Find a reason
Leave it to Xenos, the same guy who threw a case of beer on the floor, to give employees another perfect illustration of their lack of direction.
“If every business leader could have the inspirational qualities of John, I don’t think any company would have a problem,” Terry says. “He brought a bunch of managers into a room early on in the process and gave them a piece of paper and said, ‘Write down the three most important reasons we’re here. What is it we’re trying to do?’ He collected them and no two people had the same three priorities. Regardless of what order, no two had the same three. That clearly indicated that we had a lack of direction here.”
This wasn’t a decline that happened overnight. So it wouldn’t be turned around overnight either. But you still have to come out and tell your employees that you’re making an effort to make a change in the way you do business.
“They won’t believe it the first time you say it,” Terry says. “You start saying it and you keep repeating, ‘Things are going to be different. The way we’ve done things in the past will not carry us to the future. We will do things differently.’ Tell them what it is, the why and the how, and then hold people accountable.”
The message Terry wanted employees to hear was that Monarch was in business to serve its existing customers and convince new ones that they should try its product, as well. These were the priorities he was looking for on those slips of paper that had been given to Xenos.
“Our primary reason is to serve that customer, the bar, the restaurant, the grocery store or the liquor store,” Terry says. “The second thing we do is to responsibly enhance demand for our product. We engage our consumers, either at the store or at a venue, to try to persuade them that our products, when consumed responsibly, provide greater benefits for them than other products.
“We didn’t say we’re here to make money. Part of the power of it is to deflect attention away from ourselves. A lot of mission statements you read, they talk about some form of making wealth for ourselves. What we’re trying to do is focus everyone’s attention on what society wants from us. It’s a for-profit business, but what is it that we do?”
It’s easy to think that society owes you its business, but society has lots of other options to choose from.
“We think the world owes us a profit or a good job, and what I think we’re trying to convey with our mission is that stuff is a byproduct of doing what others want,” he says. “If you make it about others, you win.”
Repetition is key. Say it once, then say it again and again and even again.
“Once you’ve identified what your mission is, that needs to be part of every message that you give,” Terry says. “You give a message of the month. If you’ve got your core message and you repeat it consistently, people will start to believe that, ‘Yes, that is what we’re all about. That is why we exist.’”
It was Xenos and Terry who decided on the priority to focus on customers. And while some might look at a business and say, ‘Duh, of course, you’re there to service your customers,’ it wasn’t happening at Monarch.
“In hindsight, I think it was obvious,” Terry says. “But going back to our three priorities and no one could agree on them, it really wasn’t that obvious. Even if you think it’s obvious, state it, repeat it and make sure every manager is held accountable to that.”