Communicate better. This is going to sound funny, but the key to communication is you have to do it. There are a lot of strategies about how you say something or when you say something or what you may not say or how you want to spin something, but the most important thing is, whatever strategy that you take, you have to do it.
You can’t think about communicating — you have to pick up the phone, you have to go to someone’s shop, and you have to communicate. I know that sounds very elementary, but there are very few organizations that do a great job overcommunicating, and short of communication, people will make up their own interpretations of actions.
For example, we roll out a new program, and we didn’t communicate it beforehand. Well, guess what? Now people are left to decide why, how, what, rather than doing a great job communicating it on the front end, asking for input, gaining buy-in and creating ownership of the idea, the thought, the problem, of whatever it is. That’s critical for all organizations, and a lot of organizations, especially as they start to grow, fall short in communicating. We’re committed to overcommunicating.
Because we’re overcommunicators, we’ve opened the communication lines back and forth. We also understand how important it is to listen. The key to being a good listener is not talking. I often have reminded people that when they interact with people that they watch their talk-listen ratio and make sure that they listen more than they talk. That’s where true communication comes from — when you really understand and not just hear.
Set goals. We really draw from our past experience to understand what are realistic goals and what are stretch goals. Somebody told me one time that you can’t just set sail in the harbor without navigating to a destination; otherwise, the wind will just blow you around.
For example, we set goals on how many franchises we’re going to sell during a given time period and how many stores we’re going to open in a time period. … We’ve done these things based on our experience and based on good, educated guesses, and then we work hard to get there. And if necessary, we readjust the goals up or down depending on the reality of the environment.
More important than how do we do it is that we do it. There are a lot of organizations out there — and ones whose names you’d recognize — that have been in existence for years that still don’t have goals and have no strategic plan and have set sail in the harbor without setting their navigation and do blow around in the wind.
How to reach: Flip Flop Shops, (770) 424-0027 or www.flipflopshops.com