Opinion: Bookshelf reveals wealth of customer-based growth

And sometimes, when I am pulled further into the pages of a book on business management, it seems as if the volume was written specifically for me. “Customer Centered Growth: Five Proven Strategies of Building Competitive Advantage” by Richard Whiteley and Diane Hessan (Addison-Wesley, 1996) is one of the books that had a message intended especially for me.

Oddly, these coincidences occur exactly when we are involved in Springfield Business Journal’s own strategic planning process. This is when I write a column and attempt to send the message on to SBJ readers. In the process, the themes are etched in my own mind. I have my own, self-accredited MBA program.

As you can see by the copyright date, this book has been on my shelf for a while. But it’s never too late for the premise that surviving and thriving companies should have a laser-beam focus on their customers.

Why is it that while one company is struggling to survive, another company —in the same industry, with the same customers, during the same time period — is experiencing explosive growth? How is it that certain companies bounce back from serious downturns stronger than ever, while others shrink and disappear?

Years of maintaining profits by cutting costs have left many organizations in turmoil. Usually this means more work to do with fewer people to do it. In this stressful atmosphere, some businesses will turn in on themselves and collapse, and others will turn the crisis into phenomenal growth.

Whiteley and Hessan provide specific action steps and guidelines for CEOs and all employees to understand precisely how to propel their businesses toward sustained growth. They recommend companies interested in gaining a competitive edge should:

• Create an intense focus — move from pursuing potential business opportunities everywhere to concentrating on being the best in the world at providing value for clearly identified customers. We must get rid of the products that don’t add value.

• Develop well-defined customer listening strategies and then hard-wire what is learned into the organization so that everyone can deliver what the customers really want. Guess what? The baby boomers have aged. If we want to keep the customers we have and add new (and younger) ones, we’ll have to change, too.

• Convert “teamitis” into universal collaboration with overarching goals, producing team-oriented behavior regardless of whether people are on formal teams.

• Cultivate customer enthusiasm with an interaction process that is as much a part of what a brand stands for as the core product itself. Develop a special process for special customers.

• Move into contact leadership. Get out from behind your desks and visit the customers and places within your organizations where the real work gets done.

It is the turnaround stories that the authors provide that bring the book’s principle’s to life. The Domino’s Pizza rags-to-riches-to-rags-again story has real humor and drama. When Domino’s sold the Detroit Tigers and numerous other corporate toys, it came to realize - almost too late - that its original college-student customers now wanted thin crusts, Diet Coke and variety enough for the whole family. The company ended its flirtation with bankruptcy and headed toward its most profitable year ever.

I also like the way the chapters take a step-by-step approach - a 60-page toolkit - that you can get your mind and your hands around to build a formula for a powerful new way of doing business that is tailored to your unique situation.

Dianne Elizabeth is publisher and president of Springfield Business Journal.