Requisite Organization at Canadian Tire Acceptance

Jos J. Wintermans I am Joss Windermans. I'm living in Toronto, Canada. Born in the Netherlands, and basically have been all my career in Toronto, Canada. Studied law and decided that I'd rather make my own troubles than solve other people's troubles. So that kind of tells you a little bit about why I chose management as a career in Canada. 

Basically went in packaged goods marketing. That was my thing. Basically lasted about 18 to months to two years in any firm. Moved rapidly through the best names in the business in order to get training and all those kind of different things. Ended up working for American Express Canada. That was the first time I really got a little bit of taste of global marketing because American Express is very global and also more kind of some of the accounts we had to deal with in Canada were worldwide for American Express. So it wasn't like you just deal with Canada. And I found that very interesting and much more challenging than anything else. 

When that came to an end, I took some time off because it's bruising to kind of go through a bunch of jobs where you really are hitting up against things you don't really accept and don't understand and kind of whole bunch of different things, et cetera, that I felt. Am I really into the right kind of profession? So I did some little bit consulting for friends, whatever it is. But I read a lot and I just basically kind of put my head together and said what I really need to do is to get hold of a project where I can do what I think is right and feel comfortable with all that. And I don't have to cater to other people who I think sometimes shave corners or do it for their own political reasons and everything. So it's kind of a little bit coming to grips. And I was around 40 at the time, so I guess maybe midlife crisis was about me, whatever it was. 

And then I got this offer job of an independent financial services firm called Canaan Tire. Acceptance as part of Canaan Tire, which is a big retailer away from head office, really was not mainstream. It was a nice thing to have, but people didn't understand. The guy who had founded it and had sold it to Canadian Tire was about to retire after 25 years and I was going to be the next person. And the only qualifications I really had was I used to got to be in credit cards, American Express and I was in packaged goods. And my boss at the time thought that was a good, smart thing to hire somebody of that ilk. And of course, after being off for a year and things like that, I was pretty eager to get back. And so I put all my things in the pursuit of the job. And once I had it, I had no clue what it was to be a general manager. And that is when I really had to find a framework or something to help me do that, because just managing for the sake of managing wasn't what I really thought I needed to do. 

So the first day I'm on the job, I walk into the building, get introduced to the founder of the company, and my boss is there, and we walk to the office and then into the back where the operations are. And all of a sudden I realized what I had done. I all of a sudden said, I am responsibility. I have the responsibility for 500 people here, their jobs, their livelihood. If I am a total screw up, they are the ones who suffer. And obviously, it hit me really hard that I better figure out how to be a good CEO because if I don't do this right, then I'm responsible for people who really don't have a choice. They're stuck here, whatever. It was kind of a very interesting moment. While everybody's congratulating me, I got this job. And I said, oops. I'm really way above my hand. And a boss previously had said, Joss, you got to realize every time you have a new job, the first day you start, you're incompetent adjust is how long you stay that way is really the issue. So it's just a matter of catching up. 

So I had a real impetus to try to figure out how to do this. So I talked to my directory ports and all the kind of different things, and I got all the introductions. But I think quite early on, I decided that I would introduce myself to everybody in the building. So I had little coffee meetings for half an hour, an hour every morning, 08:00 or whatever it was, and we just talked a little bit, and people introduced themselves. And then I said, what do you think we can do better here? Et cetera. And I must say, I learned more from what I sensed was really going on versus the official story that I would get. And I really sensed that people were quite willing and wanting to do a better job. But it was a fairly repressive kind of regime going on. So it spelled out the issues and the underlying things. It didn't give me any solutions, but at least I did that. So that was for about four or five months, exploration, all those kind of things. 

Then I got introduced to Requisite by a presentation of George Harding. He recommended this book, Theory of Bureaucracy, which I liked. And people have always joked that I punish people when I give them that book, but I really understand the underlying pieces of and it makes sense to me. So it's just like one of those penchants we have sometimes for picking up pieces from where other people just don't see the same thing. So then we committed to doing this because it was obvious that we had to unleash the potential of the people and the talent that was in the firm. And management seemed to be an impediment. So I had to figure out a way to kind of open that up and do something about it. And I didn't have any other methodology because I had never really done anything but kind of in a departmental way, putting some boxes together and some names in it and say, this person can do that and whatever it is, and there's an official job description, whatever it is. But it really never spoke to me. It was just a way of getting more resources to do my job, not to really manage the process. 

So this was then presented to me as a way of actually managing a structure and a way of doing it that would provide at each level, the right kind of air so that people could actually expand the potential and live up to what they claimed to me in the coffee meetings is what they really cared about and what they really wanted to do. So I'm starting in January, we are now in the summer and D Day is approaching. And I remember to this day, it was September the 6th, 19, 1988. And we decided that day to announce the new structure and all those kind of different things. And obviously that took a number of months to implement. 

