Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Positive Incremental Change

In many ways, 2010 is about positive, incremental change for us. This is exciting but also hard for me because it's a departure from the way I've been operating for the last 3 years, which has been about LOTS and LOTS of new ideas - new concept, new parlors, new promotions, new services, new relationships like subscription based membership. Bright and shiny is FUN.

But so is focus and stretching to improve. And actually, this is more fulfilling.

Looking at all that we've accomplished as a team, we're now focusing on doing the most important things better. How do we further delight our members? Continue to innovate on our colors? Make our manicures and pedicures last even longer? Communicate more efficiently? Offer more comprehensive training? Understand each other better as colleagues and as human beings?

I want to have my eyes open to the little things we do better every day and commit to celebrating these victories together. A few wins week we celebrated this week include:

- Taking all of our offsite learnings to date to pull together a fabulous booth at the Seattle Wedding Show for the first time with a beautiful booth (thank you Susanne, Susie and Amy S!)

- Rolling out our review process and figuring out how to take it to the next level the next time (thank you managers and vernisseurs for engaging in the process with honesty and a dedication to fulfilling our individual and collective potential)

- Launching improvements to our expense reporting and inventory management processes (thank you Amy F and Peter!)

- Finalzing our THIRD seasonal palette (thank you Kate and Amy S!)

And there are so many more. Improving is even better than beginning, because we have the luxury of confidence that it fundamentally works (whatever the "it" we're working on happens to be) - and since we know each other as a team now, we also have the luxury of confidence that we can figure things out together and make them better. I'm so grateful to be here.

I love our team. I love our guests. I love our company.