Q. When business is slow,
how do you get it growing
again?
Understand what the truth is
about your industry, understand
where you are weak and figure out how to overcome those
weaknesses. Understand your
strengths and how to take
advantage of those strengths.
We try to look at trends broadly. How can our little whirlpool
company, our little tub company,
take advantage of a trend?
An example of that is dogs.
We saw people doing ridiculous
things for their dogs, like making bathrooms for their dogs. So
we said, ‘OK, we’ll make a
whirlpool just for a dog.’
Realistically, a human could
use the same whirlpool, but we took the elements of our
whirlpool and made it fit the
needs of a person who might be
washing a dog.
Q. How do you identify your
strengths and weaknesses?
We have strategic planning
sessions that we conduct with
our managers. We try to look at
the whole world and find out
where we are weak.
Name-brand recognition is
an example of a weakness.
We’re not Jacuzzi, we’re not
Kohler. We’re just a little company in Sugar Hill, Ga. We just
sell through distribution, but
we would like people to come
into showrooms and say, ‘We
want an MTI whirlpool or
bathtub.’
We’ve worked at getting better
at it, but how do you sell your
product before you have the
name-brand recognition? The
answer is with the showroom
people who can learn your
product and realize it might be
better quality or more innovative, and they can lead the consumer to you. So we work first
on getting name-brand recognition in the industry.
Q. How do you build brand
recognition?
We, as a company, started
trying to sell up. Well, this is
like moving from Wal-Mart to
Saks Fifth Avenue. It can’t be
done overnight. We regained
our focus on trying to be the
best in the world at making
these tubs and communicating that to the people who
had the power to sell our
product.
We came up with another
innovation — the jetted laundry sink — and that got huge
attention. That got us into a lot
of high-end showrooms that
would not speak to us earlier.
Then, every year, we were
lucky enough to come up with
something else. You’ve got to
razzle-dazzle them.
HOW TO REACH: MTI Whirlpools, (800) 783-8827 or www.mtiwhirlpools.com