Set your priorities
Jarvis won’t talk process. His chief operating officer has meetings to work through process, but when he walks into the room for a meeting, the process talk stops.
“Her meeting either precedes or succeeds mine, but when we walk into the meeting that I call, if it wasn’t one of our strategic initiatives, we don’t talk about it,” Jarvis says. “It doesn’t matter if it’s relevant, timely, topical, it doesn’t matter. If it needs to get on this list, let’s talk about whether it should get on this list, but it doesn’t get to intrude on the strategic objectives we have for the business. Those are very clearly defined.”
Setting your top priorities is another key to taking a good company to the next level, and those objectives sit right on his desk in a PowerPoint that he can reference any time. It’s the only document that Jarvis works from during his staff meetings in order to avoid confusion or losing focus.
“It’s so easy to get pulled in so many different directions, and the only way I’ve been successful at keeping folks on track is to just not talk about the other things,” he says. “If you can’t devote any airtime to it, people will start to understand, ‘Huh, Bill only asks about the same 10 things all the time.’
Choosing what to focus on requires some research.
“Some of it is tangible data; it’s industry trends, that sort of thing,” Jarvis says. “It’s listening to customers and understanding what they really value. It’s listening to employees and figuring out what they’re hearing out in the marketplace and understanding what our competitors are doing.”
The key is asking questions and doing research, but Jarvis says people tend to get bogged down in the word “research” and think they have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“You can get in front of your customers and, in two hours, learn more than you can in most formal research,” he says. “Customers will tell you what they want and what their hot buttons are.”
For example, when Jarvis is in a Revol store and asks a new customer why he or she came in, the answer is rarely something about how the customer can save $25 a month or would prefer not being tied to a contract. It’s typically more like, “Those rats — grrrrrrr! My kid used 1,000 text messages over the weekend, and I got a bill, and it was $500, and I’m never going back to those guys again!”
“It’s an emotional reaction, …” Jarvis says. “It’s a very visceral response. I find that if you ask a question that gets a little more to the visceral response, I think you get something that’s more actionable.”
He suggests asking, “When was the last time you cursed us?” Even an enthusiastic customer can typically tell you about a time that he or she wanted to let you have it.
“That gets to a pain point that a customer has about something that’s very personal for them and very emotional for them, and that’s when customers either hire you or fire you,” he says. “It’s not a terribly rational process. It’s actually a fairly emotional process.”
It’s also important to ask employees questions, too, as they have the most interaction with your customers. He prefers asking, “If you were CEO for a day, what would you do to change this company for the better?”
“You get to their hot buttons pretty quickly,” he says. “They don’t think of 50 things. They think of two or three. Inevitably, when you have a list of 50 priorities, you have no priorities. You have to get it down to the critical few.”
In his first week of leading Revol, Jarvis spoke to more than 50 employees and customers. In asking these questions and understanding their frustrations, new opportunities began to unfold.
Jarvis uses a three-pronged filter: simple, different, better.
“It’s generally not any one of those attributes uniquely or specifically,” he says. “It’s that combination of attributes. If it’s different for the sake of being different, who cares? But if it’s simple and it doesn’t help the customer, who cares?”
He typically asks if the product can be simple, yet not simplistic, as in, can a phone be high-tech with a lot of functions but not be confusing to use? Also, can you manufacture it simple so that it drives down costs and you can pass those savings on to your customer? Is it different in that it will make you stand out from your competitor and give you unique positioning in the marketplace? Does it break convention?
If Jarvis can answer those questions with a yes, then he moves on to the third element — better. Does the idea actually improve a process or product?
“It’s got to pass all three of those filters, but that’s one of the ways I use to really determine where should we go with this and how do we turn it into something that looks and feels like Revol,” he says.
After going through these processes, Jarvis can set his top 10 priorities. From this process, Revol moved forward with creating two rate plans, regional and national, as well as adding new phones, family plans and cross-training employees so that customers didn’t have to deal with multiple people when they entered a store. As he and his team accomplish each item, he uses this process to add new priorities.
“When No. 6 on that list is done, it gets replaced by a new No. 10, and everything moves up one, and so on and so forth, and you just keep cycling your way through those.”
