When hiring, FETCH! Pet Care Inc.’s
founder and CEO Paul Mann isn’t
just looking for people who love pets — he’s looking for entrepreneurs.
Mann wants employees with entrepreneurial skills to run the company’s 100-plus
franchises, and after he finds them, he just
stays out of their way. That formula has
worked at the 1,500-employee, professional pet sitting and dog walking services
company, as sales increased 243 percent
from 2005 to 2006, and the company is on
track to shatter that mark in 2007, posting
241 percent sales growth in the first half
of 2007.
Smart Business spoke with Mann
about how a brand is like a promise and
how empowering employees has helped
his business grow.
Q: How do you communicate your vision
to employees?
Simplicity is No. 1. It’s got to be clear,
not complex. You’ve got to grab on to
the key, salient points you want people
to know.
It needs to be consistent every time
you ook at FETCH! — because a
vision is the creation of a brand. A
brand is something you can rely on,
over and over again. You know it’s
going to have the same taste, feel, level
of service, wherever you go. It’s very
important to stick to the vision and
not vary it too much.
I will share our five- and 10-year plan
with the person who does the filing for
us because I want them to know
where we’re going as a business. I
want them to get excited about the
future of the business.
Q: How do you develop your brand?
The vision and brand equal a promise of
what you can expect. That’s what I have to
sell to our staff, to our clients, to the marketplace. The key is that you have to have
a realistic vision that’s achievable.
That doesn’t mean it can’t be a crazy vision.
We have some crazy numbers, and we’re
actually achieving them and beating them.
But I needed to articulate how to get there.
Basically, I needed to give them a road-map of how they could achieve this.
So the vision needs to be realistic, and it
needs to be achievable. If you don’t achieve
it, your vision goes away. Your brand will not
stand strong if you don’t deliver on your
product or service. You lose your reputation.
Q: How do you get buy-in from employees
on your vision?
The key is to understand that the roadmap
is always changing. We set the end point; we
want to go from A to Z — that doesn’t
change. What changes is everywhere in between. The buy-in comes from explaining
Z very clearly, the end vision. Then, employees can understand how they can contribute.
It’s not my job to sell anybody. My sales-people don’t sell franchises. They are not
supposed to sell a franchise because the
franchisees also have to convince us that
they’re right for this, as well. Then we get
the right people — entrepreneurs who really grab the vision.
That way, there is no selling, just communicating the vision. It’s those people who
embrace it who then have something to
contribute.
I can tell very quickly if someone is excited or if they aren’t. They’ll come to me with
ideas, or they don’t.
Q: How do you empower employees?
If someone is hired for a job and they are
just told what to do, they’re not going to get
excited. They’re worker bees; they’re just
following somebody’s orders. If they are
empowered to be part of the team and contribute, they’re going to rise to the challenge.
My management style is similar to parenting, in a way. I have a 2-year-old and a 14-year-old, and I don’t tell them
what to do. I watch what they’re
doing and give suggestions if they
need them.
Rather than watch over their
shoulders and telling them, ‘Do this,
do that,’ I let them unfold on their
own as people and see what they can
create. I’ll only step in if they’re on
the wrong track.
It’s the same thing with my staff.
They know their job; I let them do
what they do best. I’m merely there to
supervise and make sure they don’t go
off on the wrong track or do something potentially damaging to them or
us. People love that level of independence because then they are entrepreneurial in our business.
Q: How do you create that empowerment?
That’s something a lot of businesses
miss. They could have a bunch of
empowered entrepreneurs, but instead,
people get the life sucked out of them
because they’re given these impossible
tasks and deadlines, and they’re not given
the tools to achieve them to a level at
which everybody’s going to be satisfied.
Give them a clear direction of what you
want to achieve — not what you want them
to do, what you want them to achieve. The
second thing is give them the tools to do it,
like software systems or a good computer.
Don’t skimp because that’s only going to
frustrate them and limit their abilities to
produce.
HOW TO REACH: FETCH! Pet Care Inc., (866) 338-2463 or
www.fetchpetcare.com
