Marketing as Strategy

Bob Theune, president of Dunbarton Corporation, discusses how he got started with Simplified Strategic Planning and how it has helped him and his team achieve more of their annual objectives.

Dunbarton Corporation is a leader in the production of prefinished steel building products for commercial and residential applications. By pushing new ideas, improving production capabilities, and inventing new building solutions, Dunbarton has changed the way architects and builders think of doorframes and wardrobe doors. Dunbarton is located in Dothan, Alabama.

You have been using Simplified Strategic Planning on an annual basis since 2001. How did you make your initial decision to use the process at Dunbarton?

I had recently been promoted from Vice President of Sales to President of the company. My main objective was to share the big picture with more people, to get the senior management team more involved and more committed to the long-term prospects of the company. I felt that this was the best way to improve their understanding of how the company works and fully engage them in enhancing all of our business processes - the focus of our sales activities, the efficiency of our operations and financial activities and the effectiveness of all administrative support efforts that make this place work.

I am a member of a professional organization called the Chief Executive Network (www.chiefexec.com). A fellow member was already using Simplified Strategic Planning and he spoke highly of its impact on his organization. His enthusiastic word-of-mouth testimonial was what caught my attention.

He explained how SSP required a very thorough exploration of every aspect of his business (markets, customers, competitors, internal capabilities and competencies, long-term strategies and short-term actions, etc.) - and even pointed out that, in the first year, this comprehensive, objective examination was an extremely valuable but fairly painful process! The structured documentation organized the planning process, the team's decisions and the company's results. He credited this consistent annual record keeping with his team's ability to better monitor market trends and out-maneuver the competition. I knew that was what we needed.

You have been using a CSSP consultant as your process leader since the beginning. Tell us a little about this decision.

Good question. My colleague at CEN was using an internal facilitator for their annual planning activities - and that was my intention from the start. I had already identified an internal training resource to take us through the process. In order to make sure that we all understood how the process worked (especially our trainer), we engaged CSSP to teach their two-day seminar on site.

We could have proceeded according to plan and taken ourselves through the process that first year, but I hate to admit it: before lunch on the first day of the presentation, I realized that my internal facilitator would not be able to challenge us in the same way that the process leader from CSSP would. We asked him to shift gears on the fly and present the process to us assuming that he would be leading us through the first cycle of planning. He was able to do this within the two-day presentation. We were able to get the full SSP overview along with the added benefit of actually starting the process at the same time. This generated a lot of buy-in on the part of the team and a lot of comfort for me that we would proceed with the consultant on board.

We began the process with twelve managers on the strategic planning team - I call them the "12 Disciples"! Coincidentally, we still have twelve members on the planning team (although not the same personnel - more on that later). In my experience, good consultants have the ability to ask questions that are difficult to answer. Often, these are questions that we would not ask ourselves. This can be due to paradigms we hold about our business, blind spots we have because of our daily, tactical activities or just the natural inclination to avoid probing areas of the business that we know are going to be painful to address. Our CSSP consultant was able to ask these tough questions in a non-threatening manner that allowed us to focus on resolution instead of worrying about blame.

How has the process changed your management team?

To answer that question, I will share two different stories. The first deals with the reaction my Human Resources manager had to the process - mostly with the simple fact that she felt more involved with the overall goals of the business and understood more clearly why we did things a certain way. Before SSP, she dealt with HR issues on an isolated, individual employee basis. After participating in SSP, she had a much better feel for the impact that her activities have on the big picture. It has helped her develop into a more valuable contributor to the company.

The second story deals with some changes in senior management that we needed to make. We have had a much higher success rate on implementing our annual strategic objectives - the monthly action plan review meetings and the structure of the action plans have led us to achieve better results. The tactical implementation part of the process has helped the entire team stay on track. This structured approach also revealed some deficiencies in personnel. It became clear after some time with the process that we needed to make changes in key senior management positions that were under-performing. The decision to re-direct and, in some cases, release managers was not easy, but the process made it clear that the changes were necessary. This was a big help to me. On the positive side, we were able to promote from within to fill the vacancies with people who had demonstrated they were ready for the additional responsibility. This has been extremely healthy for the team.

It sounds as if the structure of the implementation process has been particularly useful for your team. Are there other ways in which this part of the process has been helpful?

Yes. We are still in the final stages of overhauling our computer system. I have not heard that this is an easy transition for any company and we have not been able to complete it on the original, optimistic schedule. Although it was the highest priority objective a couple of years ago and we had dedicated our management resources to completing it, we ran into delays from the software vendor that we could not control. The great thing about the total implementation system of SSP is that, once we recognized that this project was temporarily on hold, it was very easy to re-direct our energy (management time and money) toward a couple of the other objectives that were only slightly lower in priority.

This sounds really basic, but it provided us with a seamless re-direction of attention to other projects, with an appropriate sense of urgency to use the time to get these other valuable results under our belt. Once the software vendor was ready to go, we were able to re-elevate the computer system project to the top of the list and get back to work. The SSP implementation tools and the monthly monitoring system made this work extremely well.

This year we are working on a large opportunity for some international business. We have needed to plan for capacity increases in an existing part of the operation. Because the strategic planning process requires that you think several years in advance, we are already well prepared for the equipment and personnel changes necessary to take on this business when it hits. I fully expect that it will be the smoothest ramp up in production that we have had in the last ten years.

I firmly believe that Simplified Strategic Planning has made the entire management team more aware of our business potential and much more in control of what we need to do to achieve that potential. I look forward to finding out what new things we will learn about the business when we return to the planning sessions this summer.

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