What abilities make you a superstar at your job? In order to answer this question, you must be able to identify the set of hard and soft skills that define your skillset. Hard skills are abilities you can gain through education, training programs, certifications, and on-the-job training. These are typically quantifiable expertise that can be easily defined and evaluated.
Some things never change! No matter the industry, the year, the overall business climate, we are only as good as our team allows us to be. We have all heard the age-old saying “a team is only as good as its weakest link.” Well, let me tell you, those are words to live by. How do we recruit and keep great talent, how do we motivate our people, how do we challenge them to
“Hey Red! I need you to change a lightbulb in my office. Oh, and now that you’re here… We want to roll-out a paperless-workflow that seamlessly ties into a Smart Warehouse Management System that precisely tracks every tire we have.” – Tony, Joaquin, Orlando, Craig, etc. Yes, I am Red… and yes, I’m pretty sure all of the execs at Tire Group have said some form of the quote above.
What’s the first thing that pops into your head when you hear the words “Finance Department”? Most likely it is some variation of accounting, budgets or paying the bills… and those are all accurate descriptions in most organizations, but there is so much more to what a good Finance team does for a company. We are the engine that makes a company run.
I’d like to share a story with you about something that happened last week that blew my mind away. There’s a specific service that we needed in the state of Texas so I started contacting a wide array of those service-providers. Of all the vendors I reached out to only one person actually answered the phone and this individual was the only one to respond via email.
Our Mission Happiness dealer trip, was our most engaging company event ever! It really showcased what the TGI family is all about and why we call ourselves “The Winning Team!” Before we departed we had our usual business meeting which covered a wide array of topics, from the state of our industry, new brand developments, pricing, forecasting, etc…
So many times we think to ourselves, “we got this figured out”, and then comes another industry shift that makes us rethink what we really know! That is the world we live in, no matter the industry, so many factors beyond our control affect our businesses and we must react to them quickly and smartly or we won’t be around for long.