Fans Not Customers: How to create growth companies in a no growth world by Vernon Hill

Author:Vernon Hill [Hill, Vernon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2012-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

10

Culture Counts!

Passion and standing up for things can help create a sense of unity. But you still have to act a certain way.

Arthur Blank, co-founder, The Home Depot

We have created a culture to match our model.

Anyone who has done business at or with Metro Bank—or collected a pay cheque from us—knows that we are different.

Culture—and recognition—was so important at Commerce that we had annual “WOW! Awards” to recognize our top-performing stores, reinforce our culture and reward our outstanding achievers—more than 8,000 of them each year. We didn’t just put on a party hat to celebrate our success, we rented the legendary Manhattan Art Deco palace, Radio City Music Hall, and put on a gala show which included everything from a Commerce Bank team member talent show to the world famous Rockettes themselves.

Of course we do not do everything right. There will always be bumps in the road. But we keep and maintain our competitive advantage because we’re not at the end; we have a long way to go.

So many people ask me, “How will we maintain the culture?,” and I always say, “We are not in the maintenance mode.” It is about enhancing the culture. It is about getting to the next level. It is about advancing the ball and staying ahead of the growth curve.

If you have a culture that wants to create fans and wants to have no stupid rules and wants to exceed customer expectations, you will succeed. But if you’ve got a culture driven only by making money, with a focus on getting costs down and driving productivity up, you will not.

You can try to cost-cut your way to prosperity, or you can grow your way to prosperity—obviously, we believe in the latter. Growth companies believe in their growth model and they invest and over-invest to grow their model and they create value through growth. Companies that do not have a growth model and try to cost-cut their way to prosperity rarely, if ever, succeed. At Metro Bank, for example, we overspend on buildings, on locations; we’re open seven days, which is more expensive than weekday-only banking; and we make a substantial investment in call center design and training—although no customer will ever set foot there. We consistently over-invest for returns where our competition under-invests.

Many banks in the UK want to drive costs down, drive productivity up, and deliver modest customer service—but in that order.

What we want to create are fans, amazing service and convenience, and that is what we do. If you’re trying to achieve great culture, great service, great convenience and to attract customers who will introduce other people to you, that’s the basis for your decisions. If that’s the core of everything you do, that’s what you achieve. People look for a single silver bullet, but it’s the million things you put together, and at the center of the million things is the culture.

Ultimately, the culture of Metro Bank is about our team members. We get fan mail every day, and that fan

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