Define yourself
Before you can define a direction, you need to define what your company is — what it does, what it doesn’t do, what it stands for and who it serves.
Lewis and his leadership team have worked that message into their company’s slogan, “The Monthly Dividend Company.” It’s a tagline that serves the mission as much as marketing.
“We chose that because it’s very consistent with who we wanted to serve,” Lewis says. “When we did that, it was also about what we didn’t do. It was really about understanding a customer who was looking for a consistent dividend stream, so our entire investor relations and corporate relations was focused on financial advisers and their clients individually, rather than the larger institutional investors. Then we made sure our staff knew there was only one reason the company existed, and that was to pay monthly dividends to shareholders. It required that any action the company made would be consistent with that strategy, and that means … really focusing our efforts on generating cash flow off the real estate that could consistently pay dividends to investors.”
It was a financially sound plan of action, but it required a mentality shift for employees, particularly those who worked for the company prior to its 1994 initial public stock offering.
Lewis needed to undertake an intensive communication campaign to repeatedly hammer home the monthly dividend message. Lewis and his team held a number of staff meetings, where the idea of the 75-year-old retired schoolteacher was born.
“It’s consistency and culture, deciding exactly what the mission is and what it takes to accomplish that mission,” Lewis says. “Then, it’s making sure that you set goals as an organization, both corporately and individually, that match exactly to that mission. It’s almost a vertical line from the top to the bottom of the company. You need to state the message and restate it. It should be very clear to everyone what you’re going to be and, even more importantly, what you’re not going to be.”
Knowing what you’re going to be means defining and executing on what you do best as an organization. Lewis and his team focused Realty Income on the goal of purchasing small retail properties under long-term leases and using the revenue generated off of those properties to pay shareholder dividends. The company’s leaders refined and streamlined the message so that it became clear-cut and not open to interpretation. The more straightforward your company definition is, the less of a chance you will have of becoming sidetracked by the latest attractive proposition to come down the road.
“In a lot of industries, there tends to be trends, fads and things that are considered profitable and different,” Lewis says. “But you need to pursue what you want to be, not what others would define you as. That all goes back to the mission and staying on message. It also speaks to how consistent you are in your actions. As you set goals and do your reports at the end of the year, whether you’re looking at what you did individually or how the company has performed, the measurement you’re going by should be what you accomplished that is consistent with the mission.”
Identify your strengths and play to them but also identify your weaknesses so you know where to steer clear. In some cases, you might not steer entirely clear of an organizational weakness or an area in which you don’t want to specialize or build muscle, but you might need to do enough to become at least competent — so that your weaknesses don’t inhibit your strengths.
“You circle your mission around what it is you do well, and then you understand what your weaknesses are and fill them out only to the extent that they at least match up with the mission,” Lewis says.