■ Many companies regard their fellow employees as customers. Management visits to them are just as important as regular “customer” visits. Aside from those, customer visits via business aircraft can be used to:
—attend customer-sponsored events, such as a grand opening
—service more than one destination in a day
—efficiently increase face-to-face contact with the customer, relationship building, interaction between people. “They think more highly of us when they see more of us.”
—facilitate a lean senior staff: “We have a lean management so it has to cover a wide area quickly.” Consequently, business aircraft can facilitate senior management participation in selling
—enable a team approach, rather than a one-person attempt. “If there is a new business opportunity that requires a team visit we dispatch them out on that call.”
—make customer visits possible into remote areas where airline schedules are not conducive to timely travel
—demonstrate capability; establish or reinforce an image
—support a customer in trouble. “Being there sometimes helps.”
Attraction & Retention of Key People
The Group
Stan Richards has built a company culture that is egalitarian, open and creative and includes a company plane. Consequently, he gets – and keeps – the best and the brightest.
Ask Stan Richards how many people work with him at The Richards Group, a Dallas-based marketing communica-tions company, and you’ll get an instant answer. Today, it’s “472.”
You get the sense over time that he probably knows most of them. Tall and lanky with a senior executive’s grace and a calm demeanor, Richards says that The Group is part advertising agency, public relations firm, interac-tive company, and design and sales promotion organization, all under one roof.
Chances are, you’ve seen their work. The firm has produced cam-paigns for Home Depot, 7-Eleven and Nokia Mobile Phones, among others. One campaign for the chicken-based fast food chain Chick-Fil-A included simple billboards stating “Eat More Chikin,” a slogan written by life-size cows standing on ladders.
Attrition is not one of Stan Richard’s challenges. “We have absolutely the lowest turnover rate of any substantial advertising agency in America,” he says resolutely. “Nobody even comes close.”
There are several reasons, he says; chief among them is the group’s gestalt. “I guess it comes as close to an egalitarian culture as you can get in a business environment. Everyone, at every level, is treated with respect. There are no doors anywhere, with the exception of conference and rest rooms. It’s a very open environment. Advertising agencies usually are hotbeds of paranoia because of the volatility of the business. So when a door is closed you wonder, oh gosh, what client are we losing now? The only way to defeat that is by not keep-ing secrets, so everyone in the firm is allowed to know everything that is going on – never a secret, never a secret conversation – outside of compensation, which obviously is personal stuff.”
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