After investing a large chunk of their bank account and the time spent researching the business, the last thing anyone wants is for something to happen to their business, and this is not just referring to it failing. Every year, a lot of businesses are harmed by things that do not even relate to the economy, such as fire, theft and vandalism.

While these things are not completely preventable, every business, especially new ones, should carry business insurance. Read up about this essential topic at helpful sites, such as BusinessInsurance.org, that give you the facts you need.

What Does Business Insurance Cover?

When business owners have business insurance, they can focus on running their business, and they will not have to worry about unpreventable losses. Business insurance will cover any type of damage that is done to the business, whether it is the result of a storm or a burglar. The insurance company will ensure that the business is returned to its original condition, which will prevent the business from having to shut down because the owner cannot afford the repairs.

Many well-established businesses could probably afford to replace any stolen items or repair even extensive damage, but new businesses typically do not have the capital. The owners of new businesses have worked somewhere for several years just to save up enough money to get an initial loan, so it would be a shame to see them fail because of something that was not even their fault.

Now, new business owners are probably wondering how much coverage they should have and what their deductible should be, but this is an individual decision. If they wish to have the lowest possible premium, they will need to have the highest possible deductible, but they better have the money to pay the deductible if something does happen to their business.

Business insurance is a good idea for any business, but it is a necessity for new businesses. New business owners do not have the capital to pay for losses and repairs yet. Business insurance is a lot more affordable than most people believe, so there is no reason for any new business not to carry a policy.

Technorati Tags: business insurance

Though there may be a number of disadvantages to this type of computing, virtual desktops allow you to increase your computing capabilities without spending a lot of money on new software or hardware.

With cloud computing, you can use software as a service (SaaS) to access the software you need through your internet browser, instead of buying the software outright.

When using SaaS, you pay on a per-use basis. During the months when your business is going at full speed and you use the software more frequently, you’ll pay more than the months where your business is slow. You don’t need to worry about software maintenance.

Even if there are frequent updates to the software you need to use, the software is updated for you by the company that hosts the software. You’ll always connect to the most current version of the software through your browser.

With Dell Efficient business solutions, you’ll have access to the virtual desktops that best suit your needs without the expense of purchasing hardware outright.

Like SaaS, you’ll pay on a per-use basis. You’ll save money because you won’t have to pay for the new computers and the software that goes on them. You won’t have to pay for a computer technician to come in and maintain the computers.

Cloud computing helps you weather the ups and downs of starting a small business.

You’ll be able to compete with larger businesses on a level playing field because you’ll have access to many of the same programs and technology that they use. Yet, you’ll be paying a fraction of what they pay for that technology.

All of these advantages make desktop virtualization the wave of the future, especially for small businesses.

Technorati Tags: Dell, SaaS, small business strategies, Software as a service

Business must always take appropriate measures to offset the effects of complex economic times. Layoffs and downsizing are common and expectable, as are cuts to `nonessential´ expenditures. Unfortunately, staff training is too often considered a dispensable cost.

In an October 6 2003 article for MacLean’s Magazine, Paul Wells outlines his frustration with poor or non-existent customer service. His variety of bad experiences highlights the dearth of caring and dedication shown by employees with a variety of organizations.

Think you’re above it? A survey published in 2001 indicates that over 67% of customers accessing services across a variety of business types (retail, financial and service) are up for grabs and of those, fully 40% will choose another provider if – or when – they find better customer service elsewhere. This holds true even when price is not comparable. In short, people arefor sale by owner selling tips

The worse case scenario is that 67% of your clients actually do go across the street for better service. Can you afford that loss? Can you afford the lost of even 5% of your customer base?

Back to those `non-essentials:” In the context of difficult economic times, without question spending money on training may seem an imprudent path to choose when seen simply as an expenditure. The usual comment is “We´ve had a tough year/two years, and can´t spend that money right now.”

But with a significant number of acquirable customers — that 67% or so — and the probability of retaining your current client base via excellent service practices, training expenditures must be considered as relatively inexpensive business boosters.

Consider this: you choose to spend training your staff on effective customer service or sales practice. Over the next 2 months, you can expect to retain the 2 –5% of clients who would have normally gone elsewhere in the short term, and to acquire an additional 2 – 5% new business.

