Create a plan
Around the same time as her town-hall tour, Monson also rallied her corporate employees together to create Operation Fast Forward to focus on helping the franchisees increase their profitable sales, decrease their expenses and assist them with restructuring debts.
She invited anyone who wanted to help to come out and brainstorm ideas. They also did a SWOT analysis — strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
“We said, if business went the way we wanted it to, what would it look like at the end of 2010,” she says. “From there, fill out some key objectives. We said, ‘Who wants to work on what team to put the meat on the bones for each of these objectives?’”
She says that getting employee involvement is especially important to have a plan be successful.
“Whenever you involve the team in creating a business plan, it becomes their plan,” Monson says. “The worst thing that leaders can do is go create their business plan and create their goals without any input because then when you say to them, ‘OK, here’s where we’re going,’ they’re thinking, ‘What do you know? You’re up there in the ivory tower. You don’t live the challenges we live every single day.’
Now once they had these sessions and came up with ideas, she then had to move forward. That can be a difficult challenge, especially when your team generates many ideas. She says to evaluate each on its cost and benefit.
“You have to make sure that all of our stakeholders benefit from our operation,” she says. “It’s using some wisdom and judgment from where to put the resources based on what you think they’re going to give you as far as the payoff. Sometimes you have to guess because you don’t know directly.
“You do as much research as you can and then you make a decision. Part of leadership is being willing to make a decision without having all the answers because you never can have all the answers. If you have to wait until you have all the answers, you’re just going to have analysis paralysis. Part of it is taking educated risks.”
When you look at each idea from these perspectives, it will help you make those crucial decisions, but at the same time, it helps employees understand why certain things were selected versus others.
“They feel engaged and they feel the plan is their plan, and they understood that we didn’t have unlimited resources, so we couldn’t do everything,” Monson says. “We had to invest the resources where we felt they’d get the highest return.”
One of the major initiatives she implemented was moving the business consultants, who go out to the franchise locations and help them implement new programs that will help their businesses, to the regions they oversaw. In 2009, they averaged 33 consultant visits a month with franchisees, but last year, they were averaging about 113 a month. As a result, sales have increased since implementation.
As these sales have increased as a result of her plan, Monson made good on her promise to reinstate the benefits she had eliminated. In June, about a year after the pay freeze, she gave raises. She also laid out plans to add back some sort of bonus toward the end of the year and was hoping to reinstate the 401(k) match early this year.
Overall, Monson is pleased with the progress she’s seen at Fastsigns, and now she feels that she’s garnered the trust of her employees and franchisees.
She says, “I’d say we’ve gone from the franchise group that had some concern of, ‘Who’s this new person we don’t know coming in as CEO?’ to, ‘Wow, she really cares about us, and she’s smart and she understands the business,’ so that certainly has changed.”
How to reach: Fastsigns International Inc., (800) 827-7451 or www.fastsigns.com
