Acres & Acres :: by Chris Beytes

Published:5/1/2008

Four Good Habits

One of the challenges of being a reporter is figuring out what questions to ask. Good questions make or break a story. “How many square feet do you have” does not count, as a good question, nor even an essential one in many cases. Who cares? As I always say, it’s not how big you ARE, it’s how big you THINK.

I like asking questions that dig into a subject’s personality or explores aspects of the business that they’ve either never thought about, or that nobody’s ever asked them—or dared ask them. I don’t get quite so esoteric as James Lipton on “Inside the Actor’s Studio” (“Doug Cole, what is your least-favorite sound?”), but I have been known to cause a stir in conference seminars (“Didn’t our pricing problem start when we sold poinsettias to Sears for $2?”).

One of my favorite questions is based on the book “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”. I asked that recently of Bell Nursery’s Gary Mangum during our recent interview (part of which appears as this month’s cover story. Actually, I asked Gary for “habits of successful greenhouse owners.” If anybody knows about success it’s Gary and his Partner, Mike McCarthy. They’ve grown the business from less than $1 million in sales in the mid-‘90s when they bought it from Gary’s father to an anticipated $150 million this year. Without having to give it any thought, Gary quickly came up with four habits for success:

Habit #1: Act Like You Own it
“Probably the biggest thing we’ve got going for us is what we try to drill into everybody’s head, which is “Act Like You Own It.” We have an awful lot of empowered people running around. So I guess our number one habit, if you want to call it that, is to get others to step up and act like they own the business, or at least their piece of the business.”

Habit #2: On Stage Seven Days a Week
Number two is a big part of our training, and it’s front-and-center in the company, and that’s “On Stage Seven Days a Week.” When you go to Disney and you see the characters, or any employee of Disney who’s in the public environment, whether it’s Cinderella or it’s the person who’s cleaning up the mess from the horses, they all appear very happy and they all appear like they’re glad to be there. They have places backstage to take a smoke break or eat their lunch or to have an argument. We’ve had a tremendous amount of positive feedback from store managers and also from people who are completely unrelated to Home Depot. I get phone calls and e-mails from people who talk about positive experiences they’ve had with our employees. That’s a really satisfying thing. That all comes from training about being “on stage” and how important it is. We hire for it, looking at personalities. We want people who exude a positive mindset when they’re in our purple shirt.”

Habit #3: Do What’s Right for the Customer
“That expresses itself in hundreds of ways throughout a season. People need to do what’s right, not necessarily what they think at any given moment is right for Bell Nursery. Sometimes it’s something that might not be right for them personally, but they do what’s right for the customer, because we’ve got to make sure that customer has a good experience.”

Habit #4: Be Straight with People
“We talk about that a lot in our training. We talk about that a lot during store visits. Be straight with people. If there’s something that may not be pleasant to say to somebody, you still have to be candid in the end. Just say what it is. We talk about that a lot internally, and we definitely live our lives that way.”
If your business seems to be struggling to chart a course in today’s competitive waters, maybe it’s time to formalize what your Habits for Success are—or what they should be. Write them down. Preach them to the staff. Live them on a daily basis … and help your staff to live them, too.

If you can’t think of any, start with these. You’ll be four steps closer to success.