Seek out new opportunities
Jarvis is enamored with Arm & Hammer baking soda. It’s not that he loves to cook or clean particularly, but it’s the fact that the company was able to find an alternative use for its product to increase sales. There were already many known uses for baking soda — cleaning and baking in particular — but then the company came up with something new.
“Baking soda was not used to put in your refrigerator, and then they convinced people — put it in your fridge, pull off the lid, it’ll soak up odors, and then throw it away every three months,” Jarvis says. “That was a brilliant growth strategy. Convince your customers to buy your product — and then throw it away.”
Jarvis says that if you want to take your company to the next level, then you have to actively seek out growth, just like Arm & Hammer did.
“You can’t play defense,” Jarvis says. “In fact, I think far too many businesses today are playing defense. I can see the log
ical recoil from being hit with the recession that we’re in, but at the same time, I think you have to go on the offensive, and you can’t wait for growth to find you. You have got to seek it out.”
For example, when Revol started, it was geared toward younger customers. As the company grew, it saw a way to connect those people with their families, so Revol began offering family plans. Jarvis could have stopped there, but he kept pushing and saw that some people wanted a small business plan — and wasn’t a small business just like family? Wouldn’t an employer love to be able to hand a phone to employees and tell them to go crazy with it and not have to worry about them running up their bill just from normal usage or because they become disgruntled? So he began offering a small business plan, as well.
“It’s finding parallels in other segments or categories that might apply to your business,” Jarvis says.
You also have to make sure you’re paying attention to the macro trends in your industry. For example, when Jarvis started noticing that text message usage was rising while voice minutes were decreasing, he could have simply thought that people were texting more, but instead he looked deeper at this trend. What he found was that more parents were getting their kids on a wireless plan, and kids, not wanting their parents to overhear their conversations, were texting instead of talking. Seeing this trend and the way the marketplace was heading because of it, he was able to revamp Revol’s line of phones to tailor them more toward Web use and texting.
“It all starts with the management of that growth from studying the macro trends and understanding at, perhaps, an unintuitive or in a very vague or obscure set of data what’s causing that and figuring that out,” he says. “I think that’s the best way to manage growth. Then you can truly commit to, ‘We’re going to grow in this segment of the market with this product in this time frame.’”
The last way to find new opportunities is to look at your own consumer experiences. By seeing how complicated the cell-phone buying process was, Jarvis knew he wanted to make it easier, but he also drew from an experience at Nordstrom to improve the service. When a college-aged apartment neighbor was constantly playing his music too loud and talking to him about it hadn’t resolved the issue, Jarvis lost it one night and began thumping his Nordstrom shoetrees as hard as he could on the wall toward his neighbor. The result? Broken shoetrees. He slinked back into Nordstrom and got new ones, but the store wouldn’t accept any payment.
“I said, ‘Oh no. I broke them — I banged them on the wall,” he says. “Nope. They wouldn’t accept any money for them.”
It was an amazing customer service experience that Jarvis has never forgotten, and in the same way, he enjoys being able to tell customers to talk and text all they want and they won’t get charged for it. So by simply looking at your own experiences, it can help you find ideas for your business.
“I think that complexity can hinder a process in a pretty dramatic way, and that there’s genius in simplicity,” he says.
Looking for parallels and trends helps keep your company focused, moving forward and makes more sense than just trying to grow for growth’s sake.
“That, to me, is a proactive indicator rather than, ‘We need to grow — you know? OK, let’s just go grow. He told me to grow, and I don’t know what that means, but I’m going to add five stores.’ Does that really help us?”
How to reach: Revol Wireless, (800) 738-6547 or www.revol.com
