Toward that end Behar, who emigrated from Peru in 1968 to study civil engineering at New York University, where he later earned an M.B.A., pays close attention to everything around him. In January 1994 he noticed that Miami-based home builder Lennar Corp. had started promoting a type of dwelling called the House of the Future, which featured whiz-bang electronics that would enable its owners to turn on lights or activate an alarm by phone. What the $819-million company was doing, as he saw it, was what he needed to do: branding a commodity. He immediately found out which advertising agency Lennar used. Then he paid a call on an executive at the same agency. "I want you to brand a stair for us," he instructed. Can't do it, the exec replied, for less than $10,000 a month. But Behar came away with some valuable free advice: Think of something good about your stairs that goes beyond the quality of the stairs, the man advised. What are you good at? We are great at delivery, Behar had immediately answered. So, came the conclusion, brand that.
Not that General Stair needed to do anything -- right away. Behar was proud of the company's leading role in developing a market for prefabricated stairs and of its estimated market share in Southern Florida: 39% in Dade County, 26% in Broward County, and a 2% sliver of Palm Beach County. But he was also brutally honest with himself about how the company had managed to reach that point. "Someday some idiot will come and compete on price," he says. "I know, because I was that idiot." He knew that the weak competition of the past few years, combined with a home-building market whipped up by Hurricane Andrew, could not last. Starting one and a half years ago, reports Vainstein, "we needed to lower our margins to get projects." The guarantee, Behar figured, might stop that slippage.
Companies typically hoist customer guarantees for one reason: to blow away the competition. It's a marketing ploy, a customer come-on, a valuable "gimmick," as Yager once labeled it, earning him a gazillion-watt glare from the man beside him. "It is not a gimmick," corrected Behar. To be fair, guarantees may look superficial simply because they seem so common. Consider the many high-profile companies that guarantee their services: Federal Express; Lands' End; Manpower; Sears, Roebuck and Co.; Speedy Muffler King; Xerox -- not to mention Domino's Pizza Inc., certainly the best-known company ever to abandon its own guarantee.
Starting in 1984, the now-$2-billion Domino's promised to deliver its pies within 30 minutes or give customers a $3 discount. The guarantee was discontinued in December 1993 after some widely publicized accidents involving Domino's drivers. The result? "We've fallen from number one nationally," laments Glenn Mueller, president of RPM Pizza Inc., a 130-unit franchisee based in Gulfport, Miss. "Taking away the guarantee has taken away our competitive advantage with customers."
But Mueller also mourns the guarantee for a much less obvious reason. Customers, he says, aren't the only group whose loyalty has started waning. "Our internal operations have lost their spark," he admits. "We're not as excellent. And that internal price is 100 times higher than any external effect." What's the connection? An extraordinary guarantee -- that is, one in which the company pays for its mistakes in serious bucks -- can "transform a company from top to bottom," says Christopher W. L. Hart, president of the Spire Group, a consulting firm in Brookline, Mass. "The concept truly touches everything in the organization. A guarantee is like turning up the power on a hose. Suddenly, you see leaks you never saw before."
Further, a money-back guarantee "almost always" lowers operational costs, he claims, because the threat of having to pay out focuses efforts on "making sure employees are empowered" to live up to the guarantee.
Once he had read Hart's 1993 book, Extraordinary Guarantees, after spotting a reference to it in a magazine, Saby Behar saw it as the perfect blueprint for General Stair.
But no sooner had Behar made his proposal than Garver began making the case against it. Behar clearly relishes such no-nonsense engagements. "I'm an argumentative guy," he says. First, Garver noted, there were plenty of instances in which General Stair and its client home builders loudly disagreed on what constituted being on time. Take the builder who called Tuesday to say lot 56 would be ready for stairs on Thursday. On Wednesday he called to say that he meant lot 36 would be ready on Thursday. Then on Thursday, when the General Stair installers arrived at lot 36, they saw not so much as a slab in place; it turned out the builder had meant lot 46. And remember the construction superintendent who called, screaming bloody murder about stairs that had not arrived -- for a house that turned out to be a one-story design? Furthermore, Garver argued, a full refund was simply too irresistible a bounty.
"What I was hearing was 'We are going to lose our asses," Behar says. That was OK with him. Not that he wanted the company -- which he owns with his brother-in-law and his wife's first cousin -- to suffer any crippling anatomical damage. But he was ready to follow the idea of the guarantee wherever it would lead. "What I had to do," he says, "was sell the nonbelievers."
Following the lead of his unlikely biblical role model, Behar expected there would be opposition. Instead of harping on the exact shape of the guarantee, he and his managers spent several subsequent meetings just talking about change. "I tried to preempt some of their emotions," Behar says.
For about four hours a week, they asked one another questions like, How will it make us feel to change? What will we gain, both professionally and personally? Some potential outcomes were obvious: increased market share, repeat customers, better margins, a smoother operation. Others required deeper thought: to grow as a team player, to gain an understanding of people and change, to attain higher status. "If we're recognized as the best stair company in the marketplace," said Yager, a former semipro hockey defenseman, "I'll get a feeling of self-respect that will help me be a better employee and friend and father."
