Solicit customers and vendors
When Faherty first became Atrium’s
president and CEO in January 2006, the
housing market had just started to
crater, and the company was beginning
to feel the effects. One market that was
hit particularly hard was Florida.
“We were having some difficulty servicing our customers in Florida,” he says.
“We had a facility that really needed to
be overhauled and get its service and
quality right. I visited several builders in
the Florida market, and every one of
them told me the same thing: ‘You guys
suck. You’ve got to really improve.’ That
was good feedback. I wish it would have
been different, but it was the honest
feedback, and it told us where we stood
and what we needed to fix.”
Your customers will often be your most honest barometer of
performance in a given market.
“You’d be surprised by what they’re willing to tell you,”
Faherty says. “They don’t sugarcoat it.”
But unlike your leadership team who will come to you with
their feedback, you most often go out and seek customers
yourself.
“You get out in the marketplace, and you meet with your customers,” he says. “You learn so much more because you really
get what the true world is. Sometimes, things get filtered from
up the organization from salesmen to sales managers to general managers. By the time it gets to me, it’s been so filtered that
I’m not sure I’m getting the true story. So getting out and talking to the customers one on one really gives you an insight into
how you’re doing and what you need to do better.”
That can be hard for a busy executive. You can’t expect to interact
with the consumer on a daily basis. Instead, Faherty suggests organizing efficient visits with your sales force when time permits. If your
team is making a West Coast swing over the course of two weeks,
for example, that would be a much better use of your time than flying 500 miles to tag along on intermittent sales calls over the course
of three months.
However you organize it, the important thing is to get out and
interact with your customers face to face.
“You travel with your salespeople,” Faherty says. “You go
visit, whether they’re a national account or whether they’re a
local distributor or a builder. You just walk in and shake hands,
sit down, and say, ‘How are we doing? What can we do better?’”
You should also direct those same questions at your vendors.
At Atrium Cos., Faherty invites key suppliers to come in once a
year to audit each facility.
“You’re buying their equipment to manufacture their products, and they know exactly how that equipment should be
used to maximize the productivity and efficiency of the equipment, and how the men on the line ought to be using the equipment and what they ought to be doing,” he says. “From what is
optimal to what we wind up doing, there’s often quite a big
spread.”
Eliciting feedback from your suppliers also provides a great
window into the practices of your competitors.
“They can go look in our plant and look at our operation and compare it to our competitors operation,” Faherty says. “They’ve got an
opinion about what you can do better, so you elicit that, and you listen to them.”
