Partnering Beyond the Plate
Robert (Bob) Aiken, president and CEO of U.S. Foodservice, sat down with HOW Online contributor Dov Seidman to talk about the corporate commitment to be “Your Partner Beyond the Plate.” The initiative is much more than a new marketing campaign for the company — it is a pledge to take a long view of business, building an enduring legacy by focusing on how U.S. Foodservice does what it does as a core strategy. Aiken describes how this opportunity to outbehave the competition is helping to create a competitive advantage for the company.
This isn't a choice between success and significance but rather a view that if we can build our focus on significance within our company, the empowerment of our people, the engagement of our customers, we'll build our financial success along the way.
Part 1 of our “CEO-to-CEO Corner” series begins with a discussion about our current economic climate and continues with an exchange of ideas on U.S. Foodservice’s efforts to build an enduring legacy by focusing not just on financial results but on significance that inspires its employees to move beyond the product.
- Part 1 of the series
- Read Part 2 of the series
- Read Part 3 of the series
- Read Part 4 of the series
Dov Seidman: How are you and your company doing, as we speak, right in the middle of what so many of us think is a crisis?
Bob Aiken: Our company is very focused on what we can control and continuing to drive our culture and our initiatives across our business, and we’re performing very well right now. I’m very pleased with the performance.
I think an awful lot of that has to do with the work we’ve done to create a culture focused on our customer and continuing to serve the customer even in difficult times.
Seidman: I’m struck that, on the one hand, you acknowledge that these are difficult times, and yet, right in the middle of these difficult times — where so many others are hunkering down, stripping things out and focusing on the basics, and just doing whatever they can to meet bottom line results — you are talking about and building an enduring company. You’re talking about having a legacy. You’ve announced that you are now going to “partner beyond the plate.” I’m really struck by the juxtaposition of those two.
Aiken: I’ve never seen times like these in my business career, but the principles that we talk about, “your partner beyond the plate,” the efforts within our company to focus on how it is we do things has never been more important than it is right now.
As the leader of our company, my job is balancing the focus on short-term success versus trying to build long-term significance. In uncertain times, it would be easy to place our journey of significance on hold but, if you do that — if you stop working to inspire your people and if you stop working to inspire your people to meet short-term financial needs — you lose the faith of your people.
I acknowledge that this is a balancing act. We’ve got to manage our short-term financial needs and necessities, but we have to continue to focus on where it is that, ultimately, we’d like to go as a company. And that means enforcing our values all the time, in times like these — not just in good times.
Seidman: What’s entailed by the notion that you’re pursuing significance?
Aiken: Significance for us is really thinking about how it is that we can engage our associates, which is, how we refer to our employees, how we can engage our customers and how we can engage our communities. It’s an acknowledgement that there’s more to business than just financial success.
When we think about building a proud legacy within our company, we believe that legacy will allow us to achieve financial success. But it is a separate end. The sole purpose of our business is not to achieve that financial success; it’s to create a business that’s got an enduring legacy, that helps our customers to succeed, that allows our people to develop into meaningful careers, that allows them to take care of their families and, ultimately, inspires them to really move beyond.
So when we talk about “Your Partner Beyond the Plate,” it’s the acts of those employees who move beyond in the quest to help us achieve that significance that we’re talking about.
Seidman: Just to push that further, you say that you’re really, genuinely, acknowledging that there’s more to business than financial results. Are you also saying with “Your Partner Beyond the Plate” that there’s more to business than your product? More than the food you put on the plate? A more meaningful, lasting relationship with your stakeholders that transcends not only financial results but the product itself?
Aiken: That’s exactly right. We deliver more than 700 million cases a year of food to our customers, and many people would define that as our company. What the “beyond” campaign is about is acknowledging and celebrating how it is that we serve those customers. We make three promises, and the campaign is really focused on the fulfillment of those three promises.
One of them is ensuring the quality and safety of our food; second, is building the knowledge and responsiveness of our sales staff; and the third is reinforcing the timeliness of our deliveries.
And in each case, what’s important is how we go about fulfilling each of those promises. We like to look within our company and find examples of employees who are doing just that.
I was talking to our people in Salem, Mo., recently, and they talked about a new restaurateur that had called about an opening of a new restaurant in their area. They called us and called one of our leading competitors. And, he said, that when he called the competitor, the lady on the phone acted as if she was doing him a favor by taking the call and that somebody would be back to him in a few weeks time. Then he called our company, and the associate — the customer service rep who picked up the phone — was excited that he’d called. She made him feel wanted, and that his business was valued.
