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BUILDING A “BE NICE” BUSINESS
 Hi Everyone,
When it comes to the workplace, BE NICE is a marketing campaign, a boardroom strategy, a staff training theme, and a customer promise. Making BE NICE a part of your company’s mission statement and vision will increase staff morale and loyalty, improve customer service, and increase profits. The company that embraces a BE NICE culture has a major competitive edge because customers will spend a lot of money with a company that’s nice. BE NICE is not just a platitude, it’s good business.
Can you imagine a company with a motto of “Be Mean”? Of course not. But the absence of a strong mission statement and campaign to create a BE NICE culture will, by default, create a mean one. There’s not much gray area here, nor is there room for a wishy-washy, spineless resolve like, “We’re pretty nice, sometimes, when we have to be.” I believe that all organizations, businesses, and family units must consciously and actively adopt and promote the beliefs and practices of being nice. An organization that conveys the opposite of being nice, or even settles for “Be unsympathetic, uncaring, heartless, unconcerned, insensitive, or indifferent,” can sit back and watch staff loyalty diminish and profits decrease.
Make no mistake—your customers are attracted to you more by your enthusiasm, your cheerful disposition, your love for what you do, and your company standards for respecting human beings than by your marble floors, your sleek business cards, or your multimillion-dollar advertising campaign. When you make BE NICE a daily priority, your company or business will reap the rewards.
Every individual—from CEO to janitor, from accountant to salesperson—must heed the call to be nice. However, it’s a lot easier to be nice when you’re part of a BE NICE culture and community. I hope you enjoy this month’s newsletter, which is all about building a BE NICE business.
Thanks for helping me live my fantasy of spreading this BE NICE message and giving nice people a voice.
XOXO, Winn
A BE NICE Story
Do you have a BE NICE story to share? Send it to editor@BeNiceOrElse.com. If it appears in the newsletter, you’ll receive a BE NICE T-shirt and CD!
Our April 2006 edition featured a letter from Bryan Marlowe. The 35-year-old cosmetology student described the times he and his family had spent in abuse shelters and his desire to someday give back. Two years later, Bryan has found a wonderful way to keep that promise!
 Dear Winn
Remember when I wrote that letter to you that you published in the newsletter, April 2006? I mentioned that I wanted to be able to one day give back to shelters for abused women and children.
I contacted the Safe Passage Shelter, our local shelter here in Tennessee. They were thrilled at the phone call. They told me that each woman and child who comes to the shelter is given a new pillow and blanket of their very own. Sometimes that is all that they have when they have to take refuge from the storm of domestic violence. The shelter needs 250 pillows a year. So I started thinking.
My business partner, Edward W. Hickman, and I want our salon to provide exceptional service and we want to have the reputation of “the salon with a HEART.” So we started the Ornare Cares Foundation. We started small this year. I distributed a memo to our team and asked for donations for the Ornare Cares/Safe Passage Shelter “Pillows for Peace” campaign. A pillow costs about $3. Whatever we raised toward this cause, the salon would match and then we would deliver the pillows to the shelter. We raised $100 and provided 39 pillows!
I am so excited about this because I believe that to be successful in life you have to give back. You have to “be nice or else!” The shelter is excited about this, too. They plan to make Pillows for Peace a community-wide campaign and even start an annual Pillows for Peace Award. I can’t wait to make a difference in others’ lives!
Bryan Marlowe
Co-owner of Ornare Salon
Johnson City, Tennessee
Monthly Audio Message
Patricia Fripp
 High energy, high content, and dramatically memorable describe Patricia Fripp’s presentations. An award-winning speaker, successful entrepreneur, and the first female president of the National Speakers Association, Patricia is the author of several books, including Get What You Want and Make It, So You Don’t Have to Fake It. She also co-authored Speaking Secrets of the Masters and Insights into Excellence with Brian Tracy, Ken Blanchard, and others.
Named one of the ten most electrifying speakers in North America by Meetings and Conventions magazine, Patricia uses humor and real-life examples to illustrate her practical points. Her speech-coaching clients include corporate leaders, celebrity speakers, well-known sports and media personalities, ministers, and sales teams. Patricia is also featured in the Bullet Proof Manager video series, sold in over 50 countries, and she starred in the popular training film Travel the Road to Success: An Adventure in Customer Service.
Before becoming a full-time speaker, Patricia enjoyed a successful 24-year career in a service industry. She owned two highly successful businesses and trained service and sales personnel.
