Domino’s Pizza Enterprises has been an amazingly successful business over the past few years and the CEO in charge, Don Meij, has had a lot to do with that success. With their continued menu innovation and now delivery by drone, it’s no wonder they are smashing the competition in sales. Eagle Boys Pizza is one of the victims of the Domino’s success (amongst other reasons).
The company posted an $82 million profit in the 2016 financial year, sales jumped 33% to $1.96 billion (that’s a lot of pizza) and the share price has risen by 91% in the past 12 months. Plenty of reasons for Meij to feel pretty chuffed and so he should be. Pizza is certainly in his blood, he started in the industry when he was at Uni as a delivery driver and moved through a number of roles before assuming the CEO role in 2002.
I wanted to share some of his top tips that have helped Domino’s success here in Australia, which he shared recently in an interview with Emma Koehn from Smart Company (www.smartcompany.com.au), the daily online news publisher. I’ve also added my thoughts as well as to why his tips are valuable if you want to succeed in retail:
- When Meij started managing pizza stores, he was excited by how you could make things more profitable simply by working as a team. “As a store manager, you can influence more and find ways to strive to be better.” I totally agree, the role of a store manager is critical to the success of that store. The store manager sets the tone each and every day. The best stores so often have the best managers who are able to work with and motivate their team on a daily basis. They always look to do things better, strive to achieve and beat their KPI’s and ensure their team share in the success. “Actually, a good manager is a great influencer, someone who can get results out of the people they have.”
- “We’ve only had one bad quarter as a public company in 2007 and that experience taught us how to listen. The big thing is we became arrogant, we were successful, but we stumbled because we weren’t listening.” How important is listening to customers and listening to the frontline team? Critical, to ensure what we are producing, the way we are servicing our customers is what they want and not just what works for us. Too many retailers go out of business because they don’t listen and adjust. “Now what the customer wants is what we’ll solve. We go to work to solve the problems the customer has.”
- “A year is a very long time in the drone delivery space. These technologies are very important – it’s coming and coming fast.” I think this says it all, the massive and fast-moving change in technology has to be embraced by retailers. Customers want to interact with your brand when they want to and how they want to, whether by phone, tablet or face to face. “We’re motivated to be part of the ecosystem, of knowledge and technology and patenting of delivery tech.”
Great advice from a very successful CEO and company. I hope these 3 tips help you in the ongoing challenge to be the best at what you do. I’ll leave this with a fantastic saying from Meij:
“You have to work hard to get results as a chief executive. The wolf at the front of the pack sets the pace.”
Roger Simpson – CEO, The Retail Solution and Author of “The Retail Solution” With over 35 years’ industry experience, Roger Simpson is recognized as Australia’s #1 Authority on customer ROI in the retail industry and as a global expert on staff coaching, customer service, and selling skills.
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