How to make small business to the extreme?

How to make small business to the extreme?

1966, a member of the famous French Bailong family, Pierre? Pierre Veron founded Sourdis in Marseille. This is a labor-intensive service company, engaged in small businesses such as group meals and service cards, but it can achieve the ultimate in small businesses through refined management within 50 years and replicate its business model to 80 countries around the world.

Sourdis was listed in Paris on 1983 and in new york in 2002. In 20 14, Sourdis ranked 493rd among the world's top 500 enterprises, and its operating income reached1800 million euros (US$ 24 billion according to the exchange rate contract at that time), which was higher than that of famous multinational companies such as Fuji Heavy Industries and British American Tobacco.

Sourdis is not only the world's largest catering service company, but also the world's second largest service card company, the world's largest inland river cruise and port professional company, and the world's largest field base service provider. These follow-up businesses are all because of the group meal service.

The founder Bailong's philosophy is to achieve the ultimate in traditional business and put human development in the first place. No matter what you do, enterprises can naturally achieve healthy growth.

As the largest employer in 18, Sourdis has more than 400,000 employees in 33,000 locations. The educational background of these employees ranges from primary education to doctoral degree. Blum plans to turn the company into a social enterprise, employ disabled employees and vulnerable groups, improve employees' ability through scientific and systematic training, and intentionally increase the proportion of female employees in management and strengthen the fairness of development.

Sourdis's enlightenment is: don't do it because of small profits, don't do it because of tradition, and don't set foot in industries unrelated to core competitiveness, even if it is high profits. Its business composition ranges from building cleaning, security and gardening to laboratory maintenance, office building energy-saving planning and even employee care? Butler service is enough for customers to focus on their main business and travel lightly. After careful planning by Sourdis, some trivial and complicated affairs not only helped customers improve their efficiency, but also dug a gold mine in Sourdis.

Enterprises in China constantly emphasize transformation and development, but they are often not only unemployed in the process of transformation, but also frustrated because they have not established their core competitiveness in new fields. However, in the past 50 years, Sourdis insisted on doing its main business to the extreme, trained ordinary people into talents through methodology, and extended the ability established from the main business to related service fields, and established an unshakable position in some seemingly meager labor-intensive industries with its core competitiveness, which is also what China enterprises need to learn from.

How to dig out gold mines from group meals

The history of Marseille in France is a maritime history, and the long coastline has created a developed port trade and shipping industry. At the beginning of the 20th century, the French Bailong family started from here and engaged in the supply service of small ships.

Pierre, a member of the White Dragon family? When Bailong founded Sourdis, it continued the ship replenishment service. With the wave of French decolonization, Marseille's shipping share is decreasing year by year. However, the revival of European economy after World War II led to the development of service industry, and many enterprises began to set up company canteens, which gave birth to the rise of catering outsourcing services. With the family's 60-year experience in providing catering services for luxury sea routes and cruise ships, Sourdis began to provide services for enterprises, schools, hospitals and other units and groups.

Only one year later, Sourdis received a request from CNES to provide ground facilities maintenance for its space center in French Guiana, and to build and manage a hotel and a small supermarket. This is a strong signal: if customers are very satisfied, it may lead the company's service business to extend to areas that have never been reached.

As a result, Sourdis began a diversified outsourcing service centered on group meals. Create a unique development path in a market that needs a lot of labor, diversified employers and meticulous domestic service.

1995, Sourdis came to China. In the eyes of Christopher Solas, CEO of Greater China, there was no so-called outsourcing service market in China at that time, and even people had no sense of service, so entrepreneurs needed to show pioneering spirit. With the foundation laid in European and American markets, Sourdis continues to serve these old customers who came to China after the reform and opening up. But now that I'm in China, I have to consider how to penetrate the China market, not just to continue the original customer resources. Sourdis has been in contact with central enterprises since 2002, and this is just an opportunity. In 2003, the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) put forward the goal of separating core and non-core businesses for central enterprises, requiring them to gradually reduce their investment in auxiliary non-core businesses. In this context, some central enterprises have started relevant reforms, hoping to realize the demands of reducing staff and increasing capital, streamlining main business and enhancing the core competitiveness of enterprises by outsourcing logistics services to third-party professional service providers. Sourdis started the road of cooperation with state-owned enterprises.

In June 5438+10, Sourdis received the invitation of the first state-owned enterprise to provide group meal service for the factory with more than 1000 employees. The premise is that the company needs to accept and resettle 150 former logistics service employees of state-owned enterprises. How to attract, receive, train and manage these employees stably is the top priority of this project, and how to mobilize the original team to improve customer satisfaction is also a huge challenge. There are no corresponding cases and regulations for reference in China, so it is necessary to creatively design service schemes to solve immediate problems.

Sourdis's business model is simple. In most cases, the services provided can only be completed by one person or a team. Fixed assets are not invested in property or complex equipment, and variable costs such as employees' salaries and raw materials are their main expenses. Usually, when signing a contract, Sourdis will accept employees who have been engaged in relevant work in the client company and retrain them to meet Sourdis' professional standards. The threshold for becoming an employee in Sourdis is not high, but the working attitude and methods are very important, which is the foundation of the service industry.

