Q. How do you involve employees in the process?
We have pretty much every employee involved. We have 15 different business units. The person who runs each of those units sets their plan. They work with their sales team to set the sales goals, the service team to set the service goals.
We make it very easy to compare results among the different stores and business units so they can see how are they doing versus others. We create the metrics and the grids to let them do those kind of comparisons and let them come up with what their goals should be.
We review them as an executive team, but usually with very minor modifications.
It tends to be very fluid. You start out with very simple metrics.
As an example, a salesman would start out and we’d be saying how much he did in sales last month and what we expect to have happen this month. Then, pretty soon you say, ‘It would be good to know how many calls I made and how many successful closes I have on those calls.’
Then you might say, ‘Well, where did those calls come from? How many came from marketing?’
You just start recognizing how the machine operates that’s your business. What are the key components of it?
Over time, people will say, ‘Well, that measure isn’t as important anymore, but couldn’t we get this measure?’ They’ll think of something new and we’ll modify it as we need to.
It evolved out of the real-life situation we’re in trying to be successful.
It’s just trying to achieve awareness and understanding of what’s going right, what’s going wrong, and why. Continuing to measure and monitor that and give feedback to that.
Q. How do you communicate the metrics to employees?
We have metrics on things like number of calls, number of vehicles sold, customer satisfaction numbers, all and all, probably two or three pages of financial info and metrics.
We’re reviewing those every single week with everybody in the company. The manager of a store is meeting with his people each week and saying, ‘How are we doing versus our plan in a bunch of different areas?’
Reviewing that with his people, finding out if there’s any major issues going on, major opportunities, and that’s done on every operating unit level.
Then the executive team meets each week and talks about how all the operating units are going.
Doing it weekly keeps everyone focused on the most important things they need to be focused on. It gives them a pat on the back if they’re performing, or it gives them a kick in the pants if they’re not doing well without me or their manager having to say it to them.
They know what’s important. They know that these are expectations we have for performance. They know they’re reasonable because they help set them.