Put the pieces together
Stepping into her role, Carnahan realized that if she was going to get her employees to follow her, the vision couldn’t be created by her alone.
“It’s a collaborative effort,” she says. “In order to be a really powerful, energized, profitable division, there are multiple constituents who have to weigh in on and contribute to that success. Again, I would go back to the word collaborative because you’re painting a vision for the 1,800 partners who are carrying out the business day to day. We’re only as successful as those who give us valuable advice, counsel, support in order to build that infrastructure and foundation underneath us to make us successful.”
To achieve overall collaboration, you need to pull from a cross section of functions within your organization. Truth is the details of your vision will probably offer a comprehensive overview of your goals from financial and customer expectations to developing products and services.
To cover all of her bases, Carnahan invited her regional business directors as well as partners from Cintas’ supporting services departments, such as accounting, procurement and administration to sit down and plot on paper what the vision should be and how to get there.
Carnahan says there are really two parts to a vision: quantitative and qualitative. Both need to be clearly defined, and both are developed by looking at different internal and external factors.
Every fiscal year, Cintas sets projections for its top-line, bottom-line and all of the expense-line items in between for each operation, e.g. document management, uniforms and apparel, facility services. Once the details are set, the Document Management Division then sets projections all the way down to the grassroots level that it can measure monthly against the actual progress toward its vision.
“It’s just like in sports,” Carnahan says. “You have to know what the score is, right? Those (measurements) are our scorecards about whether we’re achieving what we expected to achieve at the beginning of the fiscal year.”
When Carnahan thinks about vision in terms of numbers, from a financial standpoint, it’s usually setting realistic goals based upon market size and the potential of the market her division serves. As you go through the process to determine your ultimate goal for market takeover, she says there are specific company aspects you need to understand. First, where are you situated from a market-share standpoint? Second, what are your core competencies? After analyzing those questions, you’ll get a better understanding as to what the realistic market share is in the future.
For instance, the Document Management Division has 75 locations between North America and Europe. But it wants to continue revenue growth and it wants to expand its geographic coverage to 100 percent of the top 150 U.S. markets.
“You go about it in a somewhat very objective way so that people understand the way you came about the vision was very objective,” Carnahan says. “It makes sense in that it is something that can be achieved. That would be what I would say about setting a vision from a financial standpoint. Setting vision though from other aspects of what you’re going to do qualitatively is more based upon our corporate culture.”
Part of Cintas’ vision is to build inspired, energized, passionate teams, which directly links to its corporate culture and its belief of what makes a successful company. It’s taken so seriously that the corporate culture is taught to all of the new management hires coming into the company.
“We define it as a principle objective, we define it as a management system, and we define it as the characteristic that we want in our people as professionals and motivated partners who are, all again, achieving or driving for that vision of the company,” Carnahan says.
Once you’ve set your vision, you need to collaborate on the path or initiatives that will help you reach that vision.
“It’s primarily going back to what the primary vision of the division is and also then developing, what I would call, key initiatives that will lead us to being able to achieve that vision,” she says.
For the Document Management Division, it came down to priorities. One, naturally, is the security of customers’ information since its main solutions include offering secure document destruction, document recording and storage, and digital imaging. The second has to do with people — making sure employees are safe.
“Your goals must be milestones or realistic steps that allow you to get to the vision,” Carnahan says. “They’re financial as well as nonfinancial, but regardless, they are measurable milestones.”
