Success breeds success.
The tenet is far from revolutionary, but Denny Gerdeman still spreads it among
his 50 employees with vigor.
“When you have a successful
project and a happy client,
guess what? More business,”
says the principal and co-founder of Chute Gerdeman
Inc., a retail design firm.
To create this snowball effect,
Gerdeman grants his employees the autonomy to flex their
creative muscles and maintains
a constant channel of communication with clients.
That old adage has paid off
for Gerdeman, whose company posted 2007 revenue of
$7 million, up from 2003 revenue of $3.4 million.
Smart Business spoke with
Gerdeman about the importance of establishing a strategic plan and how to determine
how much growth your business can accommodate.
Q. How important is it to
establish a strategic plan?
If you don’t know where
you’re going, any road will get
you there. We draw a very
clear chart of the direction for
the design, based upon what
the brand attributes are. Once
we’ve established those attributes, those then help define
what the design is going to be.
It really eliminates a tremendous amount of guesswork.
It’s a very surgically done
approach. Certainly, there’s
design applied and art to it,
but it’s very much a business
strategy that we use as we
start developing that design
strategy. Otherwise, you’re
throwing darts at a big wall.
We start out every year with a game plan of what we want
to end up with by the end of
the year. And the same way
with our clients — we can’t be
successful with ourselves
unless we know how we’re
going to do it for our clients.
Q. How do you determine
how much growth you can
handle?
I have found, as a rule of
thumb, that growing 15 percent
has always been my target because it’s a creative service, and
it’s all driven by people.
You can’t do quality
work on every single
project if you’re growing
too fast. It’s about how
you teach the new individuals that you bring
into a company. How
you find the right individuals to bring into a company. That puts a bit of a
limit on how fast we can
grow, but it’s a self-imposed limit. We’re
much more about quality
than we are quantity.
Our ambition has never
been to be the biggest.
What I want to do is be
well-known for the kind
of work that we do, the
quality of work that we
put out. We can make a good
enough margin doing that versus just having to have a high-volume place that just pushes
projects through the doors.
We’d make more money overall if we did it that way, possibly, but it’s just not what is my
motivation.
Q. Once you have the right
people at your company, how
do you keep them?
We’ve made it a policy that we
would treat everyone like they were family. It sounds hokey,
but we really did make it warm
and friendly. It’s just our culture
of being open-minded.
We don’t have strict discipline.
(Employees) know they have to
get their jobs done and the projects completed within schedules and budgets.
Could I run it tighter and
make more money? I’m sure we
could, but you’re not going to
get the best results. You have to
allow them the flexibility and
the opportunity to flex their
design muscles. That’s how we get the best work, and that’s how we get the best talent.
Q. How important is constant
communication with clients
during a project?
If clients don’t hear from you,
they don’t know what’s going
on, they start to wonder what’s
happening. On active projects,
we’re communicating every day
with our clients, letting them
know what’s going on, what the
status is, when they’re going to
see something. There’s always
constant dialog; that way, there
aren’t surprises.
We make them a partner in
the whole process so they’re
working with us as we make
design decisions.
We allow them to be involved
in the choices and have a voice.
That’s very important, and
when they have that voice, they
become part of the process and
they take ownership. Once they
have ownership, they’re
absolutely less apt at the end of
the day to say, ‘I don’t care for
this; this is not what I thought I
was going to get.’
It really does increase the likelihood of having a successful
project.
Q. How do you keep going in
tougher economic times?
It’s really giving it the best
effort every day and being
extremely persistent. Nobody
wins every day. It doesn’t happen. But if you can win three
out of five days of the week,
four out of five days of the
week, you’re going to be very
successful.
I believe in being persistent,
always being positive, doing
your best and getting the best
people you can find and supporting them.
HOW TO REACH: Chute Gerdeman Inc., (614) 469-1001 or www.chutegerdeman.com