Curtis Moll has a simple yet effective growth strategy for his company. The chairman and CEO of MTD Products Inc. finds a struggling company with name recognition within his industry, buys its brand name, adds it to his company and backs it up with quality manufacturing processes. That strategy has helped Moll grow his Valley City-based business, which produces the Cub Cadet, Troy-Bilt, Yard-Man and other lawn and garden power equipment brands. Founded in 1932 by Moll’s father and two other German immigrants who “had $3,500 in their pocket,” MTD has become a billion-dollar business. Smart Business got Moll’s thoughts on how he focuses on teamwork, innovation, communication, recognition and taking advantage of opportunities.
Work as a team.
If you’re weak in one area or another, you don’t have a strong company. You can have a great engineering or manufacturing department but if you have a poor finance and accounting department, you won’t make it.
Every discipline has got to be represented. Every discipline has to be willing to work with all of the others if we’re going to make the company a success. So we strive on a daily basis to pull our disciplines together. The best way to do that is to develop and encourage the right skills and the right people to work as one.
Keep your eye on costs.
We hear about companies going into Honduras, the Philippines, China and India. If all we’re going to make is a commodity, we aren’t going to cut it. So innovation is key — in products, in processes and in marketing.
No matter who you talk to today, if they’re buying your products or your components, in their minds, cost and quality are a given. They don’t even talk about it anymore; they just expect it.
But if you’re going to be a good supplier and a successful company, you can never take your eye off of cost. You can innovate and get a little bit more from that innovation, but you can’t get a ton more. It’s important to keep cost and quality in front of us every single day of the year. We work very hard to do that.
Share financials.
We meet quarterly with all of our salaried people. We go through our financial results, and we talk about certain challenges, customers, products and situations. Now that doesn’t sound particularly strange or enlightening, but for us, as a private company, it is.
Five years ago, we never shared our financial results with our salaried workforce; we did with a few key people. But we discovered that if we’re going to expect people to do a better job, if we’re going to expect them to compete in a global economy, they better understand the whole picture, and they better have a good understanding of how well or how poorly the company is doing.
We have now opened ourselves up very quietly. Every quarter, we meet in our corporate headquarters, where we have 500 people today.
We bring together two executives to put on the presentation. Each quarter, it’s a different two executives, so the meeting has a little different slant. We have about an hour presentation and an hour question-and-answer. The next day, those of us who didn’t make the presentation head out to our 11 facilities in North America.
We take a CD with us that has the same presentation that we made in Cleveland, so the entire organization hears the same message in a 24-hour period. There’s no misunderstanding, and for us, it has worked extremely well.
Recognize employees.
People want to be recognized. People want to be appreciated, and they want to know that they’re making a contribution. A lot of surveys have been done by human resource people, and one of the things that people always say is, more than money, more than just a good job, is to be recognized for what they’re doing — also to be in the know. So these quarterly meetings really help us attack that.
Each quarter, we give a nomination to whoever’s done something that goes beyond, [such as] one of our employees who was at one of the stores on a Saturday and helped an elderly couple that wanted to buy a snowblower. They said, ‘OK, we’d like to buy that, but how are we going to get it home?’ Our employee, with his own pickup truck, took that snowblower home to them.
That’s going beyond the call of duty and beyond the job, and for something like that, we give recognition.
We give recognition to two (departments) each quarter, and we also give the Innovation of the Year. We nominate two disciplines for an innovation award, one on the business side and one on the product side. When we have our next meeting, we’ll provide somebody with an innovation award just to recognize how important innovation is and how important it is to recognize people who innovate.
Don’t get cocky.
In the mid-’90s, we were flying high and doing a great job. We had a great relationship with our customers, and we thought we could do anything, meet any circumstance and do anything we wanted to do. I think we had a swagger in our step.
All of a sudden, three events occurred outside our control. On top of them, we lost sight of the discipline that’s required to do a good job. Boy, did we get our comings that particular year; it’s the only year in our history when we lost money.
We came back the next year and refocused. Never lose sight of what your objectives are.
Never turn down a long-range opportunity.
When you turn down a long-term opportunity with somebody, you open up an opportunity for a competitor. Stay with it, fight it through and do whatever you have to do to make it come out.
Listen to people. It’s amazing what people in your organization can say and the kind of things they can do. Don’t think that any one person has all the answers.
In an effective, dynamic organization, a lot of people have a lot of good ideas, and you’ve got to be functioning as an organization that is able to listen.
HOW TO REACH: MTD Products Inc., (330) 225-2600 or www.mtdproducts.com