Simply retaining 5% of your customer base translates into an increase in profits of 25% and often substantially more. Add to that a further 25% increase through new business acquisition. Now that is an excellent investment in your business, not an expense.

In order to maximize your investment in training, there are a few important guideline items to be aware of. These include good analysis of your company´s strength and weakness areas, research into training providers and, more specifically, into the trainer themselves. Secondly, consider how the training program addresses your organisation´s needs and whether the program can be tailored to fit the specific needs of your company.

A simple way to know how well you´re doing in your customers´ opinions is to ask. By providing short, well worded and specific questionnaires to your clients, you will easily understand where you are succeeding and where your company can improve. Another method is to simply install a suggestion box, which will provide you with external (client) and internal (staff) opinion. If you are not already providing some method of feedback for both clients and staff, you are missing a mass of excellent and useful information.

Researching trainers and training companies is time consuming but is an essential step. It is certainly possible to buy poor training, so limit that costly possibility through good research.

Most trainers and training companies are accessible via the Internet, where you will find their background information, location, and pricing in most cases. Always consider word of mouth referrals, too; such opinions are independent and come from direct experience with a trainer or company.

A mistake some companies make is to avoid independent trainers. Choosing large company or one with a large number of contracted trainers does not necessarily ensure quality of training. Many independent trainers provide excellent training and are more flexible in what they can and will do for you because they are not constrained by a parent organization.

Once you´ve decided on two or three possibilities, direct contact is in order. You´ll need to know specifically how the trainer and their program relate to your company´s identified needs. You will also ask how targeted that company or trainer can be with their presentation and how willing they are to customize their training to your goals. Finally, ascertain if the trainer is available on your schedule, whether they will train in-house using your company´s facilities, or whether you will require outside space.

Keep in mind that although a trainer may not be intimately familiar with your product or service, a good trainer will do good research into your product, market or service prior to meeting with you and training your staff. Ask them what preparation they will do in order to meet your needs. Request a trainer´s resume or bio for additional information on their background, their education and their experience.

This sleuthing is important and necessary to finding the best provider for your needs. A generic presentation will provide a basis of training, but a presentation that speaks directly to your company´s needs and goals will offer your employees the greatest advantage. The material will make sense and will be much more memorable and accessible.

The next question will be cost. Our tendency is often to choose a product based on price. Where all other things are equal, price is an appropriate deciding factor. With training, however, price is rarely the best point of decision. There are wide cost variances in the training market, and higher cost does not guarantee greater quality, nor will low cost indicate a substandard product. Consider each trainer´s or training company´s overhead costs: the larger the company, the higher those costs and you will be paying those costs regardless of training quality or trainer experience.

Finally, set a date to meet with your choices. If it is not possible to meet face-to-face, conduct a phone interview. If you can meet in person, ask that the trainer bring the materials they intend to present. If you contact is by phone, ask for samples of their materials a table of contents or their complete manual if they are willing.

Normally, you will see their manual or similar training materials, and copies of any handouts they will provide to your employees. Usually, trainers will not leave copies with you, as some unscrupulous companies simply take those materials and attempt to provide training themselves.

Finally, establish dates, timelines, expectations and contracts. Make sure all expectable costs are covered in the contract. These will include:

• Trainer´s travel, meals and accommodations
• How many days will you be responsible for the above costs
• Program name, duration, date and location
• What materials will be provided to your employees
• Whether your trainer will bring the necessary hardware (projectors, screens, overheads, computers) or if you will provide those items.

Each trainer or training company has different costing methods, so be sure you are familiar with your responsibilities.

Lastly, consider training as an ongoing process. For a variety of reasons, training must be a regular, predictable occurrence. Certainly in terms of staff attrition and changes, who has and has not been trained will change from year to year. Also, as businesses grow and information is gathered, internal Best Practices will change to meet the needs of your customers and your internal structure.

Most importantly, consider training as a way to generate internal and external good will. Staff whose organization’s support their learning and growth are much more likely to remain with that company. Customers who receive the benefits of working with your well-trained staff are much more likely to stay with you company and to bring you more business. All round, training is an excellent investment in the strength and growth of your company.

