If ever a company seemed stuck, it was Leegin. The nine-point-something numbers reflected it: for six straight years its sales scarcely budged. Kohl, however, was about to get himself unstuck. In the summer of 1986 he went off to Harvard Business School for the first of three annual sessions in the Owner/President Management program. Kohl had never been to college, and it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. There were compelling case studies, smart professors, late-night study sessions. There were a hundred other businesspeople to swap ideas with. Soon, bells began to ring.
Leegin was a belt manufacturer just like every other belt manufacturer, Kohl realized. So long as that was true, the company would never grow. But it didn't have to be just like the others. Frank Perdue, the poultry magnate, had come to Harvard a few times to learn how he could differentiate his chickens from all the other chickens on the market. If Perdue could differentiate chickens, of all things, couldn't he, Jerry Kohl, differentiate belts? And if that was his goal, were his main problems, as he had once thought, how to make the plant and office a little more efficient, and how to add a few more salespeople?
Of course not. Not by any stretch of his fertile imagination. Rather, Kohl began to see, what he had to do was something entirely different. He had to create a new kind of belt company -- a company that offered customers a level of service and a variety of products they couldn't get anywhere else. He had to make it so that customers had no conceivable reason to go to a competitor.
That would mean reshaping the daily interactions and relationships between his salespeople and the stores they serviced, for it was in those interactions and relationships that Leegin's rubber met its road. Salespeople, Kohl could see, would have to have more to give their customers. They'd have to learn how and where the stores made money, then help them make more.
But new tires alone wouldn't make a clunker into a chariot. And if salespeople were to have more to offer, the office and the plant would have to back them up. At the time, all three facets of Leegin's operations were a mess. "Somehow," Kohl muses, "we had to make each one different."
* * *
Today each one is about as different as it can be. And though the whole may outshine the sum of the parts, the parts themselves can be pretty dazzling. Come on the road, for example, with Perry Patton, 31, a Leegin salesman for the past seven years, now nosing his new white Mercury Villager around the freeways of Los Angeles. Among his stops, this February day, is a trendy men's clothing store known as Sporting Club, on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood.
Patton's first job at the store is to take inventory. Like a bread supplier in a supermarket, he and a young trainee go through Sporting Club's belt racks, counting and straightening.
His second job is a little more unusual. Unpacking a Toshiba 2000SXE laptop, Patton punches up the Sporting Club account and records the count for each style number as it appears on the screen. Soon the little computer's portable printer is spewing out reports: Sporting Club's orders in the past 12 months (about $20,000 wholesale). Current sales volume, compared with last season's and last year's (up). Number of belts sold -- by individual style, by category, by color, by nearly anything that Patton and Sporting Club co-owner Don Zuidema might want to see.
Patton's third job? Selling, which is now mostly a matter of consulting the numbers and making informed judgments. Leegin's One World and Honest lines are doing best in Zuidema's stores. Black is hotter than brown right now. Patton shows Zuidema some new styles that fit with the top sellers, and a few others that his computer indicates are doing well in similar stores. Studying the reports, Patton points out that Zuidema's sales as a percentage of inventory are too high: Sporting Club may be losing customers who can't find a belt in a given size.
To Zuidema, the information provided by Patton's computer has changed the nature of the vendor-customer relationship on two critical counts. One: the objectivity of the numbers engenders trust. "If we're not selling dress belts," Zuidema points out, "there's no reason for him to push dress belts on us." Two: the information allows Zuidema to tailor his inventory and thus maximize sales in what was traditionally a forgotten corner of the business. "Thanks to them, we make a lot of money in the small space we use for belts. It's probably one of the most profitable centers in the store." On this day, Zuidema scans Patton's numbers and listens to his pitch on new styles. Then he places an order for $7,000 worth of belts.
Kohl, who still describes himself as a belt salesman, always figured that computers could revolutionize selling. But off-the-shelf software for personal computers never seemed to deliver what he needed. Frustrated, he taught himself to program. When the first portables appeared, he bought one and began experimenting. He asked salespeople what they would like a computer to do, then wrote the software to do it. Soon he was asking for volunteers to take a portable computer out on the road.
Guinea pig number one was Vicki Schubert, saleswoman for the San Francisco Bay area. Guinea pig number two: Perry Patton. There were times when each was ready to chuck the first machines through a store window. On one grim day Schubert visited a small chain's seven stores, spent hours taking and recording inventory, then punched the keys to combine all the stores' records into one for her presentation. All the data vanished -- for good.
