Ted Stahl would like you to
forget about any economic woes you might be hearing about
and just sit down for a conversation about the opportunities of
education and technology.
That’s not Stahl trying to be
an eternal optimist; it’s his
method of leadership. As CEO
of GroupeSTAHL, Stahl has
made a living out of growing
companies through innovation
and education. In Cleveland,
Stahls’ Transfer Express, a
wholly owned subsidiary of GroupeSTAHL that manufactures custom heat-applied garment transfers, is a living
example of that.
Stahls’ Transfer Express
employees are constantly being
taught to focus on the customer
and on technology to adapt to
what the market can bring next.
As a result, the company continues to grow each year, blossoming to more than 100
employees in less than two
decades, and it consistently
bumps up the level of technology used in the industry.
Smart Business talked to
Stahl about how to refuse complacency and why you need to
have a few rebels around the
office.
Encourage a few rebels to spark
business. There’s a word called
educated risks. If you don’t take
any, you aren’t going to be growing anywhere. Everybody, and
every company, is really in a state
of metamorphosis, reinventing
itself all the time. It has to be.
But then complacency is probably, if you are successful, a
thing that sort of sets in. You
hear, ‘We’re doing well, why
should we be trying to change
this or that?’
But if you’ve got people that
are curious about their customers, curious about the world
about them, they see the opportunities that are out there; if
they have that passion, it
becomes infectious.
So you talk about it, you make
examples of people and promote people that do take some
risks. Any type of a business culture has a tendency to try to
homogenize itself, and you’ve
got to have a few rebels around,
and you have to let people see
how much they help.
Be curious about everything. You
have to have a curiosity about
customers, about technology,
about industry — basically you
can’t define it right down to one
particular interest. It’s more of a
curiosity of the world about you
and everything that affects it.
You can’t just limit it to just
your relevant industry idea; you
don’t know what technology is
happening in Asia or Germany
or here in the United States that
might eventually affect your
product.
And if you can put it all together, if you’re curious and you’re
driven by your customers and
you understand what their
strengths and weaknesses are,
what their needs are, then you
can look toward the world of
technology and put the two together. It’s sort of like keeping
one ear to the customer and one
ear to what’s happening in the
world to help create products
that succeed.