Manitoba Business Magazine
So, when did you have your first best practice? Personally, I've been having them since I was 6. I was one of those kids who was forced to practice the piano against my will. I can distinctly remember having "a best practice" the first time my Mom went outside to garden while I was banging and slamming away in the basement. Upon hearing her leave the house, I quit playing immediately and watched Get Smart instead. Or, as a teenager, telling my Mom and Dad that I had volley ball practice (all the while praying that they didn't actually figure out I wasn't on the team) and I would meet my friends and drive around and have a tailgate party instead. Those were great practices - each one being the best practice yet! You'll notice here that I'm not receiving the Pianist of the Year Award or being inducted into the Sports Hall of Fame. However, what I, and more importantly, the team I work with, are being recognized for is achieving best practices in the way we do business every day, for the past nine years. And, before I go further, thank you for such an honour.
Throughout my career as a market researcher, I have had the shock of witnessing firsthand the flavour-of-the-day management initiatives implemented by a company being led by the fearful, the heavy-handed company policies that guarantee dives in employee and customer satisfaction and loyalty levels, or the practice of making the most amount of money in the shortest amount of time, quality be damned. I have also had the privilege of learning from great leaders and from corporate cultures that strive for greatness in the smallest of details to the largest of undertakings. And that has been an unbelievable opportunity for me as a company owner to emulate.
And ironically enough, as you've already heard me describe myself as someone who is always striving for best practices, even from an early age, it is really no wonder that I have personally settled on a career and created a company that not only employs best practices in what we do - but also works with industry to benchmark, measure, track, improve and strive for the same.
Our product offerings to our clients across North America are built on the premise that information, the right information, accurate information, information that is statistically reliable, information that is delivered at the right time in a process, and information that is actionable, can guarantee success. We have shared many such successes with our clients in our 9 years of operation. We have measured customer satisfaction with public insurance customers, with hydro customers, with credit union members, with municipal public properties that purchase transit buses, with tour coach operators who buy luxury motor coaches. And today, without fail, each of these clients have changed the way they do business, they way they offer service, the way they build their product or deliver it. We have measured employee satisfaction - and dissatisfaction - and offered solutions for greater retention and attraction of employees in all sectors of business across Canada. We see these changes in action. And we measure the differences they make. We have measured the effectiveness of advertising and have influenced the look, the feel and the intent of that advertising, and of brands - many of which you likely saw or heard on your way here this evening. And we have determined the training needs and future employment needs of so many different sectors in Manitoba and across Canada: print operators, environmental practitioners, water and waste water operators, renewables, aboriginal trades, technical writers, riggers and music publishers. And we have measured the value of industries' economic impact on our economy here in Manitoba, on other provinces and territories and on Canada overall.
I do want to share a best practice that makes a very significant difference to all of us everyday at kisquared, and that is our ISO registration. Looking around at my company in 2000, I knew how I wanted to service and sell to my clients, I knew how they should be treated, and I knew the quality of the product that consistently brought us our success. But, my challenge was this: How was I going to translate and instill that standard of quality into everyone that I hired and everything that we did, as we continued to grow rapidly?
Our first step was to investigate implementing a quality system. I'll never forget going to the QNET office, sitting in their library and watching a video on "the implementation of ISO in your organization". After it was over, I turned to Margaret McKenty, who is here tonight, and has been with the company since our first year in business, and we just laughed uproariously. I don't know if we were underwhelmed or overwhelmed, but whatever it was, we knew we definitely weren't in Kansas anymore.
It took us about a year and half to pursue our registration to the new ISO 9001:2000 standard. We didn't have a committee or a team undertaking the process, we all did it, together, painstakingly, meeting by meeting, element by element. We prided ourselves in being an agile company, with a transparent management structure, that was a great place to work. Any quality system had to reflect that reality above all. We dreaded any system, no matter how prestigious, that would bog us down in extraneous documentation, that would kill spontaneity, or limit our ability to be competitive. So we deliberated, we developed, we implemented, we wrote, edited, disagreed, trashed, scrapped and re-wrote, through a year and a half, until we were ready for our first audit. Today, our vision at kisquared is: to be the best market research company to buy from and work for. We have been registered to the ISO standard now for almost 6 years, and our quality system is how we work today. It provides us with great direction, and the opportunity to continuously improve every day that we do business - a very real and working best practice.
I want to thank a very special person this evening who believed me when I said I wanted something more in my life than working for someone else. He said to me that I could, and that he would support me when I did, and he backed that up with $30,000 of love money, literally. Tom Winkel - if you could please stand so everyone here can see a living and breathing "best practice". Our entire team owes our thanks to you Tom for giving our company its first wings.
And finally, I just want to say that no one person or company sets out to create best practices. Frequently they are born out of necessity - a technological change, a shift in demographics, a catastrophic world event, or a scientific discovery. And they are created by the efforts of the many. But the greatest best practice practitioners and teams are those who still take the risk to respond and make it better for all of us. To all of you - and especially to the kisquared team here tonight - cheers to a bright business future, filled with extraordinary hope.