Tyson spent months surveying 80 people inside and outside the company and conducting 50 face-to-face interviews. He spoke to representatives from every function and even a few customers to compile dozens of rules for chauffeur performance. "We asked the five most important things a chauffeur should be able to do upon completing initial training," says Tyson. "We talked about the three things a chauffeur most often failed to do in the first year of employment. We asked what chauffeurs have done to exceed the standard. We took it from the other side and asked what chauffeurs have done to make a trip seem like nothing special."
From the responses to these questions, Tyson created an intensive week-long program emphasizing teamwork, communication, and customer service skills, and featuring such segments as "topics of conversation," "holding the umbrella," and "reading the mood of the client." "They have to understand the things that set us apart from other chauffeur companies," Tyson says. "The airplanes make customers walk through first class and see all that luxury on the way to their tiny seat and plastic cup of water. When people walk by our chauffeurs on the way to meet some other company's, they should feel like they're seeing first class on the way to coach."
What fascinates me is that Rutter expects staff to maintain those standards even when there's no client in sight. Keep that jacket on even if you're alone and on your way back to the garage. At the airport, don't fraternize with less fastidious chauffeurs from other companies. Get used to looking people--all people--in the eye and smiling.
The guy who gets this better than anyone--maybe even better than Rutter--is Joe Rucker. Now the director of chauffeur services, Rucker is a 20-year employee of Commonwealth, the first 18 of those years spent behind the wheel. I had already heard Rucker's praises sung by several customers. Expecting a paragon of elegant decorum, I am surprised when Rucker introduces himself during a training session. He is an effusive man with longish hair and a tendency to bounce on his heels.
But Rucker is all about the attitude, all about the details. He is unflaggingly warm to his staff--hugging them, praising them, calling all 198 of them on holidays to wish them well. With clients, he squeezes that warmth through an appropriateness filter so he comes off as cordial and genuine but not familiar. Even when he's alone in his car, he says, he never scowls, never lets his guard down. "Like when I go through the tolls," he says. "Some of those people look pretty unhappy. So when I give them my dollar I say, 'Hi. How you doing?' And I smile at them. Maybe it makes them feel good. I don't know. It makes me feel good.
"There's no secret to customer service; you've just got to be a happy person," says Rucker. "I'm a happy person. I hope that rubs off on my staff."
Turning Down the Idle
As Rutter squires me around Commonwealth's offices, half his sentences start with the same four words. "Soon this will be our new training area." "Soon this will be the expanded call center." "Soon this will be rehabbed into additional office space." The company is on track to do $50 million in 2007, and true to form Rutter is front-loading infrastructure. He would like to open an office this year in Los Angeles, and later one in Chicago.
To achieve all this, Rutter was until recently working around the clock. A few years ago he began experiencing bouts of rapid heartbeat. With little time for golf, his handicap rose to 14. Increasing the stress, Rutter has since 2004 been sparring with Dav El, the country's second-largest limo company, which sued him for poaching drivers bound by noncompetes.
Yet even when discussing Dav El, Rutter sounds more amused than annoyed. And I have to wonder, is this really a guy who built a $50 million company because someone jerked him around? Rutter talks nostalgically about all those years running a small company, when he fumed over every mistake and occasionally ejected people bodily from his office. Today, by all accounts, he is a patient listener and forgiving boss. Just how tolerant is this guy? Despite suffering from allergies, he cohabits with the aforementioned 15 cats, three dogs, two canaries, a cockatoo, two cockatiels, a rabbit, and three rats, all because his wife loves animals.
Asked whether, in retrospect, Carey's offer was really that unreasonable, Rutter laughs yet again. "Yeah, looking back I can see where it might be fair," he says. "It was a higher multiple than they were paying other companies. Maybe it was even generous."
It appears that all this activity, this "momentum," to use one of his favorite words, has somehow touched the heart of calm in Rutter. "I think in the past few years there's been a phenomenal change in my level of maturity," he says. "I'm much less volatile. I communicate more with language. Maybe it's because I'm more powerful. There's less need for me to scream."
Company building as a stress reliever. I've never heard that before. But watching Rutter spend two minutes whistling at a cockatiel in a vain effort to make it whistle back, I am glad, for his sake, that his earlier dreams were shattered. After all, there's only so much golf a man can play before waking up one morning and wondering, What have I done with my life? And Rod Stewart will always need a ride to the airport.
