I was recently speaking with DeLee Powell, the second-generation owner of Baker’s Collision Repair in Mansfield, Ohio, and I knew I needed to start my next column with one of the things she said. DeLee has experience shepherding her business through some challenging times. Her first year of owning the business began just months prior to 9/11, for example, and Ohio was among the hardest-hit states in the Great Recession of 2007-2009. So now with the economic challenges the country faces, DeLee has a core belief that I think shop owners need to hear.
“You can’t use anything as an excuse,” DeLee told me. “You’ve got to figure out how to move through it, how to continue to be successful. So many people in the collision industry will say, “Well, the industry as a whole is down x percent,” as an excuse why their business is down x percent. That’s never acceptable to me. Our thought process here is: What are we going to do differently so our business isn’t off x percent?”
I first started working with DeLee in the early 2000s, and I’ve watched her take a business that was started by her father in 1953 and that was nurtured by her brother in the 1980s and 1990s, and grow it over the past 20 years into one of the industry’s best-of-the-best. In that time she has helped the business nearly triple its sales to close to $6 million. Baker’s 37 employees working in an 18,000 square foot facility – in a town of just 55,000 people, an hour’s drive from either Columbus or Cleveland.
I called her because over the years she has demonstrated what I see as a primary key to success in this industry right now: the ability to develop new revenue sources. We’ll look at those avenues in upcoming columns, but there’s a necessary prerequisite that DeLee has also excelled in: building a great culture. Innovation requires a culture that attracts and nurtures people who are geared up and motivated for that type of thinking. So I asked DeLee to start with what she feels she’s done to build a successful culture at her business.
Her answer falls into two broad categories. First, she herself has some traits and characteristics – either innately or that she’s developed over time – that help her be a role model and leader of a team driven to succeed.
“One of the lessons my brothers and I and even my kids learned from my Dad was his work ethic,” DeLee said. “He always just thought, ‘I’ll do whatever I need to do to get it done.’ So I sometimes think I’m naïve, in a good way. I don’t ever think I won’t be able to do or accomplish something as long as I work at it.”
She said she also tends to be a long-term thinker.
“When we had our company’s 50th anniversary, in 2003, I remember thinking: Okay, what do we need to do to be here another 50 years,” DeLee told me. “So instead of looking at just a 5-year plan, I’ve always looked long-term as well. What do we need to do long-term to really make the company strong?”
The last inner skill that she believes has helped her build a great culture at her business is goal-setting.
“I think it’s really important to write goals down,” DeLee said. “I remember back in 2001 writing down a set of about 200 goals for the business. I found that list about 10 years later and realized I’d met every one of those goals for the business but one. The last one was having the best KPIs in the country among Sherwin-Williams’ customers. So I’ve been working on that last one. It’s a hard number to hit, but striving for that goal has really helped our business.”
She said she doesn’t think the word “culture” appeared on that list of goals, but the concept was there. One of her goals was to become the type of company where people wanted to work, to be the employer-of-choice. That type of culture that nurtures innovation and revenue growth. How that has become a reality at Baker’s Collision Repair will be the subject of my next column.
