Leadership
On the prowl
How Andy Clarke hunts for innovative ideas at Panther Expedited Services
By Matt McClellan
Smart Business Akron/Canton | April 2008
Business is a blur in the expedited shipping industry. Andy
Clarke, president and CEO of Panther Expedited Services Inc.,
says it’s not unusual for his employees to receive a 90-second
phone call, then have 90 minutes to make a pickup.
It’s challenging enough to keep up in such a fast-paced industry,
but Panther isn’t just keeping up — it’s growing and growing fast.
The 350-employee company increased its revenue to $170.4 million in 2006, a steep increase from $84.8 million in 2002.
As the expedited shipping business has evolved, Panther has
changed to meet its customers’ needs.
When customers wanted defined delivery times, it was added to
the menu. When security was a concern for high-value cargo,
Panther added security services. When air freight became a customer need, Panther bought an air freight business to expand its
capabilities.
Clarke says all industries have to deal with change, but you have
to adjust if you want to continue to grow and succeed.
“Be nimble,” he says. “The key is focusing on the customer and
listening to the problems that they have and finding creative ways
to solve them.”
Those creative ideas and the willingness to take a chance are
the keys to Panther’s growth.
“Offering that type of customer experience has allowed us to be
successful,” Clarke says. “If they call us and we don’t solve their
problems, if they call us and we’re not creating that type of customer service, they’ll call somebody else.”
Here’s how Clarke harvests the ideas that have enabled
Panther’s tremendous growth.
Let your employees make it happen
Not every idea, whether it’s good or bad, originates at the top of
the company. That’s a misconception, Clarke says, and a poor way
to run a business.
Many of the ideas that changed the way Panther does business came from its customers, as relayed from Clarke’s
employees.
The Panther professionals who answer the phones, deal with the
company’s contracts and direct the company’s drivers are on the
front line. So when a customer has a problem, they are instantly
aware of it.
“They see things every day and come up with pretty interesting
and creative solutions to challenges we’ve had in the past,” he
says. “Providing them with a forum to express that is very powerful and beneficial for our company.”
The forum for those ideas comes via the “President’s Club.”
Originally, it was a motivational tool — a way to reward members
of the company who were going above and beyond their everyday
jobs and showing the leadership traits and problem-solving skills
that could help them advance their career at Panther. Each quarter, Clarke would take the chosen employees to lunch at a steak
house in Fairlawn.
But it soon became evident that the employee morale-boosting effect of a first-class porterhouse wasn’t the most valuable benefit of this business lunch. The lunch was a great chance
for both Clarke and the employees in attendance to engage in
open dialogue about what was going right at Panther and what
needed improvement. One of the ideas that was first discussed
at a President’s Club luncheon was a mentoring program for
new employees, which has since been instituted.
But the key to making these ideas reality is how Clarke handles them. When an employee spoke to him about expanding
the mentoring program to other departments within Panther,
Clarke didn’t just smile and nod.
“I said ‘Perfect, when do you start?’” he says. “‘This afternoon
when you get back to the office, set it up. Make sure you feel
empowered to do these great things. Don’t wait for somebody to
tell you that it’s OK.’”
Clarke says that if you have faith in your employees, they
won’t let you down. In times of growth, he says the people who
have day-to-day interaction with the individual customers are
the ones who are spotting the next great opportunity. It’s the
CEO’s job to develop the vision and make sure they understand it, but then you should give your employees the opportunity to succeed on their own.
“When they’re empowered to do great things, they’re going to do
great things,” Clarke says. “If people are waiting around being told
what to do, you’re limited to however many times you can tell that
particular person to do it. But if you allow them to go out and do
those things, they’re going to solve those problems.”
Don’t be afraid to pull the plug
Not every idea is going to be right for the company. There isn’t
any particular formula Clarke uses to determine whether an
idea is the right one for Panther, but you have to be willing to
make changes.
“We have done things in the past and we will do things in the
future that we thought would be good for our growth but ultimately proved, over a period of time, [that they] actually didn’t
work out,” he says. “You have to be able to respond quickly and
not be afraid to make a decision based on the full set of facts
that you have at the time.”
And many times, those facts lead you to a decision that was
the right one — at the time. However, things change. As time
passes, the facts change, and the assumptions you made may
no longer be valid. It’s not good business to hold your company to a decision that no longer makes sense.
“Maybe it made sense a year ago, but it’s 2008, and it may not
make as much sense now,” he says. “Let’s think about our business and our customers in a new light.”
