I conducted a straw poll at my network meeting and they backed up my general feeling that business is looking up. We are 30% up on last year so business is good.
I was very nervous about the last quarter as we have a very new team. The store manager is new, her first management role. We then have three sales guys with less than 6 months experience. (It takes 3 to 6 months to learn our product.) Another manager is working his notice having indicated he was going months ago ago. I mentioned Bob before in a previous blog. He is the guy that told me to stick my job, He did it in a nice way but left me in no doubt that he didn’t like the way the business was run. The only consistent is our part timer who works 3 days. She is a rock. She was only 18 when she started with us and it is rare to find that degree of maturity in someone so young.
So given the inexperience of the team, I could be forgiven for being secretly concerned about sales for the short term. Once again I am proved wrong but why?
We used to be very good at keeping people in the business, to a fault. We have become much tougher. We help, support and train but if someone isn’t performing you have to cut your losses and ‘offer some alternative career advice’. We have given notice to more people in the last 2 years than in the 8 years before that. The end result is that after kissing a lot of frogs we find our prince’s. The people we have now are clever, ambitious guys, once they really get up to speed, 30% up will be small potatoes.
Retailers United 
“We used to be very good at keeping people in the business, to a fault” – interesting.
Our business had a similar issue where we had a consistent team in terms of longevity or tenure and business was coming in at a decent level. However, closer examination demonstrated that 70% of the business was coming from 30% of the team but we were reticent to break up the team in case this would cause dissatisfaction or dissent and negatively affect overall revenue. What happened was that we retained people who were, in reality, holding back others and, unbeknown to the management, causing divisions between those who were making a significant contribution and the whose who were not. It was only when we spoke freely and frankly with the main contributors that it became clear that they resented the fact that they were ‘carrying’ other team members.
They also made it clear that they would welcome other strong sales people to the team, some thing which we thought they would be against as it could be viewed as a challenge to their little ‘fifedoms’.
We lost a couple of really good sales people through this process but also shed some dead weight – nowadays we are far less indulgent and have higher expectations from each and every member of the team.
Micky B,
Thank you for your comment, I haven’t done much with this blog yet so it is good to see someone has found us.
I think you hit the nail on the head with ‘far less indulgent’. The attitude has to be, do the job or ta ta. No business can accept poor performance. It is so easy when you like someone to make excuses for them. I love the Jck Welsh mentality, when he was the CEO of G.E. he would fire the bottom 10% of his managers ever year. Not sure how it works in practice but I bet it focuses their minds!
B.C.