Triggering Epiphanies

Have you ever had those moments when you suddenly and completely out of the blue decided something which has had a long-lasting impact, which has changed your life? Those are "epiphany moments". One has to cherish them, as they don't come often in life, but once they are there, we need to grasp them and just go for whatever there is to do! Epiphanies should always result in actions. That's why coaches and consultants like me like them so much. 

There is always a way out!

I have had a few in my life, they tend to appear very sporadically, unexpectedly, some are stronger, some are weaker, and of course, the stronger the better. They can reach levels of excitement to an orgasmic scale.

I had one recently:

It happened on 30 June 2015: I got up, had a coffee, decided to go to the local gym and sign up for membership, went to my wardrobe, packed a bag, went down the hill to the new local health and leisure centre, signed up without having seen what the place looks like, and started to exercise. I did it as if I had been remote controlled. I walked down the hill like a zombie that has smelled fresh human flesh.

Me on day 1! 

I am still amazed about it, as for the last 15 years I avoided the gym and any kind of physical exhaustion like the plague. Suddenly this! Now, 4 weeks after, I am quite happy about it and I like going there. I don't overdo it, I don't think I ever will; looking like Arnold has never been on my to do list, but a little bit of exercise is actually quite nice. 

Some of those epiphanies can be triggered, some probably come completely out of the blue. It must be similar to dreams; many stem from activities and occurrences that took place in our active lives, others come from deep within our subconsciousness. 

Epiphany moments in a business context are rare. I can imagine entrepreneurs probably have them when coming up with an idea and then take action. The role of a coach is to pave the way for them to happen. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It's like with dreams, you can't force anyone to dream something specific. 

Epiphany in Bulgaria, where on 6 January every year men throw themselves into ice-cold water to fetch a cross that has been thrown in by the local priest. My coaching method isn't that drastic...  ;-) 

I have an example where I managed to trigger such an epiphany moment: 

Imagine a factory, break time for the workers is at 11:00 and there is no canteen on site, just a vending machine with sandwiches, chocolates, and the like; and then there is this little van from a local bakery that drives from factory to factory selling warm food, no meals, just warm sandwiches and rolls. For our German speakers, they sold Leberkässemmeln, but I am refraining from explaining this in English. 

Anyway, whenever I walked around the shop floor I heard a siren at 10:15 and most workers left their work place and went to that van to buy their "Leberkässemmeln". Those were kept in aluminium foil to keep them warm in order to bridge over till 11:00. What happened though, in most cases, break started at 10:15 because people wanted to eat their rolls straight away. Production figures plummeted daily during that hour. 

I went to the plant manager and just enquired about that sandwich van and he proudly told me about managing to finally have the van stop at 3 different locations inside the factory so that his workers would not have to leave their work place too early in order to walk all the way to the main gate where the van used to stop in order to be able to buy their "well deserved rolls". 

One morning after sitting over the project goals, which was to raise output by a certain percentage and we were far from the target line, I said to him a little bit after 10:00, "I need a break, why don't we take a stroll to the coffee machine in the factory and I get us a coffee...?". We went and of course at 10:20 the factory was empty, as everyone was queuing up at the van outside. I said, "It must be break time, nobody is here anymore, the machines are all switched off..."

The sandwich van does not exist anymore and break time starts at 11:00 again. We discussed this issue with the workers' council and came up with a good solution. The plant manager told me after a while: "Roland, I was so embarrassed when you showed me what happened down there without rubbing it in. It was the moment when I knew we really needed to sort the business out and start pushing mountains". 

We did and managed the turnaround and hit the target line. Happy Epiphany! 

That's an epiphany gone wrong!

Salmon, Shrimps and Krautsalad (4)

Proudfoot had a standardised training programme for selling skills of which I got the manual. We had to adapt it to the client’s needs and that took us ages. We realised that the Proudfoot manual was far too elaborate for the client. So we did lots of work to tweak it and transform it into a “tailor-made” one. Well, no need to reinvent the wheel, but here we really had to sort of reinvent it.

I must say, our training programme which we finally got together was absolutely fabulous and extremely specific to the client’s needs. The role plays were all about selling salad, the language was adapted to their business, and everything was salad!

This was a very skills project. And please refer to an earlier entry where I explained skills programmes. I implemented exactly one of those. We had TTTs, TTEs, TTCs and CTCs. Anyway, something like that anyway. ;-)

Salmon, Shrimps and Krautsalad (3)

We also needed to implement daily/weekly review meetings with the sales force. The 4 area sales managers of Germany needed a single system for managing their sales force and we implemented that. We created agendas of what to talk about, how to link sales to the weekly figures and reports, etc.

We even got rankings of who were the best sellers with the highest margins for the company. One of the area managers was our task force, Uwe Kossatz, who was responsible for the east German market. Another task force was Michael Gebauer, a Hamburg based marketing manager. The 4 of us were an extremely good team and we were pretty efficient with the programme.

Salmon, Shrimps and Krautsalad (2)

Unfortunately, I have lost all documentation about that project and in fact, about most projects, so I must rely on my brains for details. I remember we did a brown paper session and figured out their main problems in their processes. But apart from those process inefficiencies, which were actually a missing management system for the company, we were tasked with the training programme regarding selling skills. On the picture is my colleague Emmanuel Quentin.

Management system was easy. The client did not have an idea about their margins of their products, just a rough one which were money makers and which were not. The most selling product was “krautsalat”, which is very German and means something like cabbage salad. They sold tons of that stuff, but hardly got any money back. On the other, products like crab salad, which was hardly sold, delivered a very high margin. So, we needed to create a management information system which first highlighted high margin products per area and which second reported on single sales efforts of sales staff so that high margin selling was manageable.

Salmon, Shrimps and Krautsalad (1)

After the Christmas holidays 2000/2001 I got a phone call that there was a project for me which I would have to manage. The project was a little extension of an existing one. The latter was a manufacturing project in Osnabrück and mine would be an extension towards their sales department and that was in Hamburg, also in Germany.

The client produced delicatessen salads and sold them mainly to department stores and gourmet palaces. Their sales force needed “selling techniques” and a common approach to sell salad. I was excited. But as said, it was a very small project, only 24 manweeks, which means 2 people for 12 weeks. The project started mid January till mid April.

I must admit I have forgotten the savings commitment we had with the client. Bearing in mind that the project cost around 300,000 euros, I would expect the savings to be around 900,000 but I don’t know anymore.