Dolf Kahle understands
the power of visual management.
The co-owner and CEO of
Visual Marking Systems Inc.
makes sure his message is
constantly in front of his
employees. He puts posters
in the cafeteria to illustrate
the company’s strategic plan
and action steps and posts
whiteboards in each department to help his 105 employees keep score of goals and
make note of issues to be
resolved.
“If you put it in front of
people and they read it every
day, they’re going to do better at remembering what it is
than if they just hear it,” he
says.
Smart Business spoke
with Kahle about how he
educates employees to
strengthen his $11.2 million
graphic design and printing
business.
Q. What are the keys to growing a successful company?
Strategic planning, a strong
management team and education of all the employees —
and that’s twofold. One is
training in their specific job,
and two is education about the
company’s strategic goals.
In 1982, when my father
and I took over the company,
we put together an annual
business plan.
By the time I took over the
company, I realized that to
grow, I had to get the managers more involved in the
planning. If you try and run
everything by yourself as your
company is growing, you will
find that everything has to go
through your desk.
Q. How do you get managers
involved in the planning?
First, I had to train my managers better, but in particular,
find which managers to grow
with the company. That’s a difficult thing to do because you
have people who have helped
you get there, but they are not
necessarily the people who are
going to help you grow.
So in 2005, we started strategic planning off-site with the
senior management team,
with us all doing the planning. We look at our
strengths, weaknesses,
opportunities and threats.
Everybody is involved;
we do our homework
ahead of time, and we go
off-site for two days and
put together a strategic
plan with specific action
items.
The only way you’re
going to grow an organization is to have everybody understand what
the game plan is and
buy in to it. They have
to say, ‘We agree. This is
the direction we want to
go.’ I have a senior management team of eight
people; that means that
nine of us are running the
company, not me.