Julie Vincent can be reached via email.

Julie Vincent is a professional trainer and adviser with over 15 years experience in sales, marketing, administration and business. She has contributed to a variety of in-person and print business forums, and trains in the areas of administration, customer service and professionalism

By Jamie Swedberg, Industrial Fabric Products Review

Think a company´s fortunes have to rise and fall with the local economy? Rubbish, says O´Brian Mfg.

With its tin-roofed houses, fragrant pine woods, and abundant barbecue joints, Wilson, N.C., still evokes images of the Old South. But O´Brian Mfg. Co., an industrial-fabrics firm located just off Highway 301 north of town, has a firm grasp of the new economy.

Originally founded to serve the state´s then-burgeoning tobacco industry, the company has responded to changes in the local business climate by branching out into broader territory.

It was 1961 when Withrow O´Brian started making truck tarps for North Carolina´s farmers. At the time, tobacco was the state´s primary revenue source. Even then, though, the industry wasn´t a perfect moneymaker for the brand-new company.

His son Woody, now chief executive officer, says business fluctuated with the vagaries of farmers´ fortunes. “One year, a cotton or tobacco farmer would have a really good year and order plenty of tarps. Then the next year it wouldn´t be good at all, so we´d be stuck standing there with nothing to do,” he says. “That was one of the reasons we switched.”

O´Brian still serves local farmers by making hand tarps and covers, but the company has widened its scope. First, it added commercial and residential awnings to its repertoire. It also diversified into compactor curtains, or “diapers,” for garbage trucks.

Then one day, a friend of Winnie O´Brian—Woody´s wife and the firm´s chief financial officer—suggested that the company ought to design automatic tarp systems for the waste industry.

The O´Brians took up the challenge, and the rest is history. A couple of decades later, automatic tarping systems make up 80 percent of their business, and they reckon that their company is the second-largest U.S. manufacturer of the systems.

The tarp-system units are simple in construction, but inspired in engineering. A giant pair of hydraulic arms unrolls a tarp from the back of the truck cab to the end of the container, neatly covering the cargo.

Drivers don´t need to risk injury by climbing all over the truck to attach the tarp; they simply operate a joystick. The O´Brians tout the systems as being versatile—they cover anything from a 10- to a 50-cubic-yard container. And they´re also easy to maintain, they say, since their hydraulics are enclosed and the arms rest below the level where they´re likely to get crunched by a container.

Having made significant inroads into the rubbish market, Woody says his company is tackling the dump-truck market, too. “We´re pretty much into covering and containment,” he says. “As long as it falls under that, we try to get into it, but if it doesn´t, we try to stay away from it. You don´t want to get too diversified.”

It was this series of changes that spurred the company´s explosive growth—from just a few family members to 31 employees in two facilities—in recent years.

Now, with its cavernous warehouse and cheery clerical staff, the firm resembles any number of other medium-sized industrial-fabrics companies. Still, it´s a little unusual at its core, and that may be one of the keys to its success.

Let the four winds blow

A loud jingling sound, like a behemoth bicycle bell, shatters the relative quiet of O´Brian´s 22,500-foot main facility. It´s the end of break, and a seamstress tucks a bookmark in her book and returns to work.

It´s a scene you might glimpse in hundreds of sewing rooms all over the country. Except for one small detail: The woman is only visible from the waist upward. The rest of her is concealed in a concrete foxhole in the middle of the floor. A glance around the room reveals several more foxholes, each outlined with yellow-and-black warning tape.

Sean O´Brian, Winnie and Woody´s 26-year-old son and the company´s sales and technical point man, explains: “A lot of other places have to build up tables around the sewing machines. But when we built this shop, we decided where we wanted the machines and just put holes in the floor.” The result is that the floor acts as one giant sewing table.

Overall, the O´Brians have been happy with the innovation. According to Woody, it´s a lot easier for seamstresses to feed large tarps through the machines when they don´t have to hoist them over the edges of tables.

The system certainly frees up a lot of room to walk, and the building contractor´s initial fears of a leaky foundation have proved groundless. There is one drawback, though, Woody says. With a typical wooden table, a coating of silicone spray can render the surface extra-smooth for easy fabric movement.

