Sometimes, in the pursuit of success, you begin to fail your company.
That’s the position that Mike Gauthier found himself in at his $24 million company, Save on Everything, the brand name of Mike’s Market Share Coupons Inc.
Gauthier, the company’s founder and president, answered a period of rapid growth by altering the structure of his company and constructing a leadership team of outside hires. But in the process, he allowed his company to get away from the culture that had made it a success in the first place.
So Gauthier had to bring his company full circle, bringing it back to a culture that valued internal growth and promoting the ideas of its people.
Smart Business spoke with Gauthier about how to bring your company back to what it does best.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve recently faced in your role?
One of our biggest challenges was a culture change we went through a few years back. We grew substantially, and that brought in a bunch of smart people with their own policies and procedural habits. Although those things are a necessity, one of the things we lost was the essence of who we are as a company, what I like to term our ‘saga’ — what are we about, why are we here. We forgot about that and started making policies and procedures more important than who we are.
So I’ve had to do a huge shift back to what our company was about. We had lost really good people during that time, and I had to end up replacing the management to have more my style and my feel of how a company should run. So we really had to reinvent ourselves, change our products, add new products, and we’ve done that pretty successfully.
What does a business need to have in order to not be bogged down in procedures?
Culture has to be a shared environment. People have to know what is going on within the company. If you’re keeping them in the dark, you’re not going to build a very good culture. I try to bring in more of a family-type culture here, even though it’s tougher to do that as you get into being a larger company. Right now, we’re at about 120 employees, so it’s manageable. But it’s having that daily involvement of your people. We have daily updates so that people know what is going on in the company, what is going on in sales, how we’re doing against our measurements and so forth.
Cultures also tend to flourish when people have a reason more than a job. They have to know that their ideas are valued and viewed as critical to success. They have to see changes will be made if they come up with good ideas. And you have to not punish them for making mistakes. You have to let them try things.
How do you allow your people to try new things, but still stay on goal?
It takes good ideas. You have to ask for them. With our sales staff, we’ll come up with new products from one of the sales members. They’ll see something, and they’ll tell us whether they think it can work in our organization. Instead of blowing it off, we’ll take the idea and see if it actually could work for us. We try to take ideas and work with them. We allow people on the production side to come up with new looks, new covers for the magazines we do. We tell them ‘Here is what we’re looking for; you come up with the product. You design it and come up with the idea.’ That gives them ownership. They take ownership and pride in what the product is going to look like. Then it starts to become more than a job.
How do you find people who are a good cultural match?
That is a tough part of the job. We went through all the scientific methodology and all of the other aptitude programs that are out there. They give you some idea, but in reality it’s all about who wants to step up to the plate. The trouble is, I’ve found that when you bring someone in from the outside, a lot of them are anesthetized from the neck up. They haven’t been cultured to think for themselves. So if you’re running a culture like ours, it takes a while to change that. Ultimately, it’s up to them. If they feel like it’s important, that they want to change and work hard, they’ll do it.
HOW TO REACH: Save on Everything, (248) 362-9119 or www.saveoneverything.com