There was a big shock to the organization. There were kind of perceived threats uttered. There was an article in newspaper, there was all kinds of different kind of innuendo or whatever it is. And obviously to me, I had to be the person who said, no, it's the right thing, we're going to do this. Calm down. This is based on kind of good understanding and all these kind of different things, et cetera. And I learned that that's a very lonely and difficult thing to do. So certainly when I got home at night, I had a lot of things that I had to let out in order to kind of be there. So fortunately, my wife happens to be a psychologist and she was very helpful in saying, hey, just take it as just part of people venting their anger and doing this. And it's nothing personal, don't take this as a personal attack. It's you as the institution that does something and you happen to be the representative, but you're not being invalidated by everybody. And certainly helped me through all of this. 

And I think that also there were a number of people who were really pleased that this was happening because it finally kind of said real change might be happening. So I would say the next four or five months, we had a lot of different things that happened. And I would say the first time I felt that there was actually real change for the better was about, I would say, six to nine months after the implementation of the changes when we started seeing a lot more kind of people dealing with the issues. As they came up, they're calmed down. Now the fear had subsided. Managers that were there actually were saying, okay, this is now my job. I better start doing it. Some people that weren't really either capable or really wanting to participate, but I would say kind of one third to 40, 50% of the managers started just saying, okay, I'm going to give this a chance. And I would say within 18 months after the changes, we were basically in full flight because we had implemented on the marketing side, a lot of programs to stimulate growth. So people saw the changes, people saw that there was growth, that there was excitement and all those kind of things, and they were just dealing with the influx. So I would say the first in the kind of seven years I was there, in year three, we had the big blockage the first time where we were making plans, volumes were up by 25% 30%, and everybody wanted 25 30% more people. And I said no. 

And so that's when we started implementing more process flow and starting to really tighten up on what is it that we can do to get measurements so that you can plan your resources you need, but you're also being held accountable for the output. So we started putting that in. We brought in a consulting firm to help us do that, whatever it is. And it was not an easy process, but it still really gave us, I think, a measurable output that helped manage us to plan. So we took out the emotion of it and we started really saying, hey, x number of telephone calls, x number of this. If the phone calls are 10,000 a day, these are the resources you need over these hours and things like that. Rather than I need more, I need more. And when people throw resources at it to solve it, it's never efficient, it never really works. 

So I think that was another crisis in the piece. So measurement became a much bigger part of doing it. So we're going from emotional bond to the founder to a requisite system that isn't bound to one individual. I'm the personification because I introduced it, but it's much more accountability of the individual, manager, director, et cetera. Now we're starting to measure. And then the next phase we went into to even do that is we actually had meetings once a month with every director, level three, and we called them Qqrts, which is the quantity, quality, resource and time measurement that Elliot talks about. And really it was my opportunity to have the level three say, this is what I do, but really to force them to say it in front of other level threes, who had all the scenes of the different accountabilities. So level four and five could sit there and say, well, why don't you talk to your colleague and get this input that you have that you say is faulty fixed. So that gave us an opportunity to knit together a lot more part. 

So in the meantime, when you kind of look at the overall business, this is just organization. We were like doubling the business in the first two years. It was just unbelievable. The profitability, everything was going right and everybody seemed to be enjoying it. And a challenge in the years three and four when we started being in the quality site much better. The one thing I remember is one of the managers came to me and said, I'm dealing with an outside company and they don't want to deal with me because I'm a manager and they are all vice presidents and can't you give me the title? Vice president for the outside? I said no, it's not how we do this. I mean, you know, your job, you know, what is it said, feel proud of the fact that we give you that much responsibility. But it was a huge thing because the outside was all based on titles and all these kind of different things and no authority and all. And we had managers who actually took decisions that were for those people at VP level. And I must say, I had to kind of chuckle because I said this is a really smart system because we only pay managers level and they make fee kind of decisions. So I really saw the effect of unleashing the people and what they did and all those kind of different things. 

I really saw that over the years as the biggest achievement was to see people grow into what they could do and only think about what's the right thing to do rather than who do I cater to. And that's kind of the joy I still have to this day of those years. And really in the end of the seven years when I went to head office, we had quintupled the business, it's just like phenomenal now, industry was doing fine, financial service, whatever it is, and we took advantage of a lot of the trends and whatever it is. But we brought a mediocre player to the head of the field in retail cards. We got the first non bank license for Mastercard in the world because we decided in 89 that long term we couldn't do without a Visa or a Mastercard license because the retail card only accepted in the stores that we had wasn't a viable proposition. So it took us five years, but we got it. So lot of really good stuff and really to this day, every time I meet people from that area who work there, we just have a chuckle about how great it was and how much fun and how much we learned and what a wonderful experience it was. And for me, totally kind of never thought I could be debt gratified and debt satisfied in managing a company because it was just a wonderful feedback to see people change, grow and do that and things. We had a lot of fun, too. We were crazy. I mean, we just celebrated everything we could and had a good time, which is really part of the fun. There was a lot of what I would say good, genuine liking to work at the place and being very, very successful at it, which is obviously why you're in business in the first place. You it's.