With the foxhole system, a friction-free surface might translate into shop-floor accidents. “We kind of had to play with this,” he says. “You can get the floor slick up to a point, but once you pass that, then you run into a danger of someone falling down.”

The foxholes aren´t the only evidence of inventiveness in this shop. In an adjoining room, separate from the squeaky-clean sewing area, the shop´s dustier, greasier operations take place.

Fourteen-foot-high garage doors allow “anything that´s street-legal” to be driven in and fitted with a tarp. Here, too, awning frames are welded, products are developed, and boxes are shipped. In one corner, traumatized truck tarps are dragged in for repairs, facilitated by another clever invention—a long, skinny light table. “A lot of people do repairs on the floor,” Sean says. “But Woody designed and fabricated this, which shows any and every hole in the tarp.” For ease of use, there´s a metal roller attached to the long side of the table.

“You just hook the tarp up to the roller, and roll the truck top as needed. There´s a little rotary switch in the back,” Sean explains proudly.

It wasn´t always this way. Until 1998, the entirety of O´Brian Mfg. was confined to a 15,000-sq.-ft. space across town, crowded with tables, equipment, and people. But in November of that year, the firm opened its brand-new, custom-built facility off Highway 301 and turned the smaller building into a metal-fabrication shop for its automatic tarping system frames.

It turned out they made the change just in time for Hurricane Floyd, which immersed the metal-fab shop—but not the main facility—in seven feet of water. The storm KO´d many neighboring businesses, but it only inconvenienced O´Brian; it turns out the metal-fabrication equipment was surprisingly resilient.

“All our hydraulic suppliers were really, really helpful,” Winnie says. “They told us to pull the plugs [on our hydraulic equipment], drain all the water out, and soak it in a bath of hydraulic fluid. It was recoverable.” The welders received the same treatment, as did a waterlogged forklift.

The only major casualty was a plasma table (a piece of equipment that cuts steel by generating electrical arcs) that racked up a massive repair bill; yet even that had a silver lining. “The table hadn´t run that well up until that point, and now it´s never run better,” Sean says, laughing.

Like father, like son

“I started working summers with dad when I was in school,” remembers Woody O´Brian. “After I graduated, I moved to Durham and worked at an accounting firm for a couple of years. Then, at my mother´s persistence, I came back and started working at the company.”

That was in 1974. He´s stayed ever since, and says his venture into the outside world helped him learn to work for others without any special treatment.

Good thing, too, because with the entire nuclear family on site, the O´Brians go out of their way to maintain a businesslike dynamic. No one seems to use the words “Mom” or “Dad,” let alone a term of endearment, at the office; it´s first names for everyone. It´s all part of keeping things running smoothly, Woody says.

“Winnie and I, we´ve always put it down to trying to keep the marriage relationship separate from business,” he explains. “We play out the business roles when we´re at work, and then when we leave work, we take up husband and wife roles. When you get home, you try and talk about other things.”

He says family members also stake out their own territory at the office, and rarely see each other during the day. That helps, he points out, when family resemblances kick in. “It´s just that he and I are so alike in so many respects,” Sean says, agreeing with his father.

“Sometimes we can work together fine, but other times, after about five or ten minutes we need to go work on different things. We´re so near alike, we just get on each other´s nerves.”

Father and son share a love of design and engineering. If left to their own devices, they say, each would while away the day puttering with new prototypes for the company´s automatic tarping systems.

They´ve even created a faux truck bed—a steel frame on blocks—in the warehouse, ready to be fitted with new pieces of machinery. “We get feedback from the end user on different products,” Woody says. “And so I guess that´s my small expertise. I´ll come back and visualize it and design it on paper, then do a prototype. Then we put it in our research department and test it, improve on it, redesign it, and get it ready for the market.”

Sean´s the same way, and has taken the design process one step further by mapping ideas out in DataCAD, a computer-aided design software package. And right now, he says, he´s got the ultimate in hands-on jobs: One of the company´s welders is out with a bad back, so Sean has volunteered for machine-shop duty for the next few weeks.

