When mortgage companies started to close due to the collapse of the real estate market, Deanna Daughhetee didn’t fear for her own company. Instead, she capitalized on the fact that there was less competition.
“You need to make sure you do think about what kind of opportunity does this present to us,” Daughhetee says about the economy. “It really starts you thinking about things in a different way, and that’s when you come up with new ideas and new opportunities that maybe you hadn’t thought about before.”
The company, which Daughhetee founded and owns and at which she serves as president and CEO, has 31 branches in 25 cities and opened 11 in 2009 alone.
Much of the company’s success venturing into new markets comes from the involvement of her 350 employees in the process. From gathering research all the way to replicating the company culture in each new location, the process must include effective communication and a set of expectations.
Smart Business spoke with Daughhetee about how to involve employees when venturing into new markets.
Decide how to expand. We actually have a team (to do research). Our marketing team is involved in it and our senior management gets involved in it. Then we also do some informal information gathering out of typically our sales force.
We would go out and we research the markets so we’re looking at demographics, we’re looking at competitors — what’s the competitive landscape in markets — defining what we think our opportunity is in the market to determine whether it’s a good market for us.
The second thing is can we find the right people in that marketplace or can we transfer people from within the organization into that marketplace.
Is there a good labor force there? Are there people that are trained in whatever it is you’ll be hiring them to do? If not, can the training be provided? What’s the unemployment rate in the market that you’re talking about? How many people are you going to need to hire?
Those types of things are all going to factor into your ability to get that off the ground with the right people.
It’s a combination of (then) analyzing the information and talking through it with your team because you really want to make sure you think it through. When you have a team together and people bringing up different aspects, different thoughts, different challenges, I think you end up making a better decision.