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Insights from the Latest Staffing Industry Analysts Conference
By Ella Koscik, CEO MDI Group
Last week I had both the pleasure and the challenge of serving on the Keynote CEO Panel at the Staffing Industry Analysts Executive Forum. Together with executives from Adecco, Manpower and the Bartech Group, we faced the big questions that businesses across the country and around the world are asking: How is this economy affecting the industry? How will this recession reshape your business? What are you doing differently to ensure your success in these unprecedented times? If you could have five minutes with Congress and the President, what would you tell them?
This vetting of ideas and debate on business strategies revealed some valuable lessons and reminders of good, general business principles that I thought you would find of use as well. Please find below my top five takeaways from this panel of CEOs. It is my hope that you find these lessons helpful in these times of big challenges and big opportunities.
Top Five Lessons from the CEO Panel
SIA Executive Forum
Know Who You Are and Deliver
The businesses that succeed despite the decline and marketplace obstacles will be those that know exactly what they do best and deliver on it. They have a clear, distinct value proposition and successfully communicate it to their customers and prospects.
Businesses that panic, introducing new lines and offering any service as long as a customer is interested, are setting themselves up to fail. Customers today are looking for reliability, expertise, experience and measurable, bottom-line value. Only a business that is doggedly focused on its core expertise can deliver that kind of certainty in its solutions, services and/or products.
Keep Your Customers Close and Informed
Remember that many of your customers are struggling today, and they need to be regularly reminded of exactly how and how much you are helping them. Competitors are taking direct and hard aim at your client roster, which makes it critical for customers to understand your role in their success.
Ideas for strengthening customer relations include increasing regular communications (newsletters, e-mails, on-site visits, etc.), introducing client satisfaction surveys, increasing how often you provide metrics that show bottom-line benefits and ensuring senior-level executives are in regular communication with the client’s senior management team.
Invest Where You Can
Recessions are not just opportunities for investors to buy stocks at bargain prices. Right now, there are investment bargains your business should be watching for as well. Now is the time to make a strategic push to increase market share while your competitors are vulnerable.
If you wait until the market has turned around to invest in your business, you are investing too late and missing a key opportunity to increase market share (one that your competitors may be very willing to take advantage of). The question is really this: Can you afford to not invest in your sales, marketing and operations efforts?
Simplify Technology
Is technology enhancing your ability to provide services and/or products or impeding it? This is an important question for any business that wonders whether the technologies they have adopted are really adding value or merely complicating services and solutions. Technology should be a tool to greater service and efficiency. If you find the technologies you have adopted are not resulting in better service and efficiency, it’s time to simplify.
Don’t Let the Economy Consume You
You can’t get away from the economic news and it’s important to stay on top of market information. However, you can’t let the economy define your business strategy or overwhelm your staff. As coaches tell their teams, “Play your game!” Don’t let the economy dictate your every move or frighten you into submission. Make strategic, informed adjustments for economic realities, and get out there and do what you do best.
The economy and its turmoil have in no way consumed MDI Group. Has it motivated us? Absolutely! We are positioning ourselves to succeed by focusing on our clients and remaining the workforce solutions experts businesses turn to for increased capabilities, reduced costs, greater efficiency and talented, high-performing resources.
I am challenging my entire organization to take a look at these five lessons from the SIA Executive Forum to examine our performance and identify areas where we can improve. I invite you to join us in this challenge and look forward to sharing the results of our efforts with you in future communications.