“Of course, while you´re doing all this, you still have the day-to-day activities of running the business,” sighs Woody. “You´ve got to stop whatever you´re doing and talk to the customer that wants to talk to you. Or you´ve got to talk to the two plant managers and make sure things are getting done at both locations.”

Nevertheless, both he and his son insist that they´re not as comfortable in front of customers, and would rather leave sales to the salespeople. They´re always ready to help clients in need, but their favorite activity is research.

Sean, with typical youthful enthusiasm, carries over his favorite aspects of work to his leisure time. His father points to a truck body wedged on top of a storage unit in the warehouse. “This is what he likes to do—he´s building a vehicle from scratch for four-wheeling. He built a chassis, and he´s going to put that body on it.”

Woody´s leisure pursuits tend more toward escapism. Back in the days when Sean was a Boy Scout, Woody developed a love of kayaking, and continues the activity to this day. “When you´re paddling whitewater, you can´t think about business,” he says. “If you do, you turn over and you get wet. So it keeps your concentration, and it keeps your mind off work.” Winnie, he says, prefers to sit outside the family´s beachside trailer, engrossed in a book.

Far afield

In the company boardroom, Sean waves a hand in the direction of a large U.S. map studded with thumbtacks. “We haven´t updated it in a while, but all the pins you see here are our dealers,” he says. “There are more in the Midwest now than we´ve put in.”

The automatic tarping systems, he explains, are sold throughout the United States and via one dealer in Canada. Winnie adds that recently O´Brian Mfg. set up a dealership in Venezuela to supply tarping systems for dumptrucks, and it´s struck a manufacturing agreement with a company in the United Kingdom.

“We take care of the local stuff here,” Woody says, referring to the truck tarps and awnings his company sells in North Carolina. “But [for the automatic tarping systems] we need a dealer in the customer´s area to provide good service to the customer.” The dealers are encouraged to provide full installation and warranty service to buyers, he says.

“What we send out is actually something in kit form,” Sean says. “They´ll get all the parts with the instruction manual, and possibly an instructional video if they´ve never done one before. In addition to that, they can call us if they have any problems, and we can walk them through it.”

Service, quality and consistency, Woody says, lie at the core of the company´s reputation. That´s why an ISO 9000 certification is on the agenda for late summer. “We´re getting excited about it, the closer we get,” he says. “I think it´s something that´s coming down the road, that everybody will be required to do if they´re going to do business with the big companies. We like to think we´re ahead of the game on that.”

He adds that the firm is also concerned with providing a safe and pleasant work environment. That could be why, even though the entire O´Brian clan has just returned from a week away at a conference, none of them appears stressed out. Apparently, the business hummed along like a finely tuned machine while they were gone.

Woody shrugs, taking it as a matter of course. “You´ve got to look after your employees, and then your employees will look after you,” he says, smiling. And then he quietly slips back into the warehouse to continue his work.

Reprinted from April 2001 issue of the Industrial Fabric Products Review, with permission from the Industrial Fabrics Association International.

By Jamie Swedberg

O´Brian Manufacturing can be reached at http://www.obrianmfg.com.

Profiles of business owners respected in their industry appear in our newsletter and are available on our web site. We encourage association executives to tell us about their members who are leveraging their inherent advantages (trusted brand, excellent service, etc.) by embracing a “doing it right” attitude into their strategy for growth.

The retail environment poses many customer-relationship challenges.

High employee turnover and one-time customers are just two of the hurdles facing retailers trying to implement customer-centric strategies.

But one Connecticut-based clothing retailer is overcoming these obstacles using one-to-one principles to boost its share of customer and keep its Most Valuable Customers (MVCs) coming back.

Serving an upscale customer base of professional men and women, Mitchells is a million family-owned business with locations in Greenwich and Westport, CT (The Greenwich store, acquired in 1995, goes by its original name, Richards.)

The company´s database tracks each of its approximately 150,000 customers´ personal data and preferences, including size and style, as well as SKUs bought and prices paid since the tracking systems were installed in each store.

In fact, chairman and CEO Jack Mitchell personally keeps at his fingertips information about his top 1,000 customers. To use his favorite metaphor, the secret to Mitchell´s success is “hugging” the customers.

