Define and differentiate your business. You have to define your business scope: What’s our area of business? What’s our mission? What’s our basis for making decisions? … What’s the environment we’re going to create? What are the principles behind our actions? And ultimately, what do we want to be known for?
This brand exercise helped us do a better job of articulating who we are and what we stand for in a way that is no longer what everybody else is talking about.
Your brand is not your logo. It’s not your products. It’s not your services. Ultimately, your brand is being able to communicate these things in a meaningful way that differentiates us from our competition and that really reflects who we are.
Share the vision. The second thing was to communicate that vision often. I started blogging on our intranet site, sharing the vision of who we are and where we’re going, [giving] frequent updates in terms of where and how we were living by the strategic plan and sharing the constant progress and the successes and the challenges.
In addition to that, I started to publish a newsletter. The newsletter is sent out to our franchisees. [It creates] a sense of inclusion by having franchisees participate in the development of stories, sharing new happenings.
You have to inspect what you expect. To that end, we set up a number of tracking systems. We have, for example, a bulletin board on our intranet system. We encourage franchisees to weigh in on where and how these various initiatives are going for them, challenges that they’re having, being able to ask questions and get honest answers.
It’s important to have key performance indicators and to track them on a regular basis.
Measure customer response. Oftentimes in [customer] surveys, you’re asking the wrong questions and the answers aren’t going to the right people.
There’s only one question that matters, and that question basically is, ‘Would you recommend us to a friend or associate?’ (Our survey) asks two questions. First, on a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend PuroClean to a friend or associate?
If somebody answers with a 9 to 10, we ask the follow-up question, ‘What did we do well? If somebody answers 7 to 8, we ask, ‘What could have we done better?’ And if somebody answers from 0 to 6, the question is, ‘How did we let you down?’
Break down the survey response and attribute it back to … the person that actually performs the work. [We can] track the performance of each employee on the basis of how they interfaced with the customer.
HOW TO REACH: PuroClean, (800) 775-7876 or www.puroclean.com
