Housing Giants - July 10, 2008 - (Page 17)

background isn’t home building. It’s restaurants, and he was a senior executive at Red Robin, a nationwide restaurant chain. At Red Robin, he used to challenge himself to determine what was wrong with a distant location by going in cold, and — never having been there before — walking around for 25 minutes. In that short time, he would be able to tell the manager where he needed to improve his purchasing, production, quality control, sales, customer service, scheduling, communication, supervision and leadership. All that in 25 minutes. What was he looking at? It is more difficult than it sounds, because as he walked around, he carefully noted certain critical metrics that were on display throughout the restaurant. The metrics could predict — on a minute-by-minute basis — the current state of the operation, the service, the staff and well beyond. The metrics could predict the current state of operation, the service, the staff and well beyond. the condition of the home builder. “What I am doing at Anderson Homes is bringing the sense of urgency of retail and the key performance indicators from manufacturing into Anderson’s operations. Any home builder can benefit from this,” Stark says. “What I did at my Red Robin with my 25-minute walk-around appraisal is frankly far more activity analysis than any home builder I’ve met ever does. I am just bringing an out-of-industry approach to management.” digital Help Where home building operations differ from a restaurant location is that the activity metrics — those leading indicators that can prompt you to intervene and quickly redirect staff — are very widely dispersed — in Anderson’s case, among 17 communities. But they’re dispersed categorically as well, with some crucial metrics contained in RestauRants, Home Building … same tHing? Now Chris is focused on home building, and he has developed a set of metrics that he can use as the same “walk-around” technique to determine www.Housinggiants.com 7.10.08.Housing giants 17 http://www.housinggiants.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Housing Giants - July 10, 2008

Housing Giants - July 10, 2008 Contents Viewpoint News & Moves Tech M&A Critical Management Series Part 1

Housing Giants - July 10, 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.