“I remember meeting one of the country´s top retailers on the runway at an Yves St. Laurent fashion show and he asked me, ´How are your outerwear sales?´” says Mitchell.

“I couldn´t believe he was asking about outerwear sales. My question was, ´How are your upper-end customers buying? Are they very satisfied? Are they coming in more or less frequently?´

He was product focused and I am customer focused. To us, it´s customers first and then the product—of course we search the world for the best product for each customer—and then the rest usually takes care of itself.”

This customer focus is a mind-set, he says, from when his parents started the business in Westport in 1958.

Today, there are nine Mitchells in the business, including Jack´s 97-year-old father, who started it all. “Every one of us makes a major contribution,” Mitchell says, “and they all have the same mind set; it has been and always will be customers first.”

Thirty years of data

In the 1970s, the company began tracking its customers´ purchases by category (suits, shirts, etc.) using an IBM AS 32 and then the AS 34.

The spotlight went on for Mitchell back in 1989, when he and his son Russell purchased the company´s IBM AS 400 and decided to track customers´ purchases, not only by category, but by actual stock keeping unit (SKU).

“When Russell and I were looking at the system, someone from a marketing firm asked us if we knew as much about our customers as we knew about our inventory,” he explains. “We realized at that moment that we didn´t…and then the light went on! We decided the whole system would be architected around the customer and then on what the customer bought.”

The changing retail scene also showed Mitchell that he was moving in the right direction.

“Two decades ago, people liked to go shopping. They were getting a reasonably decent level of service and they enjoyed it,” he says.

“Then the service dried up, and owners didn´t know how to get the customers back. We´ve learned that the most important [assets with regard to building the customer relationship] are the people you have working for you, and their mind-set to serve and help the customers.”

That vision flourished and grew when Mitchells acquired Richards. “The most important benefit we bought was the relationship that the sales associates and the tailors had with their customers,” Mitchell says.

“They had worked some 45 years establishing those relationships, but didn´t really know who their customers were. Associates were scribbling information down on pieces of paper.”

By introducing customized CRM technology, Mitchell was able to take Richards beyond the mom-and-pop stage.

“We brought in a system behind the scenes to track the important customer facts and we gave them the technology to manage customer relations effectively and profitably,” he adds.

Today, Mitchells and Richards share a customized customer database built in-house that is completely integrated with their accounting and inventory databases.

Profile…profile…profile

Gathering all that customer data begins with a profiling process in which sales associates ask customers for basic personal information, such as their names and addresses.

According to Mitchell, customers willingly provide the information because the retailer is respectful of its clientele´s privacy concerns.

“When we collect and file customer preferences or any other data customers provide, we are very sensitive to the whole area of privacy,” explains Mitchell.

“We never, ever share any privileged customer information with anyone—we don´t sell or rent our customer lists. We´ve even gone so far as to make sure all this information is password protected.”

As a result, customers trust the benefits of sharing their information with Mitchells´ sales associates, and go on to provide more personal data about their work and home lives, as well as their clothing preferences.

“Customers aren´t going to tell you their whole history on the first visit. But gradually you listen and you learn about them, and you know how to service them on a one-to-one basis,” says Mitchell. “You´ve gone from a transaction to a relationship.” (At 1to1 Magazine, we call this process “drip irrigation.”)

Enabling employees

As the face to the customer, sales associate buy-in is integral to making Mitchell´s vision of high-touch customer relationships work. To that end, store employees are authorized to “do whatever it takes for customers,” he says. “We don´t alter the price, but we´ll do almost anything to service customers and go beyond their expectations.”

Informational feedback is key to helping staff members achieve goals. Every morning in their work mailbox, sales associates get a recap of every sale they had the previous day.

Then, about two weeks after each sale, the database prints out a satisfaction report from which associates will call their customers and ask about their shopping experience. But, “It´s not a solicitation call, merely a satisfaction call,” Mitchell is quick to point out.

This approach pays numerous dividends for Mitchell´s goal of stocking his customers´ closets. In fact, one of the company´s personalized services is to do just that — go into customers´ homes to clean and organize their closets.