 CLICK HERE to discover Patricia’s business-building tips and detailed ideas for “shameless self-promotion.” Her straightforward wisdom will spare you years of employee grief.
If you enjoyed this month’s audio message, you’ll love our MASTERS Audio Club. CLICK HERE for more information.
People Profile
Jack Mitchell
 In 2006, Jack Mitchell was listed among the Top 10 Retail Visionaries of All Time, according to Daily News Record, one of the most widely read retail trade publications in the country. His family-owned clothing stores (Mitchells and Richards) are widely considered by industry leaders to be among the most successful upper-end men’s and women’s specialty stores in America. You don’t have to look beyond the titles of his two best-selling books—Hug Your Customers and Hug Your People—to discover the secret to Mitchell’s success.
“Giving great personalized customer service has always been the foremost goal in my family,” says the third-generation Connecticut specialty store chairman and CEO, “but one thing we never lose sight of is that you can’t possibly deliver great service if you don’t treat your own associates right.” Mitchell makes a point of extending his high-touch philosophy to his staff as well as his customers. The busy executive meets frequently with each staff member, always calls them by their first names, and makes sure they get annual birthday cards from the Mitchell family.
In Hug Your People, Mitchell shares five secrets for creating happy employees:
- Be NICE to them (and hire nice people to begin with).
- TRUST them (they deserve it and will work even harder and smarter to continue to earn that trust).
- Instill PRIDE in them (they are more productive when they are proud of their work).
- INCLUDE them (since you can’t do it alone).
- Generously RECOGNIZE them (and not only with money – but don’t be chintzy, either).
In this age when people are spending more and more time working, Mitchell believes that it’s all the more important for companies to allow staff “to feel they have a sense of purpose at work.”
Corporate Corner
Give Your Team a Reading Assignment!
 At one of my “Know Your Business” seminars I challenged a group of business leaders and accountants to read chapters 8 and 9 of Be Nice (Or Else!) and then tell me what they thought. They all work for or with companies that practice the BE NICE philosophy.
“After college, I started in the corporate world and remained ‘stuck’ there for 9 years. One area in chapter 8 I really enjoyed was Values vs. Behaviors. People at my old job would always say they valued their families; I never saw that. What I saw was affairs and working ridiculous hours. [At my new job] not only do we value family, our behavior shows it.”
— Jodi Norris
Financial Leader
Cincinnati Academy – A Paul Mitchell Partner School
“My favorite segment was the one on the HP Way. This morning was the first morning I didn’t go straight to my office. I wandered around, saying good morning to the desk, the folks in the classrooms, and the future professionals on the floor. It was the perfect way to start a day and I ended up walking back to my office with a huge smile.”
— Memory Gough
Brand Leader/Financial Leader
Paul Mitchell The School – Atlanta
“I found many things that we do well in my CPA firm and some we need to work on. We’ve always emphasized client service, but sometimes we’ve put accomplishing the task ahead of the people involved. Obviously the work we do for them is important, but if we never get a chance to showcase our abilities it doesn’t matter. Since attending the seminar I’ve begun talking to my staff about our ‘Be Nice Philosophy’ and I plan to incorporate it into our mission statement. I plan to pay my staff to read chapters 8 and 9 so we are all on the same page.”
— Daniel Muzljakovich, CPA
I highly recommend this exercise for any business or organization. You can use it as both an interviewing step for potential employees and as a tool for training current employees about your organization’s culture.
Do Something!
What If None of This Comes from the Top?
 In many seminars or workshops after I’ve shared the information about building a BE NICE business, a group of excited yet disillusioned people have come up to me and said something like, “Our boss should have been here. He’s the real problem. What if we all want to be nice, but our boss is an SOB?”
All I can say is that my heart goes out to you. To pay the bills, you sometimes have to endure unpleasantness at work. But I challenge you to try the following home-play assignment:
- Discover bits and pieces of ideas I’ve shared here that you could subtly or even privately implement at work, without going against company policies.
- Perhaps you can share one or two ideas with a coworker.
People love to commiserate against the boss in a negative way, and I doubt that your workplace allows that. Why not be a new type of rebel—one who has the courage to not only inspire the naysayer at work, but to also take on the challenge of inspiring the big, bad boss.
Quotes of the Month
“The magic formula that successful businesses have discovered is to treat customers like guests and employees like people.”
— Tom Peters
“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”
— Jeff Bezos, business executive and founder of amazon.com
Winn Claybaugh’s Be Nice (Or Else!) The Newsletter!
Copyright © 2008 by Winn Claybaugh. All rights reserved.
Editor: Gail Fink
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