Mike has his own unique style. He draws on more than 27 years experience. He has worked most positions in the service industry and feels at home in more major cities than most people.
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Inspired by the principles developed in the “Service Profit Chain”, Mike Hohnen takes you through each of the steps needed to create an outstanding service business.
We live in a world of abundance – there is plenty of choice everywhere. And since 2008 we have experienced significant drops in demand as consumers became more careful. The result is a widening gap between supply and demand in virtually any category you can imagine.
When that happens, many companies have a knee-jerk reaction, and the recipe is more or less always the same: initiate rigorous cost-cutting programs, reduce staff and/or services, offer discounts in many forms, and increase advertising aggressively.
This, however, is the equivalent of trying to steer and brake as your car begins to skid on black ice while going through a sharp curve.
As you hit that declining demand curve, you need to perform what at first seems like a counterintuitive move: hold your price, increase your services, improve your quality, and narrow your focus in the market.
In this book, you will not only understand why but also see how you can do that.
I spent some delightful hours over Christmas deeply immersed in the Steve Jobs biography. Not only was his life an amazing story but there are also an of abundance of wisdom nuggets throughout the book.
One that struck me in particular was the story of when Jobs returned to Apple after his years of involuntary exile. At that point in time Apple was on the ropes and the market was rapidly losing faith.
Jobs convened a product review meeting – Apple at that time had 10–15 different versions of the Mac on the market and even more in the pipeline. Jobs went to the whiteboard and drew a 2 x 2 matrix. On the one side he wrote home/professional on the other he wrote desktop/laptop. Jobs then announced: That is it – four products. A laptop for professional or home use and a desktop for professional or home use. Everything else is as from now abandoned/discontinued.
The lesson for us all of course is: focus. Decide what it is you want to do and do it well.
Trying to be all things to all people invariably results in being nothing to anybody.
Internet has only been around seriously for the past 15 years – but it has evolved enormously from the time I was linking up to CompuServe with an acoustic modem and dismantling phone plugs in hotel rooms to get my crocodile grips to connect with the raw wires in order to get a connection…
We don’t yet know what is next – but we do know it will be different. One thing you can be sure of is that in the next 5 years you will see more innovation than you have experienced the past 15 years – what will that mean for your business?
We kicked of Module 3, on our 3 year 6 module Service Management training this week. Seventeen energetic and ready-to -go ‘students’ worked for the days getting to grips with marketing of services and the role of loyalty and satisfaction.
Four students hosted 4 workshop on developing the focus for their action learning question – the question they will work on for the next 16 weeks and that will form the basis of their final written assignment in December. The Proaction Cafe was hosted by Kathrine Procter who is the Program Manager on this module and works with structured questioning in three rounds. Each round has 3 new expert help the host develop depth, perspective and action items on the chosen question.
The feed back afterwards was awesome – not only did the 4 hosts declare that for the first time did they have a clear focus on their assignment at a very early stage but the other participants also felt that they had learned a lot about how they could approach their learning question.
An unexpected bonus that we had not thought of was that participants felt that working in the ProAction Cafe format also gave them a great opportunity to recapitulate the learning from the three previous days as they wove these topics into the problem solving discussion at the tables. It does not get much better in my world.
