VCPlan – The Path to Success

Today I sat in on a student presentations for the English department at Southern Methodist University. Teams of approximately 12 to 16 students were given the assignment of presenting a proposal of putting a business into a foreign country. They were broken up by management, HR, public relations, logistics and operations. The point of the exercise was to teach a combination of presentation, marketing, and cultural sensitivity. My wife was reviewing their presentation skills and I was a there just as a surprise guest questioner.

I think my job was to ask irritating questions. I did a good job but I tried to be nice and ask them questions that would only demonstrate if they could think on their feet. Although they were not expected to present something that a VC would really be able to approve, they should be able to address out of the box questions.

One group was presenting the concept of a fast food burger joint in Australia that was organically certified. There are a lot of different regulations, purchasing requirements, and organizations they will have to manage. They pointed out that the government does scheduled and surprise inspections. I asked the management group how would they insure that they would pass these inspections and get the employees to comply (I intentionally left it vague). The response was perky (with the student bouncing happily): We think the employees will be enthusiastic to support an organic only vision.

I will tell my response in a moment… but for those of us that have experience in getting employees to comply all the time, what about all those myriad of regulations and organizations that will probably make it confusing and inconvenient? What about those employees that will not really understand how to do all this?

How do you get employees to comply with this? Simple, through training and reinforcement by someone whose duty is to do this. Complexity invites mistakes. Extreme complexity like all the organic laws and organizations they spouted tells me that mistakes are very very likely. Furthermore, for their main message to be that they are an ORGANIC burger place, they should be concerned about that one issue.

My answer was short: I think your enthusiasm is great, but you may want to consider having someone hired to focus on this task.

That person could even be call the second COO: Chief Organic Officer.

In any business where you have extreme complexity whether its just the quality assurance or its the key uniqueness (i.e. ORGANIC foods in a fast food place) you should consider having someone take a leadership position in that role. It does not have to be enforcement like a cop, but more like education and support. It will really help out the employees, improve the working environment and insure that the business stays on its marketing message.

Just because you are enthusiastic about something does mean it will translate 100% to your employees 100% of the time. Reality is that you need reinforcement and that someone takes responsbility.