Swing for the fences
If you really want to turn the corner, you need to go beyond refocusing your company to find a few areas you can make a difference and then use your limited resources to take a big swing.
“You need to identify trends, and you need to go out in the
trenches and identify your customers as well as customers that
don’t choose your product,” Bassoul says.
So when Middleby’s focus on ovens turned up, Bassoul began
making visits to customers that bought his product and ones that
didn’t.
“I tend to spend a lot more time with customers that don’t buy
my product, and I’m not trying to convince them to buy my product,” he says. “I’m trying to learn why they didn’t buy us and what
they don’t like about the products they use so when I go back to
my customer they buy me because I become better.”
But this is where Bassoul says you have to really pay attention to
see what innovations can truly spark the industry.
“How many people tell you they are customer-driven?” he
says. “We are not customer-driven, we are customer-driving.
Customers don’t know an iPod; they can’t help you create an
iPod.”
So to create an iPod, you have to pick up on things beyond what
people are complaining about by sitting with them long enough to
listen to current state of their business. At Middleby, for example,
Bassoul noticed two things in restaurants that might not seem
directly related to his business. One, restaurants were cutting back
on costs wherever they could. Two, the trend of dining out casual
was growing every day.
So Bassoul took everything he had and put it into addressing
these issues. Middleby decided that it would build its brand up
around more casual dining — going so far as to make that brand
global — and put all of its engineering focus on the innovation
required to make more energy-efficient ovens.
“We bet the company on these things, and that’s what people need
to do,” he says. “We didn’t take on 20 projects. The customer told us change that
knob to red or green; we didn’t want to
waste our time. We wanted to do bold
moves, so in 2000, we bet on energy saving.
We put huge resources in designing ovens
and fryers with energy management systems that could save customers hundreds
of dollars — and today, thousands — on
the monthly utility bill. It was the same
year Hummer introduced H2 at 9 miles a
gallon.”
The company also attacked the global
market by going into markets where there
was no local player and building test
kitchens and funding complete operations.
Both moves were completely different
than anything that Middleby’s competitors
were doing — and that’s exactly the point.
“When you look at our competitors, they
are still trying to change knobs,” Bassoul
says. “We’re not working there, we’re
working on huge disruptive technology,
we’re working on plasma TV versus tube
TV, we’re working on iPod versus
Walkman.”
As a result, Middleby today has been
growing its international business by double
digits annually and 30 percent of its
employees work overseas. Oh, and in case
you didn’t guess, customers have been
pretty interested in the more efficient
equipment, too.
