Even with 330,000 customers,
Christopher Faulkner doesn’t rely
on an assistant to answer his e-mails — he still answers them himself. With
the rapid growth of C I Host — revenue
grew from nearly $78 million in 2005 to
$92.5 million in 2006 — the founder,
chairman, president and CEO of C I Host
focuses on changing his business to keep
up with his customers’ needs.
Smart Business spoke with
Faulkner about how to keep the
roller coaster that is your business
from nose-diving straight to the
bottom of the hill.
Q: How do you know when it’s time to
make changes at a growing company?
Look for any flattened sales or
any growth percentage that
slows down or plateaus. It’s the
roller-coaster effect — you get to
the top of the hill and the car
starts going down; that’s too late
to start change. That’s already
going straight to the bottom. Be
able to forecast while you’re
going up the hill, before you get
to the top, what is that time
frame looking like, and what
else can we do.
Figure out in your plan where
that hill continues to increase
and where you think it’s going
to plateau, so always be looking for complementary services that you can bring to your
portfolio that make sense for
your particular segment of
customer.
Drill down into your base and find out
what else they need and what else drives
them. Most customers, if you have a
provider already selling you goods or
services, nine times out of 10, they would
love to buy more from you because they
already have an ongoing relationship.
Q: How do you embrace change?
Realize that what you did last year or
five years ago isn’t necessarily what
you’re going to do today or tomorrow.
Every good business model has to
change multiple times along the way if you’re going to be in business any length
of time.
Some have a great idea and launch a
product, and it takes people by storm for
the first five years, but at some point
that’s going to age and come to end of
life. I would be hard-pressed to find any
industry where a company has been successful for five to 10 years and hasn’t
changed their model at all.
Q: How do you connect with customers?
My customers are the ones paying my
salary and keeping the doors open. If we
didn’t have them, we wouldn’t be in business, so they’re it. They’re the ones I
have to bow down to.
Every week, we have two things going
on. One is my CEO chat. I log into a chat
room and customers, press people,
prospects can chat with me. The other is
every day; every employee is required to
make 10 calls to customers. Every day
2,500 [customers] get a call out of the blue to say, ‘Are you happy? We’re just
calling to say thanks, and if you have
feedback, we’d like to hear it,’ and
they’re floored. That is the holy grail of
the business.
As CEOs, there shouldn’t be an ivory
tower behind a closed door. If customers
call, take their call and speak with them.
It’s the most frustrating thing a person
can do to have an issue with your company and call, and you say, ‘Take a message’ and not return their call or
e-mail. It’s a slap in the face.
That’s the biggest factor that a
customer will leave a company
over, if the executives are too busy
to take care of them. It leaves you
with such a bad taste in your
mouth, and for months, that person
is going to be mad and tell 100 people how bad you are versus telling
one or two how great you are.
Q: How do you best serve customers?
Everything you do in the business,
every idea that you’ve got and every
decision that you make — you have
to apply that thought pattern to,
‘Would the customer want this, and
is this in the best interest of the customer?’ A lot of times you find yourself saying no.
A lot of times CEOs say, ‘Well,
whatever,’ or, Too bad — I’ve got to
cut costs,’ and you lose sight of
what the customer wants. The customer either gets what he wants, or
he goes down the road to someone
else. You serve the customer, or
someone else will.
For example, should I buy the
$200,000 router or the $50,000 router
that’s going to cause outages? Most
would say the $50,000, but is the cheaper
one in the best interest for the customer?
No. That’s the litmus test that I use.
It’s a very easy application but not the
easy decision to make. You might see
short-term profit because you cut costs,
but, at the end of the day, if service starts
sliding and customers start leaving, that
profit quickly turns into a loss. It’s big-picture mentality.
HOW TO REACH: C I Host, (817) 868-9931 or www.cihost.com
