What’s your most valuable business skill: your smarts, your take-charge attitude, your sales ability?
Those are all fine attributes, but they’re also potential handicaps.
Patrick Guilbert scores high in all of the above, but says they’re not the secret to his success.
“I don’t ever want to come across as someone who knows everything,” Guilbert said.
“Some businesspeople think, ‘I’m the boss, so I’m the one who is supposed to make the decisions.’ Well, humility is probably the best quality you can have. A little goes a long way.”
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Two years ago, the 34-year-old Manitoban made the jump from corporate middle manager to entrepreneur. This spring, he was recognized as one of the best younger retailers on the continent by the North American Retail Hardware Association.
What caught the attention of his peers is the nature of Guilbert’s success.
He took over a small Home Hardware store in Neepawa, Man., that was doing $1.5 million annually in sales and boosted them by 20 percent. And he did that largely through selling more paint.
Who knew there was that much pent-up demand for paint in a town of 4,000 people?
Guilbert didn’t. Not at first, anyway. He found out by using his ears.
Buying a business in his old home town was a dream come true for Guilbert, who earned a business diploma, supervised an information technology department for a trucking company in Winnipeg and then moved into human resources.
His introduction to hardware and retailing came in June 2008, three months before his buyout of the retiring Home Hardware owner was to take effect.
“I basically volunteered there, watching the customers and the staff, listening to what they were saying and trying to understand their thought processes,” he said.
“Out of that, I came to understand there was an area we weren’t tapping into. That was paint and, as it turned out, we were missing out on about $300,000 in annual sales.”
Guilbert struggles to explain just how this came about. There was no light bulb moment, much less a stream of customers saying, “get a proper paint department and I’ll start dropping wads of cash here.”
Rather, it was a bunch of little things, such as someone looking for a new doorknob or faucet. In the course of conversation, mostly on the customer side, it would come out that they were repainting the living room or bathroom, but never thought of buying paint at Home Hardware.
Although paint lined the shelves it was on the side wall, and there was no paint counter or auto-tinting machine to match a customer’s existing paint.
After a month of hanging around, watching and listening, Guilbert had a plan.
So now it was just a matter of designing a revamped paint department and hiring a contractor, right?
No way.
“You can’t just put a product on a shelf and expect it to sell,” Guilbert said.
“You’ve got to have buy-in from your customers and your staff. I had this vision, but I wanted to know what my customers and my staff thought.”
Of course, most customers didn’t have any specific suggestions, but they were pleased to be asked and they sure took note when the new paint department opened.
The staff had ideas though, and got more involved as the plan took shape.
Buy-in? You betcha. When customers aren’t buying the extra $1,000 in paint that goes out of Guilbert’s doors most days, they’re checking what’s coming next.
And the staff? They’ve been helping their young boss plan and promote the latest innovation, whether that’s the new moulding and trim department or the revamped plumbing fixtures area.
“If an employee wants to bring in something, whether it’s a new paint colour or garden fountains, then I’ll say, ‘If you think you can sell it, then let’s try it,” Guilbert said.
“If it’s a mistake, we’ll deal with it, but you have to let your staff think for themselves. Micro-managing people is the worst thing you can do.”
Make no mistake. This is not about paint or retailing. It’s about seeking the views of others and respecting their opinions.
You may not have employees or customers, but what about family members you work with on the farm? Or your neighbours, input suppliers and accountant?
You get plenty of chances to try out your great ideas. But when you ask, you may find other folks have some pretty good ones, too.
Archived columns from this series can be found at www.fcc-fac.ca/learning. Farm Credit Canada enables business management skill development through resources such as this column, and information and learning events available across Canada.
