Our proven method
We work on purpose, guided by our values. This choice has been potent for both us and our clients whether the path is clear or not, and all the more when the journey is arduous. Along the way, we’ve identified six steps that have to be taken to create, maintain, and expand excellence. This is the case regardless of industry, regardless of size, or scope of the project. At first, these six steps were intuitive. Over the years, each has become definitive, a fine-tuned system, data based and tested time and again.
What’s equally true is the six steps are not rolled out as a cookie cutter model. The systems are consistent, and at the same time there is unique nuance critical to every client system and situation.
Each of the six steps stands on its own and simultaneously supports all the others. To maintain excellence, we’ve found that each is needed in some way, shape, or form. We call it, “Building the Brand from the Inside Out.”™
Learning
We Are
Acuity
Purpose
Purpose
Communication™
ONGOING LEARNING
Developing Conscious Intelligence | Mind/Intellect/Think | Body/Awareness/Feel | Heart/Connection/Resonate | Soul/Integration/Know
FISCAL ACUITY
Anticipatory Financial Statements | Cash Flow (Forecasts) | Purchase Budgets | Inventory Against Budget | Cost Daily, WTD, PTD, Annual | Strategic Planning Bi-Monthly
TRAINING ON PURPOSE
Interviewing | Five Levels of Team Member and Management Training | Personal Growth | Organizational Growth
HIRING ON PURPOSE
Experiential System | Hire Only A+ Candidates | A Maybe Is A No | Hold Training At All Times
CONSCIOUS COMMUNICATION™
Safe Space | Conscious Communication™ | Purpose/Values | Kind Not Nice | This Is Who We Are
LET’S START A CONVERSATION
Take your business to new heights. Send us a message and let’s have a discussion.
Let’s Start A Conversation
Take your business to new heights. Send us a message to schedule a complementary consultation with our culture and growth experts.The Miick Method® includes the following six steps:
1. Know Who We ARe
Know Who We Are and What Actions Define Excellence
To truly thrive, it’s critical to understand why we’re in business beyond profit. To be able to answer the question, “What is it we provide through our products?” is profoundly empowering to any organization. The answer provides a sense of deeper purpose in work, and allows each individual in every role within a company the opportunity to have true pride in their participation.
A great example from the world of hospitality involves the word “restaurant” itself. The root translation of the word means “a place one goes to be restored.” “Restaurateur” literally translates to “restorer of soul.” The example is thus: I am hired as a barista, a dead-end job one might imagine. However, if I understand my work is truly to restore soul as I serve beverages in less than a minute, how might I do that? This restoral of soul becomes the goal of my work, and of my team’s work. I may look like a barista, but I am a restorer of soul. My work is to have you feel different when you depart than when you arrived. This understanding of deeper purpose is contagious and connected.
In other words, how do I make a difference? How do we make a difference in people’s lives?
Part of knowing who we are is also having a defined sense of values. Values exist in all companies. Most are simply implicit, and can often therefore be inconsistent. By consciously defining values and by using Purpose and Values as active tools, we’ve found that actions become clear, data-based, and profoundly effective.
A team member either performs or does not with an understanding of Purpose and Values. A company either leads or does not with a sense of Purpose and Values.
Instead of being obscure, expedient, or malleable to internal politics, Purpose and Values are explicit. We know who we are, and we commit to being that. Join us as an employee or as a customer if you believe likewise.
2. Fiscal Acuity
Anticipatory Fiscal Systems
Most companies wait for a financial statement to make decisions. One of our clients calls this managing by autopsy. From this backward-looking perspective we’re already behind and too late to make solid decisions based on current data.
All Miick clients are supported with fiscal systems that are both simple and which look ahead. Anticipatory fiscal systems are ones that let us know our costs of doing business today, and more so, based on today and our week to date, how we will do in the coming days, weeks, and months. We know how to create and run profitable, fiscally healthy companies, regardless of industry, thanks to all we learned from the fast-paced daily business management of restaurants. In 30 years we’ve not had a single project that did not achieve the fiscal goals defined at the outset on purpose and using company values to make those fiscal decisions.
