Synergy skills

Every morning, Bliss Nicholson would stop at The Bruce Company of Wisconsin’s nursery. It’s a habit that started more than 30 years ago when the nursery opened. Whether he needed to or not, he would swing by and see what was happening.

But, as the company grew, Nicholson, the president and CEO, had to cut back on his trips. There was too much to do managing the company’s 10 departments. More importantly, he had eight managers to run the different departments, and by stopping in he was disrupting the organization’s flow.

“The only way I could finally get to the point of not having my nose in it and being involved in it – I had to quit stopping at the nursery every day,” he says.

And quitting meant changing the route he took to work every day. Instead of making a right out of his driveway, he’d hang a left, and go in the opposite direction of the nursery.

“It was like you’re programmed,” he says. “Your car just goes in that direction. And I really had to reprogram my whole thinking.”

About a year ago, Nicholson was able to take a big step back and now he can go two weeks without making a stop. By making a left turn instead of a right turn, he learned a valuable lesson.

“Finally, I found out it could function better and it was running better when I didn’t stop every day. They had a plan and they were able to work their plan. When I stopped, I disrupted things,” he says.

Keep ’em separated
Nicholson is clear that he wants each department to run as a separate entity. Employees used to bounce back and forth between departments, but he learned that the flexibility of the departments caused problems.

At one time, employees worked for both the nursery and landscaping departments, but sometimes when they needed to get a landscaping job done, employees were busy in the nursery.

“We just couldn’t … count on it and make a commitment to do the things we needed to do in the other departments,” Nicholson says. “So, it was very hard to hold those people accountable when their people were someplace else, instead of saying, ‘Hey, listen, you guys go out and sell the work you need to keep that department busy.’”

Once employees were separated into departments, management had to drive home that the department they were assigned was the department where they would work. If temporary help was needed elsewhere, an employee would pitch in, but he would still report to the manager of his assigned department.

“Sometimes you even get frustration because you might have the landscape division that all of a sudden has a ton of work and the irrigation division isn’t quite as busy,” he says. “So, you’ve got guys in one area working 60 hours and guys in the other are working 40 hours. Every now and then you get people that say ‘Oh, I want to go over there.’ They forget that last year, it was the other way around.”

Nicholson says the best way to keep departments operating separately is by putting someone in charge. Someone needs to lead the department if you want to show employees you are serious about them working as an individual unit.

“It just can’t be one of these things – oh, we’re going to create a division, and start the maintenance department and you half-heartedly do it,” he says. “It doesn’t work. You have to have somebody that has a passion and loves it and is going to want to make it work.”

Nicholson says you then have to give managers the tools and support so they can run the department effectively.

“You can’t be every place,” he says. “You can’t oversee everything. You’ve got to have some trust in that manager, so you’ve got to find the right person to let it grow. Give it to him, let him have the responsibility, give him the guidelines and the help he needs, but let him make it work.”

But work together
Nicholson wants the entities to operate separately, but still work as one. Sounds a bit contradictory, but it’s really not. Yes, you want each department to succeed on its own, but everyone has the same priority.

“We have a philosophy here that first of all, we have one customer and there’s one company, and we have one bottom line,” he says. “So in the end, everything that everybody can do for everybody else benefits everybody.”

In a perfect world, Nicholson says he wants every department to cross-sell. For example, the company’s landscape department creates 60 to 70 percent of the irrigation department’s business.

But working together and referring other departments to a customer can cause problems. If a customer isn’t happy with the work a referred department did, then it becomes everyone’s problem. Again, the departments have to work together to solve it because, if the nursery recommends the landscaping department to a customer, and the landscaping department does a bad job, then both departments could lose the customer.

A Bruce Company customer service representative or someone from the department that caused the problem will normally meet with the unhappy customer.

“Part of it is to be candid with whoever the sales person (was) or whatever happened. Say, ‘Hey, here’s what happened.’ Talk about how expectations weren’t met and come up with a plan and make sure we respond quickly to that customer so they know we take it very seriously and it’s not an accepted thing that we do,” he says.

Once the customer is satisfied, you have to address any tension that might occur between the two departments because of the incident, he says.