If you want your management team to be able to make nimble changes as the facts surrounding a decision change, you
need to create an atmosphere in which it’s OK to take a creative risk.
Clarke has a few keys to creating that kind of atmosphere: If
the idea works, you simply reward the people involved. Of
course, it’s not as easy when an idea doesn’t pan out.
The first step in that process is having a post-mortem meeting in which the involved team members find out why the idea
didn’t work. If your team based its decision on a hunch, then
you have to hold them accountable for the failure. However,
you can’t fault them if they did their due diligence.
“If you did all your work, you did all your research, you had
the facts, but those facts changed, and it didn’t work out, well,
even if you’re a smart, dedicated person, you’re going to make
mistakes,” Clarke says. “We just try to keep those mistakes to
a minimum, and we try not to make the same mistakes twice.”
Another key to establishing an atmosphere where creativity
can flourish is letting your ideas be up for debate — not
instantly cast in stone. Some CEOs can get too attached to an
idea they are passionate about and become reluctant to let it
go. Any possibility that his management team would remain
silent while a doomed idea sabotaged the company has been
sanded away by Clarke’s competitive decision-making process.
When his senior staff members enter a meeting room to discuss an idea, they leave their egos at the door. Clarke says you
need to create an atmosphere where people are not personally
attached to ideas. It makes it easier to bite your tongue if your
idea is shot down or combined with another person’s idea.
“If (my idea) doesn’t make it out, I don’t feel bad,” he says. “I
just want to make sure the best ideas come forth. If it’s a combination of two ideas that independently are good but together
are great, let’s do it that way.”
Get everyone on the same page
Because Clarke believes ideas come from every level of the
organization, an important part of his plan is building links
between each part of the organization — and not just at the
senior level.
At Panther, Clarke has strived to break down the silo mentality
that plagues some businesses. For that to happen, communication
has to not only flow up but flow from side-to-side, as well.
Let’s say an employee in the finance department has a problem that requires help from the IT department. In a company
with silos, that problem has to be channeled all the way up the
chain of command in the finance department, across to the IT
department and down the IT chain of command to a programmer who is assigned to fix it.
“By the time that happens, first of all, you’ve lost time in the
matter, and you always lose something in the translation,”
Clarke says. “By the time it gets to the programmer, he may
have a completely different thought as to what the person originally wanted.”
To eliminate mistakes and make the process more efficient,
Clarke has encouraged side-to-side communication at Panther.
He wants the finance employee who had the initial idea to go
straight to the IT employee who can help him. In fact, building
ties between departments is one of the main benefits of the
President’s Club luncheons.
“I bring in people from the organization from different groups,
for not only an open exchange of ideas but also to develop relationships,” he says. “When somebody has a particular problem
they need to solve, that problem may be solved by a person you
sat next to at lunch. As opposed to going all the way up through
your group and then down through the other group, all you need
to do is say, ‘Remember, we had that lunch, and you told me you
were having a problem with this. Here’s a potential solution for
you.’”
Clarke says the collaboration that develops from their new relationships is a good way to show your employees that while their
main responsibility still lies with their group — whether it is
finance, IT, operations, sales or anything else — all employees are
ultimately responsible for the betterment of the company.
“We all play our own particular roles,” he says. “If there is something I can do in my job to help another person do their job more
successfully that will enable us to serve our customers more effectively, it’s actually in our collective best interests to do it.”
Clarke says you can talk all you want about establishing a culture
where ideas flow freely, but it won’t happen if you don’t take part
yourself. Employees follow the lead of the person in charge, so the
key to getting employees to break out of their silos is for the CEO
to engage in clear, consistent communications with everyone,
regardless of department or level, and then encourage each person
to do the same.
If you set that tone, it will filter down and soon employees from
every department of the business will be interacting with each
other. That sense of camaraderie strengthens the company’s team
mentality. No individual group takes the credit for a success or
shoulders the blame for a problem because each group is working
side by side with the others.
“It no longer becomes, ‘Hey, here’s a problem and that problem is
in this particular group’; it becomes, ‘Hey, there’s a problem at
Panther,’ or, ‘There’s a good thing at Panther,’” Clarke says. “We all
share in Panther’s success, and we all share in the responsibility
for correcting things that aren’t successes. When Panther succeeds, we all succeed.” <<
HOW TO REACH: Panther Expedited Services Inc., (800) 685-0657 or www.pantherii.com
