TRADE COPIERS
CONTINUED
performance must be agreed with everyone. But once you have a target and then departmental targets and individual targets, if people know exactly what’s expected of them, they take responsibility for that and then they don’t need a manager constantly badgering them to perform because they’re empowered to achieve on their own with people in senior positions providing guidance and encouragement rather than policing performance.” Reliability Another key to Trade Copiers’ success is reliability. “It’s about telling a customer that if you’re going to be at their warehouse at 9am on a Tuesday morning with two artics to collect the stock, you make sure that you’re there at the date and time promised. Pace is an issue for most people and because we have a very large fleet of HGVs, we’re able to move resources to ensure that our customers can rely on us. “If you let someone down, it spreads like wildfire. We’ve got a lot of big clients that are good ambassadors for our company that share that they work with us because we’ve built up these great relationships. We don’t actively market for new customers, a lot of it is built on reputation and word of mouth.” Future After the success of recent years, Mark says the focus for Trade Copiers is on consolidating their growth and continuing to grow organically – unless a strategic opportunity presented itself. “The biggest thing we’ve done in the past few years is increase market share,” he says. “And to do that, we’ve had to manage our reputation and make sure that our service is as good as we say it is. “The plan for the next 12 months will be to refine the growth that we’ve had. We want to make sure that our level of service is maintained after the growth that we’ve had, and then I will probably sit down round the table again with all the internal stakeholders and build the next strategy. Because growth is two steps, you grow, then you refine, you grow, then you refine. If you grow, there’s no guarantee that the process that was working today will still work tomorrow because with growth comes new challenges. We’ll take the next 12 months to refine our processes and then we’ll go for another growth spike, if appropriate.”
Trusting to perform Indeed, Mark is fastidious about the data logging, and expects all team members to be. While he says he is generally relaxed and pragmatic in his leadership style, he does insist that data is logged correctly. “It’s the human element where the process can potentially fall down,” he says. “The integrity of the data is compromised if we’ve missed an inquiry that’s not taken into consideration.” This isn’t just about sales – it is about those enquiries that don’t lead to a sale too. “In a position of leadership, you can only influence the people that aren’t buying or aren’t selling,” Mark says. “Although I love to see business getting done, I’m not that interested in the computer system showing me what deals have been concluded every day. I’d rather look at the people that we haven’t transacted with because I can get involved in those and I might be able to make an impact there. It’s people trusting that they can put 10 inquiries on, but no deals that day, and are not going to get a telling off for it, because it’s important that we understand why those people didn’t make a deal with us, so we can try and influence it more positively next time. “If you have a culture of fear, then people will be reluctant to share that with you. The system only works if the people are in the right mindset and the right culture exists. We have that now, but it took several months to get us there. “It’s about celebrating success and trusting people to perform to an exceptional standard. And our team has done that for several years now. And we can only do that by breeding confident and empowered people and trusting them to use their own intellect to go out and hit objectives. Now, they have very clear objectives, and the level of
It’s about telling a customer that if you’re going “
to be at their warehouse at
9am on a Tuesday morning with two artics to collect the stock, you make sure that you’re there at the date and time promised.
”
14
Powered by FlippingBook