Sales meeting in the toilet (2005)

I am a dad of three children, Molly 7, Millie 6 and Henry who will be 2 shortly. I am on my third relationship and have experienced my fair share of adversity in my life. My family are very close and like any close family we spend a lot of time in each other’s houses.

My mum and dad, although semi retired now, were successful business people and worked in the retail fashion trade and without their support, guidance and the occasional kick up the butt, I would be lost. The integrity that they both possess is very difficult to find these days, especially in our modern generation.

Since a young lad I have been highly motivated and possess high levels of energy. I would and have worked all the hours around the clock and travelled great distances to go to work and earn a pound note.

I enjoy motivating others and love getting up on stage, speaking to an audience and doing some really crazy inspirational moves to get people to move out of their comfort zones.

I have run my own businesses and worked for other companies but one constant remains and that is – I want to be the best at what I do! During my business and personal career I have succeed and failed in equal proportion.

I was working in 2004 for a small advertising directory sales company and we had just 35 staff when I joined. I grew the staff headcount to over 250 people employed on a full and part time basis. The energy and sexiness within the outbound call centre environment that I created was truly awesome and on a good day, sales and motivational was unrivalled.

Sales on one particular day were way were way off what they should have been and my staffs were sluggish, not performing and KPI’s were way in the red zone. Even my managers were downbeat and were not inspiring their teams and I was starting to lose my patience.

I was watching the floor, which was an 8000 sq ft open planned call centre and waited for someone to take action. No action came and as a result I went to the front of the floor and told everyone to finish their calls, put their phones down and join me at the front of the floor.

I always held two meetings every day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon after lunch. I was always well prepared and inspired my teams using a mixture of personal and business related topics and information.

People always used to say to me that my meetings were awesome and that I pushed people way beyond their own personal expectations for what they could achieve in sales and indeed their lives.

I have always believed that motivating and teaching people is a two way game. I always say “You hold onto one end of the rope and I will hold the other. As long as you hold on, ill hold on but if you let go then so will I”.

Inspiring people is an art and they have to love you, trust you and fear you all at the same time.

So, I am at the front of the floor and I now have 140 staff, 6 sales directors, 8 sales managers, an operations support team, IT team and the CEO looking on. I could see by the looks on their faces that they knew a crap storm was coming and there was an eerie silence as they waited to hear the inevitable.

The meeting that I was about to give them was by no means going to be my usual motivational and inspirational ye ha lets go type of address. This was going to be far from inspirational, but little did I know!

“OK team, sales are down, calls are down, profit for the day is down and not one of you, including my senior team have stood up and made any positive changes that could influence a turnaround for the day’s sales – Why? You have all the tools and personal and business reasons to achieve your daily goals. Yu have the ability and coupled with the superb product that we have you should be smashing the days sales out of the ball park – Why is it that we are having this crap day?”

Not one answer came from my entire team. They knew better and they also knew that in this team we fight, we fight for every inch and we stay on top of our game regardless of what challenges we face. That knew that with excellent performance come great benefits, commission rewards and other team and company incentives and recognition. On the contrary, poor performance comes with one almighty kick up the arse.

“OK then, if you guys are happy with such a crap performance then we are going to hold this meeting in the toilet, which is where the crap goes”.

With that I marched over 150 people into the men’s toilets and packed them in every piece of space that I could find. Some were standing on the toilets, others in the sinks, some were on other peoples shoulders and we were packed to the rafters. I forced and pushed every one into this toilet until the doors were bursting with people.

Whilst in the toilets I explained in no uncertain terms that we do not accept any kind of poor performance and that when things are not going to plan that you stop, adjust, evaluate, change and move forward. I cannot put the exact words in this book that I used but let’s say the use of my vocabulary was colourful.

Inside the room it was hot, stuffy and people were feeling uncomfortable being in the toilet, but they soon got the point. My HR Director was spitting kittens about my methods and I would not recommend using the toilet as meeting point for anyone in today’s tough employment law society.

The bottom line was this:-

I – My managers realised that they needed to see things before they happen as prevention is better than cure.

2 – Not everybody is motivated all of the time but if you can motivate and keep your top performers motivated then the rest will follow.

3- If you do not perform when I am around then the shit is going to hit the fan and literally, it did.

4 – You can bring some humour into your everyday business life and people will never forget these moments.

The outcome of the afternoon kick up the arse toilet session was that the team flew out of the toilets and went on to smash their daily target to pieces. Now I do not know whether it was because they did not want to go back into the hot sweaty toilet again for another spank or because they were actually inspired by my meeting. Either way, it got the job done and that’s the kind of unconventional guy I am.

Best Wishes for 2012

A great year ahead!

Regards Brad