IT’S TIME FOR MY TOUR of highlights from the last six months or so of Back Page interviews, in which entrepreneurs and CEOs share with me in their own words their unique perspectives on running a business.
Michael Coles, CEO of Caribou Coffee Inc. at the time, expounded on the idea in October 2007 that business owners have to earn their customers each day.
When you shut your lights off every single day, you start over the next day, and you have no contract that the customer will come back, he says.
You can have the biggest day, the biggest week, the biggest month, even the biggest year, but the bottom line is when you shut your lights off every single day, you have to start over the next day.
The interview garnered a positive response from readers, one of whom said he’d found it so valuable that he e-mailed it to many counterparts in large corporations.
Perhaps proving Coles point that nothing is guaranteed, Coles himself was out at Caribou within weeks of the interview’s publication as Caribou’s stock price failed to satisfy shareholders.
Horst Rechelbacher, the famous founder of Aveda Corp., gave his interview in the most aromatic of settings, his Intelligent Nutrients store in Minneapolis. He hopes that brand will someday be as big as Aveda.
There he urges visitors to sample each fragrance, and I left the interview reeking of perfume a problem because my next stop was to lead my son’s third grade reading group, and third graders are not shy about saying you stink.
Saving the planet sounds corny. I want to assist nature to function, Rechelbacher says in the April 2007 issue.
We have a 10-year window. The bears are drowning on the North Pole, there was a picture in the New York Times. That’s S.O.S. Save Our Society. We are the bears. In fact soon there will be one global religion: Save Mother Earth.
He gets my vote for most Zen interview of the year, as well as most difficult to follow. A big thinker, Rechelbacher jumps from topic to topic, from mundane to existential and back again.
A most endearing pair of business owners are Dino and Vona Adamidis, who operate Dino’s Greek fast food restaurants and were featured in the August 2007 issue. The long-married couple has an oft-practiced routine, with Dino spinning big ideas and Vona bringing him down to earth.
Dino runs around the store back-slapping customers, while Vona makes sure visitors get fed. A sample of the banter:
Vona: Every day I thank God that what we have is what we have. What we have, I look at it and say, it?s OK. Every day we do something wrong. We didn?t have money. We opened all our stores with the change in our pocket.
Dino: When I came here I had $20.
Vona: It’s good he didn’t tell me because I would have said ‘take a hike’.
Dino: This country is God?s country. It really is the land of opportunity. What do you want to do? You want to get some gold? You’re welcome.
Joel Ronning, CEO of Digital River, likens skippering a sailboat to operating a company, in the September 2007 issue.
It’s a matter of measuring, constantly measuring, the ability of people to handle things, Ronning says.
On one of the sailboats he races, he says it’s immediately apparent if a crew member makes a mistake, because the boat will lose its position on the water.
It’s different at a company, in that it unfolds over the course of months. With a company you’ve got to run on lots of small signals, which can be described as instinct, Ronning says.
If you see a lot of small decisions going wrong I put a lot of onus on people’s small decisions. I think that has tremendous weight. This is how this person thinks, and I need to coach them in this or that direction.
Amy Langer and John Folkestad co-founded SALO LLC, a financial staffing company, in 2002, and they’ve been driving fast growth since then.
The company topped $42 million in sales this past year.
They believe in focusing their business, despite the temptation to go after whatever work exists. “We both are passionate that if you try to be everything to all people we’d be a mediocrity,” Folkestad says, in the February 2008 issue.
An intriguing part of their strategy is starting subsidiary companies to go after segments of the staffing market. So far they’ve started Oberon for human resources staffing, and NumberWorks for lower-level accounting positions. Like their parent company, each of those companies is on a fast growth path as well.
Joel Hazzard, president and CEO of Ergotron Inc., detailed his hands-on approach to inventing products, in the November 2007 issue. He likes to personally install the company’s products and observe how customers use them and what they say about them.
He also requires his new employees to do the same. The more you send your team out to engage the real world, the more ideas you’ll get from them, Hazzard says.
It’s remarkable that he can keep the practice going now that the company has grown so large, to more than $130 million in annual sales with a major global expansion underway. When he started his subsidiary was little more than a think tank, with no customers and no sales.
