Robin: Hello and welcome to this edition if Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies. I am Robin Tooms, VP of Strategy at Savage Brands and my guest today is Gene Gray, President at Innovative Idea. So Gene, welcome to Brandonmics.

Gene: Thanks for having me Robin.

Robin: Well Gene, your company is in industrial automations which is interesting, however what you really compete on and differentiate on is this idea of legendary customer service. And what I want to know is how did you get your employees on board with that idea from day one?

Gene: The challenge with getting a new employee brought in to who we are and kind of how we roll as a company really is done in a couple of different ways. One, we do it in a daily meeting we call Hoopla – you know kind of a culture meeting – and the other is with an onboarding process that we call Lose Your Marbles.

Robin: Okay, that sounds very interesting. What is Lose Your Marbles?

Gene: Well, Lose Your Marbles a name we give for a series of meetings or classes that all employees go through regardless. And we bring them in and we go through training that has to do with kind of the overall organization of the company, typical things that you might find, but we spend about 2 full days actually telling stories. And so we get together and I spend about a day – a full day and a half in that and other people come in and participate in that – but essentially we tell that stories of Innovative’s past; why we started the company, why we take care of each other, how we take care of customers, what Hoopla and our kickoff meeting is about, how we ended up with a buzzard as our mascot, so that they start to understand the family.

Robin: And that’s how they better internalize this idea of delivering service.

Gene: Sure, when you add that to the daily meetings that we have they begin to understand how important and how serious we are about taking care of each other, taking care of our customers and improving the company.

Robin: Okay great, well thank you for sharing that Gene, very interesting. This had been another edition of Brandonomocs an inside look at top brand and their marketing strategies.