: Margaret Reynolds
: Reignite How Everyday Companies Spark Next Stage Growth
: Indie Books International
: 9781941870426
: 1
: CHF 9.40
:
: Management
: English
: 275
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
In today's fast-paced market, leaders are experiencing challenges that don't respond to yesterday's solutions; long-term customers are buying less, margins are tightening, and the pressure is building. Leaders face more game-changing decisions in a shorter time span. The choices they make at this critical time will either reignite growth or condemn them to business gravity. Reignite provides many pragmatic examples and tools that help executives, managers, and leaders see opportunity through a different lens, so they can discover the profitable connection between market needs and their organization's unique capabilities.
CHAPTER TWO
The Leadership Mandate
Find the Spark Before the Burnout
As a leader, it is important to recognize that tough times and adversity are to be expected. The issue isn’t whether you will face them; it is how to lead the organization to success in spite of them. In fact, challenges can be the catalyst needed to rethink the business in a way that leads to startling new insights and opportunities for growth. Sometimes undesirable situations can lead to very favorable outcomes. How can you transform negative market situations into positive growth opportunities?
Following the last recession, I embarked on a project to correlate business performance with strong leadership. Over the last few years, I have conducted interviews with leaders of successful organizations of all sizes and types—from large corporations to small businesses, from sports teams to churches and everything in between—to find out what they believe makes a difference in achieving high performance. (I reference these CEO interviews throughout the book but if you’d like to learn more, please see the resources section at the end of the book for additional information.)
One such interview was with Dina Dwyer-Owens, Co-Chairman of The Dwyer Group, the parent company of seven brand franchises that provide services to homeowners, including Rainbow International, cleaning and restoration, The Ground Guys, landscaping and maintenance and Mr. Rooter. Founded in 1981, it has expanded to over sixteen hundred franchises and nine thousand employees. During the slowed economy of 2008-2010, the company found that they were not quite as “recession-proof” as they had always thought. Dwyer-Owens acknowledged that this was not a normal recession and that they had some brands with double-digit declines. For the first time in company history, they had to ask the question, “Where do we need to be smarter about the way we operate?”
One solution Dwyer-Owens shared with me in our interview was a new tool that reduced cost, leveraged technology and solved some consumer problems at the same time:
 
One of the greatest tools that we had been piloting over the last few years is Service on Your Schedule. For example, if you are interested in having Mr. Appliance come to your home to fix your Sub-Zero refrigerator, and yo