What Keeps You Up at Night?

This past week I was at Hearts on Fire’s Owner’s Forum. They have been doing this for the past six years in Boston. HOF invites 15 or so retailers to come and talk about their businesses. This time we were fourteen owners (only one owner from each company is allowed to attend even if you have multiple stores). I have never been so impressed by a company before. The CEO (Glen), the COO (Mark), the CFO (Bill), Executive VP (Peter), etc. are all from others backgrounds besides jewelry so they each brought different perspectives to the table. We work with so many vendors but I’ve never felt any one vendor to go out of their way. Yes I have some wonderful reps who go out of their way to help me sell their brand but I haven’t had a partnership like we do with HOF—at this owner’s forum we didn’t talk about HOF the entire time but instead we talked about us and our business. Many topics of huge interest came up and we all commented and brought up our own problems and solutions. The next couple of days I’m going to blog about many topics that we talked about at the Forum that either never crossed my mind or did but I knew no way in hell how to deal or implement a solution.

One of topics was, “What Keeps You Up at Night?” Each one of us owners went around the table (some were new stores like mine, some had been with HOF since the early 90’s some businesses were 120 years old, etc—we all came from different walks of life) and spit out what keeps us lying awake in bed thinking. Some said it was the transition of their business, meaning from folks to children, some said cash flow, some said the internet, but all of us said our people—finding and keeping good people.

The Executive VP felt we have 3 kinds of people in our stores:

1. Your highest paid employees who make their wage and make money for the company. They are our greatest assets.
2. Mediocre people who we can train to death but will never be our greatest assets. We keep them because they do their job for the compensation they were hired at, we need extra bodies for security, we need them for the busy holidays, and they are good people but they will never be the best because they lack some of the energy and passion our greatest assets have.
3. The last category most owners felt they had—they called them WB’s or wrong business—meaning they are the staff you keep because you feel bad firing them—which you should—they have families, they need the money, etc. but they are barely making their wage and aren’t right for your business. Inherently they are not salespeople. So eloquently Malcolm, one of the owners said, “You can’t send a chicken to eagle school.”

So what do we do to find and keep better sales people—most felt it begins with the interviewing process and most of the owners at the HOF forum had never been interviewed in their entire life because they grew up in the business and ultimately made that their career.

HOF battles the interviewing process by callipering each employee. I haven’t read much about Caliper yet—but I’m going too. From what I understand you tell Caliper what kind of employee you want to hire like a sales professional—and what tasks the sales person should be capable of and then after you interview and do your weeding out you Caliper each person—it is a test that takes 45 minutes or so and Caliper will tell you the reservations it has about that person for that job. I think they were saying it’s about $200 per person. Some were saying to go back and Caliper each employee that you have because some might not be good for a position like a sales associate but instead your marketing team, inventory specialist, or accounts payable.

Have you used Caliper before? Has it worked for your store?

What Keeps You Up at Night? Is it really finding and keeping good employees?