Don’t focus on money
Brugger makes it a priority to take as much focus as he can away from money, whether it’s dealing with customers or with employees. That’s not always easy to do in a tough economy when you’re trying to draw people to your business.
“Everybody else tries to throw down prices and push more products on the market and tries to convince people with payment plans,” Brugger says. “We try to convince people that this is a good investment in the long term.”
Brugger is confident that success is found when you avoid the haggling over dollars and cents and instead focus on meeting a need, whether it’s a need for your customers or your employees.
On the consumer side, that’s particularly important when you’re talking about consumers who in many cases, aren’t frequent shoppers of your product.
“If you’re looking for quality furniture, you buy every fifth, every 10th, every 15th year,” Brugger says. “So you don’t have the same information as you have for clothes or other consumer goods. We build on long-term success and not short-term success. … In the long run, we’re able to generate more quality sales that way.”
Your employees are obviously working for you to earn a paycheck to support their families. But when you focus on meeting customer needs and make it a priority to be open with them about things other than financials, you make it about more than just the paycheck.
“For me, in my experience, long-term-wise, it’s not the best approach to have people just motivated by money,” Brugger says. “It can be part of it, and it should be part of it, but it’s much better to have that provision be on a team base and not an individual base.”
In other words, focus on building teamwork and rewarding teams for collective effort.
“If most of the people are just money-oriented, then they are usually short-term-oriented because they just want to push, push, push to get the next paycheck,” Brugger says. “It shouldn’t be the main reason why somebody is working for us, because then people are much more difficult to involve and it’s much more difficult to implement a strategy because their first thought is money.”
When you focus on providing good service and helping your customers and you show that you’re in it with your employees, you make it easier for them to join you. And the end result of better service is usually a better bottom line.
In the case of Gautier USA, the approach put the company in a position to successfully launch its first concept store in New Jersey last year with new projects planned for Florida, New York, Texas and Las Vegas.
Brugger says a key to his success is the ability to build a connection with his employees.
“Even stronger than money benefits is really involvement and identification with a company, with the values and with all the basic core elements of the company,” Brugger says. “If they really feel they are part of something and they can commit personally to it, then they will invest more than if it’s only money-based. This is a factor which is extremely important.”
How to reach: Gautier USA, (954) 975-3303 or www.gautierusa.com