A Chat With Paal Gisholt, President/CEO, SmartPak Equine

CS: That will be a separate book, not under the SmartPak Equine name?
PG: Right now, we’ve just been experimenting with supplements for dogs. Based on the reaction to that, we think that the demand for supplements and food would be even bigger. The initial testing we’ve done has proven positive.

CS: What are some key points to your success?
PG: If you had to wrap your arms around the various ways we operate, it comes down to using culture as a tool to create a high-performance organization, as opposed to using a lot of control mechanisms. What I mean by control mechanisms is even though I don’t have experience being in other catalog companies, I’ve seen, for example, extensive use of scripts in the contact center. People often have very rigid job descriptions or are kept in a particular role. They may have very limited authority to solve a problem for a customer, or limited authority to go outside their specific functional area. What we’ve done to try and get everyone marching together in the same direction is to spend a lot of time thinking about the values that matter. And if people buy in to the values, understand the values, understand the basic economics of the business because we share with them the profitability of the business, you’ve got everybody acting and behaving like a business person and all moving in the same direction. And things happen that are not exactly as I would like, but in general they are directionally correct. And if they’re not, then that person probably isn’t a fit, won’t enjoy [her] time here and won’t be with us very long.