you never come back to it, and it gets lost,” Kim says. “You have to make that part of the cultural fabric of your organization.”