You should avoid finger pointing, Nicholson says, but sometimes you do have to take sides in the argument. Mainly he has to coach the party at fault and help them understand what they did wrong.

“You’ve got to get those people together, and you’ve got to let both of them express their feelings and you’ve got to be open enough to understand why the retail person feels the way they do . The other person has to be open enough to understand the other side,” he says.

“If you’ve got the right people in place, they will. Then, I’ll be honest with you, it’s a trust factor. That person then needs to make sure he goes out and does what he says he’s going to do.”

While it may sound like a lot of hard work to develop and operate 10 departments, Nicholson says it’s worth the time – and changing his route to work.

 “I think our growth would have been 30 percent less than it has over the years if we would have just been focused on one area because we’ve been able to bring all these together and build on them,” he says. We have that balance in there that if one area it’s a little slow, the other areas have been able to supplement it.” 

Having all the answers
The Bruce Company wants customers to know they can help with anything landscaping related.
When it comes to cross marketing departments within a company, there really aren’t any negatives, says Thomas F. Raemisch II, marketing manager of The Bruce Company of Wisconsin.

After all, if someone walked into your retail center, why wouldn’t you want to let them know that you can also do landscape maintenance. Or, if you have an eight-page flyer for the garden center, there really isn’t any downside to mentioning your landscaping services on the inside cover.

“We feel our biggest asset is our customer base,” he says. “If we can cross-promote to them, that’s where we can really get a lot of bang for our buck because the people that are coming into the door are already familiar with the Bruce Company as a kind of ‘We can do it for you’ type of thing.”

Raemisch says the only drawback to cross marketing is you may lose some room on the page for the product or service that was the main purpose for the advertisement. But that really isn’t a problem because it all promotes the Bruce Company, Raemisch says.

“What it does is it continues to keep your message out there,” he says. “Obviously you are going to lose some of your space if you have some more specials that you wanted to have on the retail flyer that you are not getting across."
 

Click here to hear Nicholson talk about some of the mistakes he made when adding departments.

He said what?
Gossip can be a culture killer.

Internal competition – teams within an organization competing to make each other better – can produce great results. But, it can also cause some pettiness if one team isn’t carrying their weight.

A snide comment in the garage or holding yard about a team’s weak performance can start gossip and cause disruption within the company.

Bliss Nicholson has run into this problem as president and CEO of The Bruce Company of Wisconsin. Having his 10 departments operate as independent companies while still serving one bottom line can cause friction from time to time.

“Sometimes it’s just a verbal comment. If somebody said, “Hey, that department, they aren’t carrying their load. They’re not doing this.’ I’m a firm believer that if you have a comment to make, make it to somebody who can make a difference,” he says. “Don’t stand around the water cooler talking about everything. If you’ve got a problem with somebody in another division, and they’re not doing something, first of all, go to that person.

“If that can’t work, go to their manager and talk about it in the right way – some things you are experiencing and seeing – and then talk it through. Don’t go to the water cooler and talk about it to everybody else because that accomplishes nothing, except wasting everybody’s time.”

When Nicholson is in a meeting, a lot of times he’ll ask his managers what people are saying at the water cooler. His goal is to create an atmosphere where people can be open and honest. He says employees have to know that you will listen to them.

“They’ve got to get to know you and get to know that you are open and willing, that you’re not going to jump on them every time, that you need that input to make things work,” he says. “And if you never hear those things you cannot do anything about it. And that, when they share something with you, it’s confidential and that you can find a way to help and make it better but you don’t always have to go out and say, ‘Well I sat down with so and so and they said this.’ No, there’s other ways to approach that and do that.”

When Nicholson hears of a problem, he says his first instinct is to solve it himself. But, he says it’s best to get more details from the employee, not necessarily the names of the people involved, and ask them how they would solve it. In the rare occasion he hears a suggested solution he doesn’t like, Nicholson will suggest another way to handle the situation.

“Nine out of 10 times, they know what to do. They just need a little encouragement about doing it,” he says.

The author is associate editor of Lawn & Landscape. You can reach him at bhorn@gie.net