I was talking to Frank at his machine shop recently. Frank owns a shop he inherited from his dad, and he is thinking about how to transition it to his children someday soon. Frank is justifiably proud of the company’s long history of great service to their customers. Over 90% percent of their business comes either from repeat customers or from people who used to work at their repeat customers. It is an enviable position and hard-earned.
But the next generation has other ideas. I met with them to talk about it. Caleb, the 2nd son, started. “We are growing, " he said, “but not much more than inflation. We want to make a bigger move than that.” We love our customers but we think we can do better than wait for the phone to ring”
“Ok,” I said, “So what makes you better than all the other machine shops out there? You have a great reputation for quality and delivery but so do most other shops.” “Speed” said Kayla, the oldest daughter. In the discussion, I learned that they have been developing processes that allowed them to quote faster and deliver the first article faster than any of their competitors, sometimes on the same day. “We do things faster, which makes them cheaper, and allows our customer to iterate their designs more times.”
“The key to that is our talent.” said Kayla proudly” We invest in our employees and they stick around. Our average shop employee has been here for 5 years. Our engineering team, longer than that. Our stuff works the first time, every time, on time. Our customers know that and that is why they come back.” It is our Secret Weapon.” They all nodded in agreement.
“So it is really your people,” I said. “Everyone is trying to solve this exact problem, and you have done it.” That is a huge advantage that everyone will quickly understand.”
I looked at their advertising and website. It was nicely done, with sample parts demonstrating their capability, a list of machines, and cool videos of their machines turning out parts… but not a word or picture talking about their huge competitive advantage.
I was reminded of an old marketing guy I knew long ago who was looking at my marketing campaign at the time. He told me, “It's like you are marketing a hotel and telling everyone you have beds.” They showed what they have that is the same as everyone else and hid what makes them great, their Value Proposition.
“So let’s make your Secret Weapon less secret,” I suggested.
In the next few weeks, they started gathering video testimonials from their customers as well as their employees. They added a page to their website with these testimonials and put quotes from them on the front page of the site. They also started posting them on their newly set up social media pages. They made Kayla’s “First Time, Every Time, On Time" the tagline on every post. They also put in regular rotation a video from Frank about the company’s philosophy on how to treat employees and the average tenure of folks in their shop.
It did not happen overnight, but word began to get out about the shop's great customer experience. The phone began to ring increasingly with new customers wanting to try them out. The team put Caleb in charge of onboarding these new customers to make sure each of them had the best possible experience. They began to grow much more quickly and as they did their reputation as a great place to work helped them add to their high-quality workforce.
“Our shop is not about cutting metal”, said Frank, “it's about giving a great experience to our employees and customers. The metal takes care of itself, and all we had to do was let people know that”
What is your company’s Secret Weapon? If you don't know, find it. Then let the world know and the customers who appreciate that will beat a path to your door.
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