Blinds to Go Staffing a Retail Expansion Plan

Blinds To Go Staffing A Retail Expansion Plan

As a successful retailer, Blinds To Go started a retail concept that positioned the company to surpass their competitors and create a compensation plan for their employees that some staff members were not willing to give up easily. Part of their expansion across North America relies heavily on staffing their stores. So in return a well thought out staffing plan is critical to expansion success.

When Stephen Shiller, the son of a fabricator of window dressings, convinced his father to focus on selling blinds it them allowed them to cut down on the normal delivery time frame for custom blinds.

Since the order would be produced immediately following the sale, Blinds To Go used several customer centric steps to accommodate customers while their orders were fulfilled. Customers were fed and made comfortable. The concept could not be replicated because most of their competitors were either manufacturers or retailers, none of them were both.

Blinds To Go's expansion spread like wild flowers but it did not take long before the business was faced with tough decisions and declining sales. The irony behind the decline in Blinds To Go's heightened success was the fact that Blinds To Go employees, along with their effective ability to fill product orders, was by far one of the critical factors to their successful business models. Employees enjoyed selling blinds and servicing the Blinds To Go customers. More importantly, they were compensated at a compensation level that the employees felt their quality of work was worth.

The companies executive leadership strongly believed in the idea that the quality of their staff was more important than store locations, customer demographics or advertising when it came to the success of the businesses operations. The retail employees roles were well defined and the closing of the sale identified each individual employees commitment to their work.

Because Blinds To Go understood the unique asset within their employees they designed a compensation based culture in the stores which birthed a high energy and sales hungry culture. Each position in the store was supported by an upper level employee who would assist with the closing of the sales. In this type of sales environment everyone compensated. Stephen Shiller believed this was the best way to evoke motivated performance.

When recommended by a new Vice President, Blinds To Go made a questionable decision to move to a salary system in a effort to attract more recruits for the expansion of new stores. The change in the compensation strategy supported the recruiting's department by making it easier to staff the new stores but it brought in a much lower caliber of employees and forced their quality team members out of the door. The salary pay system crushed their sales performance, lowered their in