SUCCESS IN ACTION

CHIEF TALK CEOS SHARE KEY LESSONS THEY’VE LEARNED

INTERVIEW BY LEE LUSARDI CONNOR

DOLLAMUR SPORTS SURFACES: A GAME PLAN FOR GROWTH A SPECIALTY MAT MAKER BUILDS ITS MARKETING AND TECHNOLOGY MUSCLES.

First, Listen and Learn In the fi rst 90 days as a leader at a new company, you need to learn as much as you can about four components: people, processes, technology, and infrastructure. Dollamur already had strong brand equity and name recognition in 30 countries, largely because of our support of premiere competitive events around the world. We also had great people in place.

However, most of the team members I inherited were “home-grown”—meaning they had a tremendous amount of knowledge about the company, but not the breadth of experience at other companies and exposure to best practices that would take us to the next level. The challenge was to build a management team with the right blend of skills, experiences, and industry knowledge. We especially needed to build our marketing and information technology areas.

Improve Technology to Support Growth We hired a gentleman with extensive experience to support three initiatives: improving our Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, improving our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, and supporting online sales. We weren’t fully utilizing our existing ERP system. An ERP works best when it’s fully integrated, and you turn it on and all the key modules work together—sales, accounting, manufacturing, and so on. The ERP has to become the heartbeat of everything you do.

We are also implementing the technology required to support our direct sales to consumers. Now the consumer can go to Amazon.com or eBay to buy a smaller version of our wrestling mat for use at home. We are also talking to several leading sporting goods retailers to sell our products on their sites.

Dollamur Sports Surfaces, maker of specialty mats for wrestling, gymnastics, yoga, martial arts, cheerleading, and more, is a mid-size company with outsize ambitions. “Our strategy is to dominate in every single sports segment we compete in,” says CEO Don Ochsenreiter, who was brought in last year by owner Frist Capital. His mandate: to double the company’s sales to at least $50 million in fi ve years. Ochsenreiter, former CEO of Burton Golf, says the company is well on the way to meeting that goal. Here, he shares his approach to leadership:

Mats in action: Ohio High School Athletic Association Wrestling Championship

Cater to Different Customer Segments Coaches and athletes see our brand name at leading competitions, and want the same for their training centers, schools, and so on. That has worked well, but we didn’t have a fully developed marketing plan with consistency in messaging and branding. Now we are focused on developing that. Our website today is good, and very information-driven, but with the new site we’re really going to focus on the customer. We compete in eight very different sports segments. We’re the exclusive supplier to Ultimate Fighting Championship, but we’re also selling to yoga studios all around the country. If you’re a yogi, you don’t want to go to our site and see pictures of people beating the “whatever” out of each other. So we’ll have specifi c websites and social media initiatives for each of these customer groups.

Grow All Ways We are looking at acquisitions that make strategic sense for our company. However, organic growth will be very important to us. We recently unveiled a new product: indoor, portable sports turf, just as beautiful and highperformance as the artifi cial turf you see in a football stadium. It’s called GymTurf 365, and it lets you transform an indoor basketball court into a fi eld that the fi eld hockey team or football team can practice on—in less than 45 minutes. No one else has anything like it. We estimate that the market for this is about $100 million.

For Buy-in, Communicate and Participate To gain your employees’ trust, you have to be great about communication. We have a quarterly town hall–style meeting in which we give everyone an update on what’s going on and do a lot of recognition—new hires, work anniversaries, and anyone who’s gone above and beyond. Each quarter has a theme; a recent one was the importance of quality, in everything from entering orders to speaking with customers. In between, we have focused, smaller team meetings—we fi nd that works better than big weekly staff meetings.

You can’t just tell people what to

Our strategy is to dominate in every segment we compete in.

—DON OCHSENREITER

do. Whether it’s on the production fl oor or in accounting or in sales, you have to roll up your sleeves and be involved. For example, we recently did a sneak preview of our new product at an industry event, which required a team to go to the venue to set up from 11:00 pm until 6:00 am. We appointed six people to do this, and I joined as the seventh person. It was an incredible teambuilding experience.

I recently interviewed a management candidate who gave me a great quote: “You give people the opportunity to change, and then, if necessary, you change the people.” That’s true. But my biggest satisfaction comes from seeing those who work here become successful and grow in their roles.