Energy and Service that sets you a part...

TO: All Employees
FR: Gunnar Simonsen

As I have had numerous opportunities to meet with our owner this past year, I feel it is always important to seek to download as much of our conversations as possible to you on the front line. That way, it keeps us in step with our leadership as well as to what really is important.

In recent discussions with our owner about our retail operations, a few themes are consistent…

The importance of service that sets you a part and reflects a personal touch
An environment that reflects energy

Please discuss with your staff the following questions and document them. Hang them up in the break room, hand them out to each staff. It has the potential to become your culture. But for it to become our culture, we need to be the culture.

What does energy look like in a retail store? What effect does it have on people? How is this energy created? Who is responsible for this?
What does service that sets you a part look like?
How do our attitudes and that of our teams play a role in both service and energy?

A few other great questions for you to ask your staff and document are:

List Top Ten Reasons a Guest Would Never Return to Your Store – list solutions for each of the ten reasons
List Top Ten Reasons a Guest Would Visit Your Store and Leave without Making a Purchase – list solutions…

These are critical and yet simple questions that can give both you and your staff a vantage point that might lead you to the next level. Taking the time to actually talk about these things, document them, pass them out, reflect them, act on them, and consistently coach your staff on them could make all the difference. In this, we must be relentless in our pursuit. And, hopefully in this…you may gain a clearer perspective of what is truly important as we seek to set ourselves a part and achieve business success from a reputation standpoint as well as a bottom line profitability standpoint.

Of course, there are other crucial areas as well as you all know with regards to managing our budget expectations. (i.e. payroll, food costs, margins, supplies, etc.)

I guess what it all comes down to is that if your store closed…would anybody notice? What makes us special? What makes us important? What sets us a part? Find our competitive edge and run with it.

Our types of businesses are tough places to be these days and it takes a lot to make them work. But, I believe that if we have the right people in the right seats of the bus with the right attitudes and the right tools…we can do it!

Last night, I watched an interview with Simon from American Idol and he said boldly that it is all about the audience…and he essentially said…they make us…we don’t make them.

And with service and energy…that’s our American Idol and with each guest that walks through our doors…they are our audience and trust me…they do have their remote controls in hand.

Let’s keep them tuned in. Thanks for all that you do and for acting on these dialogue points with your staff. Please let me know what you find out.

Thanks. Gunnar

p.s.

For the sake of returning to science class and understanding how energy works…here are a few explanations.

For the purpose of explaining energy to beginners, I think the best description is the following nearly-well-known Dave Watson definition:Energy is a property or characteristic (or trait or aspect?) of matter that makes things happen, or, in the case of stored or potential energy, has the "potential" to make things happen. By "happen", we mean to make things move or change condition. Examples of changes in condition are changes in shape, volume, and chemical composition (results of a chemical reaction). There are also changes in pressure, temperature, and density which we call a "change of state" in thermodynamics. Phase changes, such as changing from solid to liquid, or liquid to vapor, or back the other way, are also good examples of condition changes. Something happened!

Without energy, nothing would ever change, nothing would ever happen. You might say energy is the ultimate agent of change, the mother of all change agents.