Set a leadership example. The biggest thing is to listen. So many people at the top, we dictate and don’t listen. You need to listen to the concerns of the different departments and hear both sides of stories, not take one side.
You have to sift through the roadblocks in some of the departments. That has been our biggest attribute here. We don’t just fly off the handle. We hear both sides of the story.
We meet monthly as a total company. We bring everyone together; we talk about the initiatives from the prior month and how we did. Then we talk about the previous month and what we expect. [We] let them know about the calendar of events that are taking place.
From the CEO of the company all the way to the janitorial people, we let everybody know exactly what is happening, who is coming to the facility, what to expect for that month with business volume. We share that information; we don’t hide any of that information.
We talk about what is going to take place and what is going to transpire for that month.
Formalize your training. When we were a smaller company, it was easier because Patty or myself could fly around the country, take that time out of our day and go visit our consultants in various markets.
But as we started going from a Cincinnati- and Detroit-based company to 50 states and 25,000 consultants nationwide, we had to devise a plan. What we really started doing was working with leadership and putting a leadership program into Pure Romance, and taking our message, our values of the company and continue to pass it on to new consultants. We have 75 leaders that we bring in every year, twice a year, and work with them on what do we see for the upcoming year, how do we want to run our business, how do you train our consultants. Then what they do is hold training sessions every other month in markets throughout the United States.
The biggest thing I’ve found in doing this for eight years: If you don’t develop leadership, you will never grow your company. You will stay in the exact same position, or you will find yourself behind companies that do develop leaders. Leadership in our mind — why we’ve done it and why we continue to do it — is the simple fact that if you’re not doing it, you’re doing your sales force and company an injustice.
Working with our leadership— not only on conference calls and bringing them in twice a month, twice a year, but making sure they’re updated on a weekly basis on any given change — is the most crucial and critical part of growth.
HOW TO REACH: Pure Romance Inc., (866) 766-2623 or www.pureromance.com
