Road Warriors

Advice from traveling CEOs on client visits time management.

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Two travel-tested CEOs tell why you should flee headquarters and get face-to-face with the market -- and how to be smart about it when you do

Start talking business travel -- a topic guaranteed to prompt eye rolling among most company owners -- and Bob Crawford turns nearly evangelical. Not only does Crawford like being on the road, not only does he think he has to be on the road, he thinks other chief executives are wrong if they're not equally committed to hitting the hustings.

Forget the argument that you're just one person, that you can't be everywhere, and that the telephone takes you to more people more efficiently. "I totally reject that, unabashedly," says Crawford. "It's real hard to listen, get the full content, unless you see the person, feel his or her presence. A telephone gives you only diluted communication."

More to the point, Crawford maintains that his rental-furniture company has grown and prospered specifically because he spends 50% of his time outside his office, accompanying salespeople on calls, going to conventions or chamber of commerce meetings, visiting his showrooms. To be sure, he is an anomaly; equally travel-savvy CEO Jimmy Calano, of CareerTrack, in Boulder, Colo., takes to the skies less enthusiastically (but no less purposefully). And only 15% of CEOs polled from last year's Inc. 500 spend more than half their time making sales calls. Ask the others and they'll groan, saying they're too busy to leave the office for long periods of time. Too much going on.

To which converts respond: That's just the point. There is too much going on -- out there. If you're a CEO and you're staying behind a desk attending to all today's business, you're going to miss learning about the business of tomorrow.

Of course, just being out there isn't enough to ensure you'll reap the benefits of face-to-face commerce. As Calano and Crawford would agree, traveling smart, not simply traveling, is what counts.

In the 10 years since he bought his Arlington Heights, Ill., company, Bob Crawford, 53, has grown Brook Furniture Rental from revenues of $800,000 to $50 million. In part because of one acquisition last year, the company now has 40 showrooms in four states, a staff of about 450, including 55 outside salespeople, and business in both residential-and office-furniture rentals.

As someone with a B.A. in math and physics and an M.B.A. in finance, Crawford doesn't lean toward making decisions from observation and intuition alone; he doesn't let travel-inspired gut responses replace numerical analysis. But he's finding himself in a faster-paced environment -- his clients, he says, are under pressure to make decisions more quickly than they ever have been before. And his reaction to that -- surprising to some -- is to be away from his office more now than ever before. "The CEO has got to be able to sense the marketplace in order to have confidence that he's moving in the right direction," Crawford says emphatically. His goal is to maintain and grow the company's position as the largest furniture-rental company in its markets of Northern California, Southern California, and the Chicago-Milwaukee area. To do that, he says, "the reality is, I need to be able to temper reported facts and trends with my own feeling for the real, current market climate."

When he's on the road, Crawford has two aims: to see things he believes he'd miss getting from secondhand reports, and to teach and coach his staff. "When I'm in the field I'm doing both at the same time," he says. "Anything else I'd pretend was on my calendar is subordinate. Leading is teaching. It's unheralded because it's time-consuming and it's tough to ask questions and probe people and listen. It's extremely demanding. "But it's critical." Crawford's personality and training reinforce his commitment: he started as a salesman and has the physical stamina and concentration that meeting face-to-face with customers and industry players demands.

So how does one travel well? How do you use your time on the road sensibly, gather information that will be useful, and capitalize on what you learn? Here are Crawford's recommendations:

Make sure the office can do without you. Crawford has structured his company around his commitment to being on the road the majority of the time. Being away from the office has required him to delegate tasks and invest in hiring and training strong team members. "If you can't leave the office because you have a weak vice-president of finance or weak administrative VPs, then you've got a problem," says Crawford -- a problem that should trouble you even if you don't plan to travel.

Commit to the time. Scheduling blocks of time provides a discipline that's a necessary first step, says Crawford. "Make the commitment to spend, say, every Tuesday in the field. And commit to upping that to two days a week three months later."

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