gripmarketing

"I saw a post about how you had your employees in the Furniture business spend 10% of there time in training. Can you elaborate on this for me please. Perhaps you can explain how I could incorporate this practice into my business in a practical way?"

Ah hah - you're reading!

New Hires attend a week-long training class at corporate, two weeks in a superior store under the tutelage of a regional supervisor before being sent to any store.

To incorporate superior training requires regional supervisors that move around to each store location. As a general rule, regionals should handle no more than 10 stores each so that the regional visits a given store every 10th week at a minimum. The ROI on regionals is 150+%.

Imagine having a professional trainer visit each salon for a week. Sales increase immediately and stay that way for about 8 weeks (on average). Regionals must come from the ranks, be top sales performers themselves who sell in a salon every day (whichever salon they are at), derive most of their income from personal sales and part of their income from store overrides, be respected by the rank-and-file, and be very good trainers. They are almost as hard to come by as officers of the company as they are next in line.

You cannot attempt to make changes or improve until you first OBSERVE an employee doing the job incorrectly. This has to be done firsthand. Training must be done firsthand. As Sam Walton called it, "MBWA - Management By Walking Around".