14 | Orgill Case Study Building a New Culture Along with the physical changes taking place immediately after the acquisition of Germantown Hardware, the transition team quickly realized changes were also needed to ensure the employees at Germantown Hardware were meeting customers’ expectations and needs. Because Germantown Hardware had the opportunity to present itself to the community as a premium source for home improvement serving an upscale clientele, the transition team wanted to make sure customer service was positioned front and center for all employees. “Whenever there is a business transition or change of ownership, you have to look at the culture in the company and make sure that the employee culture reflects the values the organization holds and the brand proposition they put forward,” Helms says. “At Germantown Hardware, this needed to be all about creating a great shopping experience for the customers and being highly service-centric.” To create this focus, the team brought in a new store manager, Chris Clark. Together with other Germantown Hardware team members, he began focusing on rebuilding the employee culture around service. Beyond service, however, the store also began taking operational cues from other CNRG operations to implement regular schedules for things like inventory management, processing price changes, operational disciplines and even tasks such as cleaning schedules. “We wanted to create the systems an operation of this size and scale needs, to not only ensure tasks are done in a timely and efficient manner, but we also wanted to ensure the employees understood why these tasks were important and the role the tasks and the entire employee team plays in creating a superior experience for the customers,” Holmes says. With a plan for quickly turning Germantown Hardware around and setting the stage for the longer-term changes that were coming in the months ahead, Sieggreen says the business was well positioned to move forward. “In some ways, our first order of business was to right the ship to make sure it didn’t keep taking on water while we were moving forward with the bigger plans we had for the business,” he says. “This team did a great job doing exactly that. They got it through that in-between period. Plus, when we started making even these basic changes, we knew right away the customers were responding.” According to Helms, this wasn’t just a feeling. The customer response was tangible. “The feedback we received almost as soon as we started changing things—adding assortments, beefing up the staff and focusing on customer service, from the vendor community, from the employees and, most importantly, from the customers—was overwhelmingly positive,” he says.
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