In Motion to Empower Employees

By: Mark Harbeke
Submitted: 2007-01-17 12:45:45
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Every day at 2:02 PM sharp, the entire staff of St. Louis-based Pro Motion, Inc (PMI) meets to talk about progress and obstacles in delivering the communications agency’s event, field, and mobile marketing solutions. With clients that include Red Baron Pizza, Anheuser-Busch, Campbell Soup and Bosch Tool, the meetings are an important element in helping account and field representatives stay on top of their game. Just ask Julie Doherty, who has been recruiting field teams with PMI for almost three years as the director of player development. “When I’m stuck on something – for example, if I need a bilingual person to travel in the field for nine months – the meetings really help because my colleagues will jump in,” she says. “Everything goes with our core values, and the 2:02 meetings play to the first value.”

According to PMI President Steve Randazzo, the first core value for the firm is, appropriately, “Employees first always.” The others, he says, are “Work as a team, win as a team,” “Make it happen,” “Reputation before revenue” and “Commitment to safety.” Randazzo says these values were in place from day one, but it took time to put words behind them. Now, as Doherty’s reference above shows, these values are such an integral part of the work culture that employees cite them throughout the day to address the various issues that come with executing thousands of events that touch millions of consumers each year.

Randazzo, who last year was named a Winning Workplaces/FORTUNE Small Business Best Boss, says the fifth core value, safety, comes into play across the spectrum of PMI’s daily business. “At any given time we might have 40 to 50 people in the field driving vehicles or interacting with consumers,” he says. “We need to make sure displays are set up with the general public in mind. Our field ambassadors must secure all elements in anticipation of weather changes.”

“Reputation before revenue,” the fourth core value, is utilized just as often. “In an existing relationship with a client, if they ask us to do an additional task, we’ll keep on doing it without charging extra,” Randazzo says. A recent example of this occurred when Red Baron asked PMI to distribute 42,000 extra frozen pizzas it had to consumers, giving the agency only two weeks in which to do so. “In both St. Louis and Chicago, account staff stayed in the field extra days at no additional cost to the client,” Randazzo says.

Part of the reason PMI’s employees are so invested in their work is that the agency dedicates five times the amount of time toward training than similar marketing agencies – all within a fun, improvement-focused atmosphere. “Usually in field marketing, people might get two to three days of training,” Randazzo says. “Our employees get two to four weeks of training. That’s more expensive, of course, but we see the value in that.” The companies that are PMI’s clients see the value, too: in 2005, almost a third of the firm’s field team was subsequently hired by clients the organization services.

Stafford Warneke, manager of the Bosch account who has been with PMI for five years, says the tool company has often recruited PMI’s field representatives in the middle of their tours, which involve mobile workshops in the form of trucks and vans that stop at various cities so consumers can see, touch, and try out the latest tools. “Since we find the right people for the accounts – in my case, those who really love power tools – and set them up to succeed immediately, our representatives are trained to work everywhere from ‘mom and pop’ shops to Home Depot,” Warneke says. “That knowledge base has value for Bosch.”

A component of many a successful small business is the practice by leadership of open-book management, and PMI is no exception. Randazzo trains employees on reading and understanding key financials so they are equipped with the knowledge of how their performance and extra efforts benefit the organization. “It helps staff and field representatives understand how their specific program impacts the bottom line,” says Theresa Weckback, another five-year veteran of the company who manages client accounts. “We can see that, for example, a new job will translate into X amount of revenue, or that Y number of people would be needed to do the job.”

After almost 11 years of perfecting the art and science of event and field marketing, ascribing easy-to-understand labels to the firm’s most important values and empowering employees through fun, interactive daily meetings, Pro Motion’s wheels are turning furiously. “This company is amazing,” Doherty says. “After the previous jobs I’ve had, I’ve been waiting for more than two years at PMI for something bad to happen – and it hasn’t.”

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