In Small Biz, There's No Small Stuff

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Living Up to Commitments

The best-performing companies understand the importance of little things, and executives at those companies know a powerful way to influence the behavior of others is to lead by example. In the course of writing my upcoming book, my team and I called Bob Kierlin, founder and chairman of Fastenal (FAST), one of the nation's leading distributors of industrial products. To our surprise, he answered his own phone, and booked an appointment to talk with us right there during the call. No automated phone system, snarling executive assistant, or routing through the bowels of a public relations department—just one phone call and we were talking to him directly.

When we asked Kierlin his secret to building a $2 billion company with some 2,000 stores, he spent most of his time talking about the little things—believing in people, keeping your word, and making yourself available. We met with nearly 20 other Fastenal people in our research on the company and we noticed something right away. Fastenal people don't jump turnstiles. They return phone calls, and if they make a commitment to you, it will happen.

I don't know when companies decided it was O.K. to build fortresses of telephone response systems to protect themselves from customer questions—but it is clearly a bad idea. Technology should make communication more efficient, not more difficult.

A Governor Who Answers E-Mails

Last month I flew to Los Angeles for the tenth anniversary celebration for the Pepperdine School of Public Policy. The featured speaker for the evening was Florida Governor Jeb Bush. During his speech, Bush mentioned he tries to make himself available to constituents who want to raise an issue with their governor. "Anyone who wants to e-mail me can simply e-mail me at jeb@jeb.org" he said in his speech.

Could the governor of a large state really give out his e-mail address and not be inundated by cranks and nutcases? I decided to put him to the test. Early the next morning I e-mailed him from my Blackberry and asked him about an obscure historical reference he had made in his speech (I figured he had staff members who answered all his e-mails—and I wanted to ask a question I believed his staff wouldn't be able to answer). A couple hours later I got a response from him—and I have every reason to believe he sent it personally.

Folks like Bob Kierlin and Jeb Bush show us that as executives we too often use the pace of our lives as an excuse to not make ourselves available to people who matter, like our customers and staff. If the head of a $2 billion business and the governor of a large state can do it, then we can probably find a way to do it too.

Keith McFarland, a two-time technology CEO, is the founder of McFarland Strategy Partners. He is author of the #1 Wall Street Journal and New York Times bestseller, The Breakthrough Company: How Everyday Companies Become Extraordinary Performers. He writes his leadership column every month.