Since our very beginning Miick has been known for the creation of anticipatory costing systems, and the ability to define metrics that can be tracked daily to move the financial performance needle. Miick works by your side to develop and support these tools and systems that can literally improve fiscal performance in days.
3. conscious communication
Communication Tools that Support Performance Excellence
Tough conversations inevitably must come up in business and life. We teach a wide spectrum of deceptively simple, highly effective communication tools that everyone can use in order to have data-based, Purpose and Values driven conversations that support emotional and fiscal health. There is little doubt that ongoing communication is the “primary how” of creating a dynamic organizational culture. We have proven strategies and insights that many of our clients have described as transformative, not only at work, but also in their home lives and communities.
With clear communication comes the ability for leaders in an organization to actually define excellence and support it on purpose and in values driven ways. Miick is on your wing here. We serve as your guide, you are not left on your own to “figure communication stuff” out. Drama is cut, positive engagement increases, and performance ramps. Through our implementations of communication effectiveness, soft skills performance can actually be tracked and measured.
4. hiring On Purpose
Hiring On Purpose
Another crucial step in our integrated method for successful growth and change is in the way we hire. Over the years our hiring methodology has created two consistent outcomes: 1) applicants know in advance the culture they are joining and the performance expected of them, and 2) leaders doing the interviewing clearly understand the excellence criterion they’re looking for. There are rarely surprises. Leaders and applicants both step into the decision to join an organization by choice, rather than by chance. This rigorous focus on hiring with conscious precision works to create higher retention, and it’s a key contributor to creating great experiences for everyone, customers and team members alike.
In our experience applying the Miick Method® of hiring, by being definitive about Purpose, Values, and levels of performance excellence, approximately 20% of applicants will self select out before we ever spend a moment of time with them.
Mentoring leaders and team members to interview through an integrated Hiring System is a magical process to experience. Miick does not just leave you with technology or a work-book. We’re by your side training, mentoring, and tracking skill sets in this robust hiring system. Hiring right becomes another metric by which our clients see dramatic improvements in just a few weeks.
5. Training On Purpose
Ongoing Training
With your organization’s definitions of brand excellence rigorously articulated in all jobs and operational functions, ongoing training becomes the key to supporting and improving team member choice and performance. No matter the level of performance a team member might currently be at, our custom experiential training programs will support relevant skill building and understanding of behaviors on purpose. This vigorous training commitment ensures a consistent and deepening brand experience for members, guests, clients, customers, and internal team members.
We’ve seen it with client after client, as effective training increases, turnover costs decrease in an inverse relationship. Effective experiential training is a foundation piece of the Miick program that helps our clients quickly separate themselves from their competition.
The Miick team is expert at experiential training design and implementation. We are at your side to whatever degree is needed, depending on your internal resources. Results? Retention of information rates at 90+% and radical reductions in employee turnover. All of which helps drive both top and bottom line performance.
6. ongoing learning
Celebrate Ongoing Learning and Keep Raising The Bar
The last step in the Miick Method® is a commitment to always improve, to always look for opportunities to move into the next level of performance. Closely tied to ongoing learning is the organizational realization that great ideas and innovation can come from team members as often as titled leaders, and from new team members as often as long time vets in a system.
Good can get to great, and great can always get better. But how?
The answer is, of course, both simple and complex. It’s this commitment to ongoing learning at all levels of an organization that takes passion and builds it into purpose, celebrates values, and gets us to a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.
Our clients often find that what starts out as a few simple steps to build and run a business more effectively quickly evolves into an exciting culture of conscious improvement. The feeling of “getting it” catches on at all levels of an organization, and there’s a palpable excitement to keep pushing forward.
At Miick, good enough simply doesn’t exist. Our work is totally focused on supporting our clients to constantly move forward. To define excellence, measure the results of excellence, and celebrate the constant inquiry of what’s next, together, is big fun!
