Changing the culture of a business - the way things are done - can be a painful process, yet the rewards, in terms of business growth, can be astonishing.  But just how do you change a culture and how do you measure it to know it's been worthwhile?

That was the problem facing Iain McMath, CEO of Sodexo Pass, a 90-strong voucher services business turning over £150million per annum, part of the Sodexo Worldwide food services and facilities management business. 

Iain had been in post for 12 months before he was introduced to a business coach from Shirlaws.  It was at that first meeting that Iain realised Shirlaws could have the solution he was looking for to help him build his business.

Why Shirlaws?

Sodexo Pass was originally created to serve the needs of the Home Office to distribute cash and benefits, via vouchers and smart cards, to asylum seekers in the UK.   When Iain came across Shirlaws he saw that they could have the answer to the conundrum he had been contemplating; how to shift the culture of the business and link the behaviours of his staff to his commercial plans for the business. 

"I had been thinking about how to tackle this problem," Iain recalls.  "How to get our people to behave differently and to adopt behaviours that I knew would grow our business commercially. I had never seen anything in any book or business school about how the behaviours drive the commercial plan you enact.  And I'd never seen any key performance indicators (KPI's) that you could measure behaviours against. I just thought they didn't exist, it was impossible to measure.  Then I met James McCarthy a business coach from Shirlaws at a lunch and he came along and said, actually we can measure behaviours and use them to support your business vision." 

After spending some months considering what McCarthy had said, Iain finally decided to bring Shirlaws in to help him build his business.  Initially this involved some one to one coaching with key members of the board, helping them to understand their own behaviours and looking at methods to put in place to shift that behaviour where it wasn't working for the commercial benefit of the business.

Coaching programme

After twelve months of one to one coaching, the board brought Shirlaws in to undertake a full coaching programme to work with the entire business and help take it to the next level.  The first phase of the programme looked at the structure of the business, the business capacity and its position in the market.  Three projects were launched, one to bring efficiencies to the business with a restructuring programme; two, a capacity project to underpin the business strategy - vital to understanding its ability to grow and the timing of growth projects.  And thirdly, a positioning project to bring some focus to the business and clarity to its marketing activity.

Iain recalls the early days of the coaching programme: "At first people didn't understand the reason for looking at the structure of the business and we got quite a lot of kickback from people.  They thought of it as a negative rather than a positive.  But in the later phase of the project they started to see the benefits.  It was when we created a tool kit for everyone to use, for example tools for creating agendas and running meetings and so on, that's when there was a big change in behaviour.  People became comfortable with challenging behaviours that weren't true to our values as a business.   Rather than just moaning about what wasn't working, now people are talking about what the client wants, positive solutions.

"This was a big shift for us.  Previously, I remember we'd had a former client who hadn't paid us for a long time and they called up and said can you help us with something.  The member of staff who answered the phone spent the whole day going through the system manually trying to find the information that the client wanted.  The staff member thought she was doing her best for the client.  The problem was it had nothing to do with the contract we had with the client but it was now setting the expectation that we would do that piece of work for nothing.

"We're a fast moving high volume, low margin business.  That way of working was simply not sustainable for us as a business and examples like that were showing up all over the place.   

"Now with our restructuring and efficiency project, we have clear policies and procedures in the business so that we can monitor performance against what we are supposed to do in a situation like that, and set clear expectations of the client.  There's no way that person would spend all that time sorting out a request like that from a client now.  It's not that we refuse to help our clients it's just that we have a clear procedure to follow that takes a fraction of the time.  So that person is now free to spend more of their time on servicing clients within the remit of their contract.  That's time spent generating revenue for the business rather than time that is a cost to the business."

The restructuring project identified £200,000 of savings.  It also helped Sodexo Pass become the only Sodexo business unit to have grown at all over the last 12 months with a solid 20 per cent volume growth. 

Exponential growth

But it's the next phase of coaching that Iain is really excited about.  After three years of coaching, the business is starting to see the potential for a major revenue and profit uplift. 

Iain describes the next coaching project: "The strategy we're implementing now with Shirlaws help is a distribution strategy and that's the most exciting opportunity. 

"At the moment our biggest cost is client acquisition.  The strategy we've developed with Shirlaws help is to drive growth through referrals.  And we're talking telephone numbers in terms of cost savings when we do it. 

"We've already started to talk to potential partners and the coaching has helped us identify quickly if they're suitable or not and at the same time our partners can see the value of working with us.  Once we've fully implemented this strategy, growth will be exponential. "

Outcomes

"When you look back at how the business was before Shirlaws went in, it was struggling."  Shirlaws coach James McCarthy recalls what he saw when he first started coaching in the business:  "There was a major capability issue in the management team. Few of them had the skills to take the business to the next level of growth.   There was poor communication and a lot of conflict internally. 

"Iain had inherited that team and knew that by embarking on a cultural programme would cause some pushback.  When I asked him if he was prepared to see up to 30 per cent of his team leave over the next few years, he had no hesitation in saying yes. It just highlighted to me how unattached he was to his team back then.  He had some people who were good at implementation but no good creative people who could create strategic solutions.  Since then Iain's recruited some wonderful talent and he's beginning to reap the benefits." 

Iain summarises the benefits of the coaching:  "We're very clear now when we recruit, what we're expecting.  Our people manage their work from a contextual perspective.  We all speak the same management language. 

"The positioning work we did early on has given us a focus and defined a very clear marketing function.   People are very comfortable about what they are expected to do and can ask questions about it.  They understand the key drivers of what we're doing, whether it's to grow revenue, retain clients or if it's about efficiency.  Everyone's clear on why we're doing what we're doing. 

"I knew that the only way for the business to grow faster than the market was through developing the culture of the business.   I just didn't have the tool kit to do it and didn't even think it existed.  I'm delighted to have found that it does exist and to have brought it in to the business."

What's next?

"We are now building on our success and the change we've brought to the business has given us the platform to grow.  So we are now aiming to treble in size in the next five years. And I'm confident we can and will achieve that."  

Files

• Sodexo_v1_July_2010.pdf (3 MB)