The Natural Stone Institute and Stone World came together to bring another edition of the Stone Industry Education series, this time in Pittsburg, PA. Blake Christensen of Valley View Granite, led the event discussing best business practices, helping fabricators find inefficiencies in their business, discussing how to make their company stand out and creating a business plan for it to stand out.
“What does clarity provide?” said Christensen. “It provides safety. When you don’t know what my expectation is, you don’t know what my roll and my goal is, that’s when you start getting afraid. And your employees start feeling that. You want your employees to know exactly what they are supposed to do that day, how they are supposed to do it and that provides a lot of comfort to them.”
Christensen then discussed mindset and the importance of the proper mindset in a company.
“If our company is currently doing X we have certain behaviors that are driving those results,” said Christensen. “We have to realize that beneath those behaviors there is a mindset, there is an understanding of why I am doing what I am doing, how I am seeing what I am doing, how I am seeing the people I am involved with. Am I installing kitchens? Or am I installing something in the heart of their home?
“Are we an organizing that just measures my performance?” Christensen went onto say. “Or am I an organization that measures my performance and how it impacts the next guy, or the customer. That’s a big difference and when you start to understanding that, you start becoming much more efficient. So if you want to change your current results to a different results they say we usually focus on behaviors. We never focus on the mindset though. If you never change the why you are going to slither back to those old behaviors and those old results. I have made the mistake of thinking if I only have this system in place people would conform to this system. But that’s a mistake, you need to focus on why people should go to the new system as much the new system itself.”
The next Stone Industry Education event will be held September 21, at Global Granite & Marble in St. Louis, MO.
