Joe McClure refuses to sugar-coat the dire economic outlook for his employees at
Montrose Travel.
“We’re probably going into the
darkest time of most of our lives,”
he says. “Some of the folks around
here have seen economies worse
than this one, but most of the people in our company haven’t. It’s
going to be an absolute bloodbath.”
Despite the economy, Montrose
topped $110 million in sales last
year, but the company’s president
has prepared his employees to go
into battle to survive in 2009 and
beyond. To do so, he developed a
two-pronged plan: get aggressive
in sales and marketing by quadrupling the advertising budget, while
conserving cash through delaying
IT upgrades, terminating four
unproductive employees and 100
percent salary reductions for the
company’s three owners: McClure,
his wife, Julie, and his sister, Andi.
“Most companies at this time
go into their bunkers and hunker
down,” McClure says. “We don’t
hunker down. We don’t retreat.
We stand up tall and go in and
fight.”
Smart Business spoke with
McClure about how to find out
what motivates each of your
employees and how to make
sure your employees are meeting their requirements.
Look inside your existing business
for new business.
We are in the
midst of turning this entire
company into an army of selling machines. Every single
person in this company,
whether they are on the front
lines or in a support role, has
individual requirements to go
get leads.
We weren’t doing the simple
things. For example, we have
a corporate travel division that
handles multimillion-[dollar]
travel budgets from major corporations around the country.
When our travel counselors
were talking to individual travel coordinators and/or travelers, they weren’t asking the
simple question: ‘Have you
booked your 2009 vacation
yet?’ We weren’t cross-selling
our own divisions.
For our leisure division, our
travel counselors were not
asking people calling up for a
seven-day cruise: ‘Who does
your corporate travel? Do you
travel for business?’
So we started this very
intense effort of truly cross-selling all of our divisions. All
of a sudden, the light bulbs
went off, and just in the 48
hours of Friday and Monday,
people are really engaged and
they are really producing leads
for all of our sister divisions.
Monitor to motivate.
I don’t
believe that people don’t do
what you expect them to do. I
believe people do what you
inspect them to do.
We are engaging all of our
managers to truly get down to
the agent lines and inspect what
we expect them — what we
need them — to do, then manage and monitor it on a daily
basis. We’re actually getting
down to every individual on a
daily basis and making them log
what new leads they’ve given to
their sister divisions, and then
we’re posting that.
Like, Suzie gave four corporate leads. Mark gave seven
vacation leads yesterday.
Then, you create this friendly,
competitive nature. Now
when results get posted and
they’re easily seen, it just
drives that activity that we
want. Unfortunately, even
though we are a strong company, I believe that if we didn’t
post the results, wins and successes on a daily basis, it
probably wouldn’t drive the
behavior that we want.
As a leader, you need to make sure
you identify the different personalities in your business.
People are
motivated for different reasons. There is no one-size-fits-all motivation.
Some people in our organization are very motivated by
money. The more money they
can earn, the harder they’re
going to work. Others are very
motivated by reward and recognition. Others are very motivated by additional paid time off.
So long as you can create
and understand the right motivator that affects every individual and create a communication plan and an incentive program that truly touches each
individual, then you can get
everybody engaged.
If you create an incentive
program that misses the mark
on half the personalities in
your company, you’re not
going to get the results you
want.
