Part 2 of 3 of a Conversation with B.J. Orsi, Regional Manager, Bed Bath & Beyond.
B.J. Orsi is one of twelve Bed Bath & Beyond Regional Managers, each overseeing about 40-50 Store Managers, who, in turn, each manage about four Department Managers. B.J. has been at the company for over twenty years. I recently had the pleasure of talking with him about how his company operates and what sets it apart in the marketplace. I am sharing some key ideas from that conversation in three blog posts, of which this is the second.
Today, I continue with that conversation – with what B.J. said about how his company promotes a teaching culture that allows managers to earn their promotions by training those below them.
Jose: How do managers know what customers want?
B.J.: To do that effectively you must be on the sales floor all the time and get to know who they are. In return, you are developing an understanding of how to get to know each individual and how to motivate them and teach them leadership skills and learning the merchandise. Our systems tell us what sells, and so forth, but computers don’t tell you everything. So you have to be on the floor to really identify what the customer is looking for and ask them, what didn’t they find? What is it they want? and to do that I need to spend a lot of time on the floor.
Jose: How does this tie into leadership development?
B.J.: Since there are planograms and schematics to manage, you can’t sit in the office and delegate. You cannot have the merchandising executed at the level you want without a lot of involvement. Because that store manager has been through all of these areas, he or she has to spend a lot of time on the floor and will have lots of hands-on training, talking through development, and demonstrating to get to what they want to see happening. So, it is company culture that they are on the floor much more often than with other retailers because we are not looking through books for schematics and planograms.
We are on the floor and we are analyzing, Hey, does this look right or make sense? How do we merchandise to this buyer by look, by function, by price point? What do you think? What does the customer think? Or maybe, Try it this way or next week let’s experiment by putting it in a different way. So it really takes a lot of hands-on involvement with the customers and the employees to really execute the standards we are looking for as a company.
Jose: So, you have created a teaching organization which is really interesting the way you described it. In a lot of corporate cultures, the way you advance is by killing the person in front of you. You know what I mean? You have to undermine the guy in front of you. Of course, you’d get a toxic environment as a result (but lots of companies have them). To have a teaching organization which says, No, the way you advance is by advancing those under your charge is a huge, and not a subtle, difference.
B.J.: Other centralized, more cookie-cutter, retailers can take on someone with a little bit of retail experience. Most retailers today are operators for lack of a better term. These organizations are looking for good soldiers and they operate a business from the top down. We operate from the bottom-up. Those good soldiers could walk into some retailer in 4-6 weeks and be a store manager and operate that business because they are following their planograms, schematics, while most of the critical decisions are made up in the corporate office and they are simply executing.
Our company is different and that’s why it doesn’t take 4-6 weeks to be a store manager. It could take 12-18 months or even 2 years to become a store manager because you have to learn everything. We are working from the ground up and are really training them to think and be autonomous so that they can run that business on their own and really be very successful. They can continue to drive the business by developing their people, finding out what the customers want and then giving it to them.
Jose: I’ve always felt that Bed Bath & Beyond is a good store to walk into and have a pleasant experience. But this explains how you get there.
B.J.: I think I am an ideal example of this because I started as an hourly employee in college and did not expect to work at Bed, Bath & Beyond forever. I just wanted a quick buck through school and was promoted through department manager to assistant store manager and also moved throughout the country. I have been with the company for over 22 years now! So I have started at the very ground level as an hourly and then moved to where I am today.
Jose: Wow! That is a great story.
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My third and final blog post based on this conversation will discuss the idea of learning from other organizations in the industry.
