Elevate Your Profitability

My guess is that it’s because of the well-publicized death of Suzanne Hart in an NYC elevator accident last week that The New Yorker website is currently featuring an April 2008 essay about elevators.
     Ms. Hart’s death was tragic. I have no desire to trivialize her death as I use elevator industry trivia from the New Yorker essay to derive these reminders about profitability:

• What pushes consumers’ buttons? In China, elevator riders accept much tighter quarters than in the U.S. Know your culture when designing vertical transportation vehicles and retailing experiences. In both realms, also be ready to accommodate discomfort about change. A new generation of elevators, called “destination dispatch,” have no buttons inside the cab. You enter your destination floor number on a console in the lobby and are instructed which cab to take. The wait in the lobby might be longer, but the ride itself is shorter. New users report discomfort during the trip, wanting to reach out to push a button to confirm that the machine got the instructions right.
• The long ascent to profits. Profitability on super-high-rise jobs does not come from the construction. It comes from the maintenance contracts. Use that fact as a reminder that a retail sale of a product could be only part of the story. A second story might come from training in product usage and a third story from repair services, for example.
• Free fall isn’t the worst. What’s more dangerous than free fall in an elevator shaft? Stopping too suddenly, of course. It isn’t the falling that does you in. If an elevator car is dropping at a rate 25% faster than its maximum designated speed, safety brakes stop the cab promptly, but not so abruptly as to injure the passengers. If your business fortunes are going into free fall, then act promptly and decisively, but not so abruptly as to cause needless damage.
• Leave the silo vision. Since we’re talking about vertical transportation, I’ll say “silo vision” instead of “tunnel vision” when referring to a quote in the New Yorker essay from an elevator company executive: “We’ll wait ten to fifteen minutes for a train without complaining. But wait thirty seconds for an elevator and the world’s coming to an end.” Yes, but if my time on the elevator is that of a typical train ride, you’ll hear me complain for much, much more than thirty seconds.

Click below for more:
Bind Yourself to Your Plan