Ron Fugate respects the history of Alacer Corp. He respects the steps past leaders took to build the company and its brand of nutritional drink mixes, such as Emergen-C.
But just because you respect the history of your company, you can’t be afraid to try something new.
“It comes down to building on the legacy rather than threatening it,” says Fugate, the company’s president and CEO. “There was certainly a history and heritage of how the business was viewed. The approach we took was not to challenge or to denigrate that history.”
Instead Fugate and his team set out to ask questions, learn about themselves better and learn about their customers more. He also wanted the company’s 164 employees to put their creativity to use and come up with ideas that would help the company do even better.
Smart Business spoke with Fugate about how to improve your business and be a better leader.
Put the time in. There’s not a shortcut. A leader needs to have a fact-based, data-driven plan. Without it, living on hunches and history is a recipe for wasting opportunities and spending money on marketing that doesn’t drive growth.
We approached it as a blank piece of paper and we said, ‘Let’s really go out with the objective of casting the net wide enough with the consumers that we research. We’ll identify who our current users are and who our future users are without narrowing it to prove a point or to prove the hypothesis we had at the beginning.’
It really boils down to being unbiased and having an open mind. Approach it from a spirit of discovery. There’s nothing more fun than finding a surprise as you go out to mine data and find guidance for directing a business and its path forward.
The approach was to ask fresh questions. Create an environment where employees and team members are encouraged to challenge the status quo. Ask new questions that would open up growth opportunities.
Put the right people in place. Assemble management teams that have a diversity of thought. Respect their views, their history and their understanding of the world. It helps guide you away from allowing your own biases to direct action. It’s really about bringing a group of people together who will challenge your biases.
Devote a great deal of time to communication and to alignment so that everyone understands what direction the company is taking and what their role is in that process. Have them very much engaged in the planning process, the execution of the public relations and the actual product development stages. It really comes down to carving out the time and being accessible and creating a cycle of scheduled regular sessions to align the activities to the team.