And, he said, from that call forward, he felt like he knew that U.S. Foodservice was the right place for him to do business.
So, here, we have a customer service rep who goes way beyond what’s expected of her when she answers the phone, and that helps us earn a new customer — and it was all in how she went about responding to that request that happened.
Seidman: In going beyond the product and financial results, are you also conceding that there’s something different about 21st century business? That it’s hard and getting harder to differentiate yourself and build lasting advantage through competitive advantage in the product itself? In other words, perhaps your competitors can get equally valuable, good-quality and well-priced food on the plate of their customers, but you’re going beyond the food on the plate because, for you, that’s a new source of sustainable competitive advantage?
Aiken: Yes. I talk an awful lot within our company about six core strategies that drive our business, the whats, if you will. If you went and talked to the leadership of our primary competitor, they talk differently about their strategies but, at the core, they’re really pretty similar. And so, in a commoditized business such as ours, the question becomes, how will we be successful compared to our competitors? That’s where the hows come in — engaging our employees in a different way so that they feel a connectedness to the customer that allows them to serve the customer in a way that nobody else will. To me, that’s what this journey to significance is about. It feeds and builds financial success.
This isn’t a choice between success and significance but rather a view that if we can build our focus on significance within our company, the empowerment of our people, the engagement of our customers, we’ll build our financial success along the way. And that’s what we’re talking about at U.S. Foodservice.
Seidman: But when you say — and I’m quoting you from your company newsletter, “What’s Cooking,” from September — “I believe that building a company of significance drives success and that HOW … ” - all caps - ” … we do our business is as important as what we do.”
What does “how” mean to you and look like from a leadership perspective? And what are the how behaviors that those of us who observe U.S. Foodservice and how it conducts itself and competes in the marketplace are increasingly going to see?
Aiken: First and foremost, for us, it is about living our values. We have a very clear set of values that we spend a lot of time talking about at U.S. Foodservice.
And we don’t look to regulate every action of every employee in our company. We could never do that, and it would never be successful. But what we work hard to do is to define a common set of values that our employees can refer to when they’ve got to make a decision — when an issue stands before them — that they can turn to the values and find the answer that they need to continue to drive our company forward. So, how is it that we bring those values to life?
Well, as an example, every year all 26,000 of our associates undergo live ethics training. We bring a topic, a controversial topic before them — an issue they might see in the workplace, an issue that carries with it ambiguity and a gray area — and we show the scenarios to the employees and then we break into small groups of about 10 or so of different functions within our divisions. The employees sit down and talk about what it is they saw and how they would act in the face of that ambiguous situation.
What that allows the employee to do is to really practice the engagement of those values against a tough situation. What we hope is that through that training and through that experience, when they’re confronted with that sort of situation out in the day-to-day of what they do, they’re going to be able draw upon what they saw in that ethics training and the embodiment of those values to make the right decision.
Seidman: In terms of behaviors in the marketplace, where does trust enter into all of this? As I understand it, you’re telling the marketplace, “Have a relationship with U.S. Foodservice because, deep down, we stand for things. And, “A relationship with us is more than our product and more than our need to make money. You can have a relationship with us that’s deeper than and broader than what has normally been offered by a food provider.” So what are the effects of that relationship and where does trust fit into that?
Aiken: We actually start with our sales force because we have about 5,000 salespeople out calling on our customers day in and day out. And I believe if our salespeople trust us, there is a very good chance that our customers will trust us as well.
The one thing I can tell you for certain is if our salespeople don’t trust our company, our customers can never trust us because the salespeople are the face of the company, in many ways. So we have spent a lot of time over the last year, training our salespeople, helping them to be more successful. So, how does that manifest itself?
As an example, with every new salesperson we hire now, we do a 13-week standardized on-boarding process before they ever go call on a customer. They spend time in a classroom, they spend time shadowing a successful sales rep. They spend time on the phone in customer service talking to customers. We help them build their knowledge base, give them a sense of what they’ll confront when they get out into the marketplace and allow them to feel prepared to face the challenges that they’re going to see in the marketplace.
That creates a foundation of support and trust that causes our salespeople to believe in our company, and then, ultimately, when they go out and start calling on customers and building their book of business, they can speak about our company as a company that makes those sorts of investments and helps them to succeed. That translates to success with the customer as well.
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January 27th, 2009 at 7:20 pm
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