eate Value for People
II. The Human Side of Business
7. Motivating and Managing People and Groups in Business Organizations
© The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007
234 Chapter Seven
SATISFIED CUSTOMERS. Unlike the other moving companies she had seen, Sheets decided that Two Men would put a premium on customer service. “Moving had a cruddy reputation,” she says. “I made sure everything was spotless. And we went out of our way for the customers.” Sheets put her movers in uniforms and gave them business cards, charged by the hour instead of weight, and paid for any damage to be fixed. The company’s mission statement remains: “Treat everyone the way you would want your Grandma treated.” From the start, Sheets handed out postage-paid reply cards, with just five questions, to her cus- tomers. Last year, the company received 66,000 responses. Sheets says that only 1% of the comments are negative—and she uses them as an opportunity. “We want to get it right with our customers,” she says. “Sometimes we send them flowers or a gift if something went wrong.” As a result, Two Men gets about 95% of its business from word-of-mouth refer- rals, eliminating the need for much advertising. With no formal business background, Sheets says she has relied mostly on her own instincts and expe- rience. She credits her time volunteering at a hospital crisis intervention center with helping her to handle customers over the phone. “It taught me empathy and how to listen,” she says. STICK MEN U. When it came to marketing, Sheets took a similar grassroots approach. She printed brochures and placed them in apartment buildings, handed out mugs with the Two Men logo filled with jelly beans, and turned the trucks into mobile billboards—displaying the original stick-figure logo. Her goal was, and remains, to bring a personal touch to an industry known for its uniformity and stressed-out customers. Like most