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BY DALE DAUTEN
"Due to the present financial circumstances, the light at the end of the tunnel will be turned off at week-ends." -- Graffiti, in Dublin, 1987
Having just seen the movie "The Wrestler," I'm seeing the battle with this economy in pro wrestling terms: (cue the music)
"Death Match of the Decade: The Gifted Boss vs. The Not-So-Great Depression."
And today I want to tell you about how the good guys are winning.
Representing great bosses everywhere - the ones I've coined "gifted bosses" -- is Mark Ferguson, division president for D.R. Horton Homes in New Mexico. (I should point out that I've been so impressed with the management at DR Horton, I own stock in the national company.) Ferguson is taking on, of course, the worst housing market since the invention of the garage door opener, maybe since the invention of the garage.
Ferguson said to me recently, speaking about the state of the market, "There's no point wishing the wind would blow the other way - you adjust your sails." In this case, with the dramatic contraction of the housing market, that meant re-creating his division of D.R. Horton. (Gifted bosses are never content to merely shrink - they recreate.) Gone are the McMansions of five years ago - now, the relevant McDonald's analogy is the Dollar Menu. Specifically, for Horton homes in Albuquerque it meant developing a home suited to the one segment of the market that still had the option of buying - people without another home to sell; i.e., renters. The company now offers a home for under $100,000, with house payments under $700. Not glamour houses, of course, but they are detached homes with a two-car garage, and they beat living in an apartment - and that's exactly the point.
But a gifted boss is not content to simply compete on price - there are too many other opportunities for innovative competing. In Mark Ferguson's case, he and Kathy Rhoades, VP of Sales, decided that this economy was a perfect time to get closer to customer, and specifically closer to real estate agents. The company now puts on a quarterly luncheon, free to agents. I spoke on creativity at the most recent one, and you'd never know there was a housing slump - with music, sound effects, door prizes and announcements of new incentives, an SRO crowd of 400 was lighthearted.
Ferguson is a "what else can we try?" leader. For instance, the operations manager, Lou Gibney, told me that at Halloween they had brought truckloads of pumpkins to all their new developments, inviting the neighbors to come by and pick one out. You might think that in a bad market this would be a wasted expense, giving something to people who'd they'd already sold; however, the energy of the event attracted new homebuyers and increased sales.
So who's winning the Match of the Decade? Ferguson's division is ahead of its sales targets, and over the past year has gone from selling one in five houses in the Albuquerque area to one in four. I'm guessing that by the end of this year it will be one in three, and, as the market improves, it will be one-third of a larger pie. So, the economy might have taken some rounds during the economic panic of late 2008, but I'm betting on gifted bosses like Mark Ferguson taking most of the rounds in 2009.
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Dale Dauten is the founder of The Innovators' Lab. His latest book is "(Great) Employees Only: How Gifted Bosses Hire and De-Hire Their Way to Success" (John Wiley & Sons). Please write to him in care of King Features Syndicate, 300 W. 57th ST, 15th Fl, New York, NY 10019, or at dale@dauten.com.
2009 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
