Building a business is hard. Think about setting up your own store, think of all the things that you need to do and get right. I mean, you need to figure out what is it people want to buy? What are some of the products we should stock? Then we need to figure out, where am I going to find them? How am I going to get them to the store? How am I going to display them, make sure that people can find the things that they want when they come into the store? Maybe also want to think about my Customer Service. How do I make sure people enjoy coming into the store, have a good time, want to come back? I've got to figure all of these things out. How do I do the checkout and the cash? It's a whole world of finance, I don't even want to think about or talk about, there's a lot that goes into it. When you run your store, you're probably not going to be able to do it on your own sooner or later, you're going to start wanting to think about how am I going to hire some people to help me with them. Now, first couple of people you hire, maybe not a big deal, after all, they're there, you're there, you can oversee them and tell them what to do, but if your store goes well and you end up hiring a lot of people, that oversight that no longer works. You reach a point where you're doing very little of the things that really make the store successful, that's all being done by other people. Ultimately whether your company is successful or not, starts to be less about what you're doing and starts to be more about the processes and practices that you put in place to actually manage the people who are doing the work. Let me give you an example, let's take a store, let's take up Trader Joe's, so I don't know how many of you know Trader Joe's it says grocery store in the US caters mainly to well-educated urban customers, but targets very low prices, and it has been very successful, that's why I want to talk about it, it frequently comes on top in customer satisfaction surveys in the US, one of two or three stores it is frequently out there, it's believed to have the highest sales per square foot of any supermarket in the US, it's probably listed, so they have fewer details than many others, and it's been growing consistently over the last 50 years, the last ten years it's had about 6 percent compound annual growth rate, so it is an incredibly successful store. The reason why I'm bringing up Trader Joe's is when you look at the reasons for their success, a lot has to do with how they manage their people. Sure, they have some smart strategies. I think of one that people often pick up on, they tend to stock a pretty limited range of goods so rather than having huge number of brands, they have mainly own-brand products, fairly low prices, and a limited selection, which actually makes managing the logistics a lot easier and helps to drive down costs, but what's really distinctive about them? It's the people that they employ. If you go into a Trader Joe's, there's one just around the corner from me, I go, and fairly frequently, if you go in a number of things strike you. First of all, the people there they're really friendly in fact, some would say particular if your English almost alarmingly friendly, they're nice people, but it's not just that knowledgeable, friendly customer service that makes a difference, particularly when you compare to a lot of other supermarkets, so they are really efficient. I've talked about Trader Joe's have the highest sales per square foot of any other grocery store that actually puts a lot of strain on your logistics you need to be able to continually keep shelves restocked because stuff's flying off them, you need to be able to move people through your checkout faster than other stores care in order to keep the line lengths to reasonable levels to do that you need a smart, and you need an extremely productive workforce, and that's what Trader Joe has managed to achieve. How has he achieved it? For a variety of things that I want to talk about through the way they hire people, through the way they train them, through the way that they pay them, and motivate them, through the way that they empower them. Ultimately, if you want to be successful in any service business, how you manage your frontline workforce, how you put in place those practices that are going to make them successful is critical. That's what I want to talk about in this course.