When Sourdis competes for orders from state-owned enterprises, people often think that the service price of French companies must be more expensive than that of China companies. ? In all countries in the world, it is human nature that customers want the most competitive price. ? The price should correspond to the service level. In emerging markets, people have not established the concept of high quality and good price, let alone set the standard of service. However, Sourdis will set minimum service standards and price standards, because these are the basic configurations to ensure supply chain and food safety, and enterprises themselves need to have clear profit plans. Christophe said, how? If the price is too low to make a profit, it will not be able to give employees better welfare treatment, and the enterprise will lose the continuity and stability of development. ?

The group meal market has a low entry threshold, and competitors are shopping for each other, which leads to meager profit operation, but it is also a market with great demand and different needs for employees. Take the front-line waiter as an example. About 80% of customers in the mass catering service industry are strangers, while about 90% of group meal customers are regular customers, so it is necessary to reach a long-term cooperative and trusted partnership with customers. The requirements of the menu are also different. Mass catering has a fixed menu, but the group catering industry has a greater demand for food innovation. In Sourdis, hundreds or even thousands of different dishes are prepared with more than 80 conventional ingredients at different operating points according to different menu labels. Due to the limited lunch time, service providers must ensure that meals are provided to thousands or even tens of thousands of people within a limited time.

In the process of cooperation with this state-owned enterprise, personnel reorganization is only a representation. New employees need to integrate into the company's standardized operation system and provide standardized services according to Sourdis standards.

When competing for orders, Sourdis will standardize, measure and track its services, and employees need to abide by the contract to provide services. To this end, the company has gradually introduced a series of targeted training, such as computer skills and English ability, to train people to use necessary operating tools, such as supply chain, financial and personnel-related reporting systems, and to mobilize employees' initiative in learning in a flexible way.

In addition to professional integration, cultural integration is also important. Sourdis was established? Operating point management Committee? System, let these old state-owned enterprise employees play? Master? Cheer up? Autonomy. This can bring unexpected results. Old employees have a wide network of contacts here, and they have better communication channels and problem-solving ability than outsiders when encountering problems.

Relocated employees gradually found confidence in the organization. Originally, he was only a member of the non-core department of state-owned enterprises, but after arriving in Sourdis, he became a core employee, and his sense of self-identity was greatly enhanced. Looking back after 10 years, 96% of the 150 logistics service employees received from state-owned enterprises in that year were retained, with a promotion rate of 30%. Some of them joined the management team of Sourdis China and became the backbone of the company. With the opening of new operating points, they actively sought development opportunities. This solution, which was born out of China's national conditions, has also become a model for Sourdis to explore state-owned enterprise customers in the future, and has been copied constantly.

Since 20 1 1, this state-owned enterprise has outsourced business support services such as factory logistics operation and maintenance, environmental greening and cleaning to Sourdis. Sourdis introduced you? Health, safety and environment? We have established various standards to measure service quality, retrain employees, support them with professional technical force and help them move towards marketization? Go out? . In 20 13, the labor productivity was improved by increasing service items, the income increased by 7% compared with the previous year, the operating cost decreased by 5%, and the incidence of major safety accidents and accidents causing economic losses was reduced to zero.

From group meals to comprehensive services, how does Sourdis look for opportunities in various businesses? How to establish its own unique competitiveness in the service market with price sensitivity, fierce competition and rising labor costs?

The secret is talent cultivation and standardization.

Core Competitiveness of Service Industry: Talents and Standardization

The challenge of service industry lies in the low entry threshold, but the difficulty lies in the commitment of sustained stability. Sourdis employees need to work at customers, and each customer's requirements are different. It is difficult to guarantee the service quality and evaluate the service effect only by the enthusiasm and improvisation of employees. So companies need to balance customization and standardization, which is a very challenging thing.

Before Sourdis, few people quantitatively analyzed and studied the service and established a tracking mechanism. Because the service is an instantaneous action, it is difficult to verify whether the waiter washes the dishes and cleans the table according to the prescribed process and how clean it is.

Therefore, Sourdis constructs the quality of service from two dimensions. One is to cultivate development talents, and the other is to establish standardization.

Dimension 1: talent development. Managing resources is an extraordinary challenge. In China alone, there are more than16,000 employees from more than 30 cities across the country, and non-local migrant workers account for more than 50%, providing more than 200 different jobs, including a large number of grassroots employment opportunities without thresholds. Sourdis emphasizes service spirit, team spirit and enterprising spirit. As long as these three core spirits exist, they can help employees find a suitable position in the company regardless of their education and background.

In China, the turnover rate of front-line employees of Sourdis is as high as 200%, and many positions are held by migrant workers with low academic qualifications. Like migratory birds, these groups are willing to endure hardships, but they also have strong mobility. Companies need to take care of their employees everywhere, such as letting employees choose their favorite positions and work in the nearest operating point, designing some special benefits for migrant workers, helping new employees integrate into local life and solving difficulties in daily life, and also proposing a policy of reimbursement of travel expenses after returning to work in China after the Chinese New Year to minimize the mobility of employees.

