The following is an excerpt from the book:

As this book prepares to go to print I am dressed in a Spanish bullfighter’s outfit and roller skates. My Chief Operating Officer, Lance, a rangy six foot four outdoorsman, is dressed like a harem girl in sky
blue silk pants, a heavily-padded bikini top and a veil. For the last half hour, while a disco ball spins overhead and Michael Jackson sings Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough, Lance and I have been clumsily attempting a synchronized dance number on skates in a rink we rented near the office. It’s a skit for a video that will play at The Beryl Companies’ upcoming holiday dinner.

Our mutual inability to stay on our feet keeps cracking up the camera crew. I’ve done so many of these comic videos by now I’m surprised that I can’t keep a straight face either. But that’s a good sign. It means our coworkers will probably enjoy the program. And during the dinner a week later, they do, immensely.

I am not a full-time roller-skating matador. I’m a typically driven CEO of a very successful small company that has made a conscious decision to stay small. We focus on quality incremental growth because we don’t think dynamic expansion can improve the results of our unique culture strategy. In an industry where turnover usually averages 80 to 90 percent, ours is 17 percent. Our client retention rate is 95 percent and we charge significantly more for our services than the industry average. Oddly enough, the skating bullfighter skit will help reinforce these numbers.

After twenty years of very hands-on experience, I wrote this book to offer some pointers on how to turn a small, privately owned business into a premium provider that delivers a higher level of profit. These tactics will be especially helpful to people who own and manage “commodity” businesses that traditionally compete on price. Whether you sell coat hangers or creative graphic design, if your customers focus more on cost than any other factor, you are running a commodity business.

I also wrote the book because I’d like to see fellow business leaders stop treating their coworkers like commodities. Leaders should more fully understand the profound impact they can have on the lives of the people who work with them. And every business owner should realize how personally fulfilling it can be to treat co-workers exceptionally well and develop them incessantly. We’ve documented the financial rewards of this approach at The Beryl Companies for two decades. The strategy now motivates a workforce that runs the gamut from highly experienced executives to single moms with high school degrees, and it succeeds well enough to have attracted national attention.

I don’t pretend to be a world class management visionary, but it doesn’t take a prophet to see serious fault lines developing in the American corporate landscape. Number-driven executive teams focus on complex global market trends, but forget common sense fundamentals and a basic sense of humanity. The result? Far too many of the new hires at Beryl admit to criminally demoralizing environments at former places of employment. And epidemic low morale is no surprise in an age of spectacular and endless executive scandals.

Beryl’s culture story proves two things: when you treat your people like true contributors, it does the business tremendous good; and when you focus your business on solid values, it benefits both the community and the economy. The best new model for the future of American business is smart, small, ethical companies willing to make long-term investments in a loyal, local workforce.

Many management books today seem to want to shock some life back into companies that are just about to flatline. The authors describe the worst possible strains of organizational dysfunction, and then pretend that sets of snappy generic formulae will solve these problems equally well for every business under the sun. It’s an easy way to make a book, but not a very honest one. I have tried to present a lot of practical real world tactics, along with a handful of field-tested strategies that should bear fruit for viable small businesses that want to hit their full potential. It’s a less dramatic proposition than pulling a doomed operation out of the grave, but probably a more valuable long-term concern for most business owners and managers.

I bet you walk away with something useful.