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helps make ordinary people extraordinarily successful. That’s exactly what we did, not only at AlphaGraphics, but in every company I have ever built since.
Michael: Speaking about that, l et’s jump 14 years forward to 1998 and the PetsHotel. What made you believe that a Hotel for Dogs and Cats would have a chance when there already were 14,000 kennels in the USA? Rodger: Simple. At PetsHotel we didn’t think like a kennel. We developed the PetsHotel to emulate the experience of a hotel, a spa, and a day care center all in one. We targeted the female customer who thinks of herself most often as the primary parent of the pet. We hardscaped our PetsHotel facility so that the surfaces were impervious to moisture, which meant that our facility, unlike most pet kennels, didn ’t harbor bacteria and therefore hadn’t any offensive odors. Like a hotel, spa, or day care facility, we developed a reservation program that worked just like a hotel reservation system did. Our customers loved it. Not only did they equate us with a hotel, but our early and late checkout, grooming (spa) and day care (i.e. child care and recreation) services immediately distinguished us from the competition. We had large rooms and smaller rooms and many of the large rooms had telephones. Yes, our customer, the parent of the pet, as we thought of her, could call in to talk to her pet! Nobody had ever heard of such a thing before we did it! And just about everything we did and provided our customers was hardscaped into the way we conducted business. Understand, many of our positions paid a few dollars above minimum wage. So, our employees were unskilled, and in most previous jobs they had, poorly motivated and trained. In our case, however, most of our people performed well above our expectation…they were supported by a hardscaped and intuitive business system where we paid really important attention to them, and to how they worked and learned. So at PetsHotel our people were ordinary people made effective by desire combined with an effective system that led to high esteem and tremendous customer satisfaction. Just go to any PetsHotel today and you’ll see what I mean. It ’s now owned by PetsMart and most every PetsMart store has a PetsHotel inside. The program is better now as a result of PetsMart ’s dogged dedication to customer satisfaction delivered via an effective business system and dedicated, supported and empowered people who are completely invested in the PetsHotel vision. Michael: Let’s move to the heart of the matter, if you’ll pardon the pun, and my real purpose for this interview, Rodger. How is it that you can be successful in so many and varied endeavors … ….f rom Real Estate Development to Printing to PetsHotel to resuscitating the Artificial Heart at SynCardia? Rodger: I first read the E-Myth Revisited in 1986. You had just published that extraordinary book. No sooner did I begin to read it, but suddenly my practices and methods were validated. For me, you became the prophet from another land. I bought the E-Myth on tape for every
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