Each December we try to craft a theme that is supposed to guide our company behavior for the coming year. A theme is different than concrete and specific goals. Goals are really important and each of our division leads has their own SMART goals. But a company theme is more "meta".
In 2012 we had two major themes - Drive High Margin Revenue and Drastically Improve Quality. We did a good job on both of these themes but could have done better. We probably didn't do a good enough job reinforcing these themes across the organization which resulted in some quality slippage. Nothing awful, but enough to know that all of our people weren't quite on the same page.
We had a management offsite meeting last month and we were discussing what the theme for 2013 should be. A lot of back and forth between team members with nothing really resonating. Finally, our VP of Marketing, Mitch Rose, put forth the idea that we should just simplify, and just get everybody to try and be remarkable with everything we do. Instant lightbulb moment for me, the 2013 Billtrust theme is Be Remarkable!
OK, some of you may be asking, who wouldn't want to be remarkable? Surprisingly enough, there are a lot of organizations that don't strive for this.
- They strive for answering 80% of their calls within 6 rings. That's OK but it's not 99% of the calls.
- They strive for satisfied customers, but not customer zealots.
- They strive for minimizing quality errors, but not zero defects.
A company theme is not something you can simply announce and it magically happens. It's going to take a lot of work, a lot of reinforcement, and most importantly it needs internal champions. These are the people on the front lines where it really counts. They don't accept the Status Quo and stop to ask "Is that remarkable or could we have done better?"
So to all my fellow Billtrusters, now approaching 200 strong, what could we be doing to Be Remarkable!
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