Matt Rutledge prefers to
set the bar low. As founder and CEO of Woot Inc.,
he says the best way to have
excellent customer service is to
set low expectations and then
far exceed them.
The online retailer sells only
one item each day, and while
perusing Woot’s Web site, you’ll
read that if you have a problem
with your purchase, then you
need to figure out what you’re
doing wrong because you probably are doing something
wrong. If you have buyer’s
remorse, the Web site suggests
selling the item on eBay to save
everyone a lot of hassle.
Rutledge says that if customers are willing to do business at this level, they’ll be surprised by the high service they
actually receive, which makes
them want to purchase again.
This creative approach allowed
Rutledge to grow Woot to more
than $100 million in revenue
last year.
Smart Business spoke with
Rutledge about his approach to
business and why you don’t
want to paint smiley faces on
the walls.
Don’t micromanage. We’re a bootstrapped company from a small
stage, so the style that develops
from that is hands-on and wanting to be involved in the detailed
level but a balance of not micro-managing, not overshadowing
other people’s works and trying
to inspire independent thought.
It’s a tough line to walk. It’s a
lot of checking-in conversation
with people. Try to stay objective,
and you want to assess work output and understand what went
into it and be fair and objective
when you’re doling out praise or
suggesting change. You still want
to have touch points at the floor
level of the business, as well.
Micromanagement’s a negative, bad thing you want to
avoid. It’s a cultural problem
and an efficiency one. You want
to have a healthy culture and
work environment. If every
manager were heavy-handed or
too active in the detail work,
then there wouldn’t be much
time for strategy and overall
business direction thinking.
Assess work outputs. There are
some positions that lend to
measurement. Sales, purchasing, accounting — they have
black-and-white definitions of
good, mediocre or bad job.
When you get to old-school
business operations, you don’t
try to reinvent the wheel. If there
are commission plans and incentives that have made sense
for 100 years, let’s use those.
Trying to put metrics on a creative output department is a
classic example of an impossibility. Realize that, and don’t
have the same management
approach to a group of writers
as you would a group of sales-people. …
There is no metric to measure
the quality of creative work
other than a subjective pulse or atmosphere around the office or
in our audience for various initiatives. It really boils down to peer
opinion, so you want to start with
a core group of people that you
respect and then build from there.
In the creative departments that
we have, it really is a fair amount
of peer-to-peer driven growing.
Peer respect is a major factor.
Have a great work atmosphere. You
hope a lot of that is organic. You
don’t want to paint smiley faces
on the wall and throw meaningless parties — you don’t want
“The Office” TV show. You can
only input your ideas and direction for that every so often.
It helps if your company has a
somewhat exciting brand and
appeal to it. Our demographic is
fairly young and energetic toward
us, so internally, it’s the same
culture you hope for.
It’s fairly cliché, but don’t be
afraid to have fun. You don’t
want to have a draconian management style and cut down
every fun thing in your business.
There aren’t any rules. It’s going
to come down to personality
and letting people have their
space and seeing what develops.
You go through phases, and
maybe those phases are tied to
economic performance or maybe they’re seasonal. There are
causes for celebration, and there
are causes to clamp down and
meet goals and meet expectations of our audience.
Measure what you can. You want
to keep your finger on the pulse.
Then your job as an executive is
to share that pulse because the higher position you’re at, the
more points of data you have to
measure that pulse.
A lot of things are important,
so it’s not a short list. It’s more
an effort of what’s not important
and removing those from the
reports you get. You have to
have a good gut reaction. If you
find yourself spending time,
you’ll usually have a gut reaction, ‘Hey, this is disproportionate to the needs of this priority,’
and you can do a daily assessment of what your priorities are.
Prepare for growth. If you’re in a
constant state of growth, you
go through phases of speeding
along and then getting your legs
back under you.
Catching up becomes being
ready to recognize deficiencies
in departments. That’s how you
continue to fuel the growth. You usually see signs in work output
or frustration levels. … When
teams are stressed out and departments are bottlenecked,
those are pretty clear signs.
You probably hear about it
from them and don’t need to be
that proactive. It depends on
the work environment and the
mix of whether it’s a department you have metrics on … or
a department you’re relying on
personal skills and relationships
to measure.
It’s a lot of conversations with
your employees to find out what
their perceptions are. Ninety-plus percent of the time, your
employees know what you need
to do. It’s a matter of finding out
from them the direction that’s
necessary.
HOW TO REACH: Woot Inc., (972) 417-3959 or www.woot.com