“These men and women are very busy people and their expertise is not clothing. So we provide our advice, and even take pictures of the various clothing combinations that will work for them.”

One resulting success story features a customer who lived in Mexico but had a summer place in Greenwich. According to Mitchell, the customer bought her Mitchells salesperson a roundtrip ticket to Mexico City to clean her husband´s closet and stock it with his favorite Brionis. “She loved it, and we were told her husband loved it too,” says Mitchell.

Every byte has value

Data is also a key enabler to Mitchells personalized customer-centric approach; therefore, none of the details of its customer relationships is ever discarded.

In Westport, the history goes back to 1989; in Greenwich it goes back to 1996. “We never throw customer data away. We keep product records, for instance, on Polo shirts that we sold five years ago,” explains Mitchell. “Maybe we´ll try to reactivate somebody who hasn´t been in for three, four or five years. To do that, we need to know what they bought back then.”

A new data report that Mitchell introduced this year, called profiling, highlights many of the key bits of personal information, such as business title, spouse or children´s names, gathered by sales associates.

“For a customer to be profiled, he or she has to have provided us with some personal and professional information,” says Mitchell. “For example, in the profile of a customer who´s president of his company, we would see his name, home address, family notes, wife, sons´ and daughters´ names, as well as a daytime phone number, either home or business.”

Profile reports are prepared daily to gauge how many customers were profiled, and to provide associates with opportunities to update their customers´ profiles or ask them for more information. The reports have become a management tool for Mitchells to measure its associates´ success.

“In the report for the last two weeks, for example, the average associate profiled 73.4 percent of his customers. Anybody below the average has got to ´go back to school´ and work with me and our managers on how they can improve their profiling abilities,” says Mitchell.

“It´s important for all of us to understand that if we know our customers, then we´ll do better for them, and they´ll know they´ll get the personal attention they deserve.”

Mitchells employs nearly 200 people—174 full-time and 20 part-time—and Jack Mitchell makes a point of extending his high-touch philosophy to his staff, as well. “I meet frequently with each staff member and always talk to them by their first name.” Every staff member also gets a birthday card from the Mitchell family.

Tailoring the marketing effort

In addition to its in-store efforts, Mitchells uses targeted direct mailings and telephone calls to market to different customers differently.

According to Mitchell, the company sends hundreds of individualized mailings each retail season, most of which feature personalized notes from sales associates about favorite brands or designers. Customers who have given their permission may also receive phone calls about designer shows, or recently arrived stock in a favorite brand.

MVCs—customers that spend more than ,000 in any single sale—receive personal notes from Mitchell each year. He also sends a personal note to all first-time customers within three days of their initial visit.

All of these relationship-building efforts, as well as the customer response to those efforts, are stored in Mitchell´s database to track and improve the effectiveness of the company´s varying efforts.

And, although Mitchells collects email addresses, its CEO doesn´t believe that either his customer base—or his associates—are ready for full-scale email marketing.

“We´re going to start experimenting in the near future with some sales associates who are computer literate and will send email to customers who have told us they want to hear from us that way. But we have to go very slowly. The process has to be designed to work extremely well all the time, from the customer´s viewpoint,” Mitchell stresses.

Looking ahead

Along with adding email marketing to the current relationship mix, the organization´s future goals include profiling 100 percent of its customer base.

“Every customer that comes in ought to be profiled. And if our associates are forced to get into the computer and put the information there, they will start asking these questions earlier,” he explains.

For Mitchell himself, the local buzz around his company´s success from friends, customers and colleagues has prompted him to write a book, which will be published in the spring by Hyperion. The title? “Hug Your Customers.”

Karen Burka wrote this article for the 1to1 Magazine’s November/December 2002 issue. 1to1.com offers consulting, management, and publishing services to businesses wishing to maximize their relationships with their prospects, customers, and staff.

Karen can be reached via email or at http://www.1to1.com.

Profiles of business owners respected in their industry appear in our newsletter and are available on our web site. We encourage association executives to tell us about their members who are leveraging their inherent advantages (trusted brand, excellent service, etc.) by embracing a “doing it right” attitude into their strategy for growth.