Whether a person can stay on the job for a long time depends on training, which will bring more career development opportunities to employees. To this end, Sourdis has invested a lot of money in training to create a platform for sharing knowledge and best practices. Company employees are grouped according to their jobs, such as boiler maintenance technicians, housekeepers and catering service personnel. The team of experts is responsible for training new people and providing best practices that can be enjoyed all over the world.

After training, we should create opportunities for employees to be promoted. Many managers are slowly promoted from the bottom employees. A female executive in the United States, 18 years ago was just a waitress of a client. Remarkably, Sourdis began to cooperate with ESTHUA in China in 2009, and established the first master's degree in catering service for Chinese and French enterprises. So far, it has sponsored five groups of fresh graduates to go to France for further study. It not only transfuses blood for enterprises, but also constantly develops the skills of employees. After a series of efforts, the turnover rate of front-line personnel in China Company has dropped from 200% to 50% every year.

Dimension 2: Establish standardization. In the long-term practice, Sourdis has summarized a large number of best practices of high efficiency and cost saving, which has also benefited customers a lot. The quotation given by Sourdis is far lower than the investment required by the client company to undertake this part of the work. These best practices need to be standardized to clarify profit points and promote global knowledge transfer. To this end, Sourdis invested in establishing a high-quality expert team, strengthened on-site training and guidance on key tools and processes such as lean management and Six Sigma, helped the operation team find and avoid waste in operation and business processes, and optimized the operation point and company organizational structure.

With the development of technology, Sourdis developed the IT management system of nutritional meals for patients in hospitals in China with reference to the advanced software system used in North America market, which turned the manual recording of nutritional meals in hospitals into automation and mobile terminal management (such as charts). Doctors, clinical nutritionists, caterers and buyers can keep abreast of the latest treatment and diet records of inpatients, read their physical parameters and reduce the service error rate. This enables clinical nutritionists and chefs to actively design nutritional recipes that are more in line with patients' needs. At the same time, the operation team can more accurately estimate and place orders through Sourdis' unique food raw material supply chain, thus accelerating the rehabilitation of hospitalized patients and reducing food waste.

For the work that must be done by hand, for the group meal, how many grams of rice, how much protein content, and how to mix ingredients are all clear when signing a contract with customers. When training employees, different dishes are required to have different processing temperatures, and they must be eaten within two hours after serving, otherwise they will be scrapped. For example, table cleaning and glass cleaning are defined by the expert center, forming a standard operation process, and the sequence, gestures and tools have to be trained repeatedly to achieve standardized services. Trained employees can do well as long as they put their heart into it, regardless of experience and education.

At the same time, in order to make the service traceable and measurable, Sourdis cooperated with professors and research centers and finally determined six key indicators: natural environment, social communication, physical and mental health care, social recognition, efficiency and personal development. All services provided must meet at least one indicator.

Clear indicators make it easy to measure the performance of enterprises. For example, after the maintenance of HVAC system, whether the number of sick leave of employees in the client company is reduced, the correlation between the weight of employees and the food hygiene in the canteen, and whether the re-planning of office space is helpful to improve work efficiency and communication. Each service plan can be realized in a specific digital evaluation, which gives both parties a basis of mutual trust.

Customize and create new business opportunities for customers

For service, customers are most concerned about whether the promise can be fulfilled for a long time. This is the basis for building trust. It is precisely because of the efforts in personnel development and standardization that customers dare to cooperate further and go deep into some areas that have never been tried before after realizing the advantages brought by professional services.

Sourdis customers are leaders in the global communications industry. When providing services for its Beijing Innovation and Manufacturing Center, customers put forward very strict budget reduction targets, and these budget controls cannot affect daily operations or employee satisfaction.

Pass? Design, manage and provide solutions? Based on Sourdis methodology, the team established a temporary project team consisting of 12 people from Sourdis facility management expert center and engineering team. It took the team three months to analyze and process the collected thousands of operational data, and on this basis, it launched 14 power-saving project and 5 water-saving project, negotiated with external suppliers to reduce the procurement cost of key equipment parts, control the price increase of drinking water, green plants and related items, and even optimize the utilization rate of shuttle buses. Results The customer's Beijing factory reached the gold standard of the customer's global lean manufacturing project in the self-inspection of 20 12. These creative foundations are still based on the previous standardization practice, so that the service effect can be measured.

Sourdis is a small enterprise, whose business is to provide only those services that can immediately improve the quality of life of individuals (customers). Although it serves enterprises, government departments, schools and hospitals, it is the individuals in the organization who finally land. Sourdis started as a catering outsourcing service, and later developed into three major businesses: resident service, incentive and reward service, and personal and family service. It has entered a wide range of fields, including Michelin restaurants, providing services for the army and prisons, providing support for engineering bases with harsh offshore and onshore environments, providing professional maintenance services for pharmaceutical laboratories, and even helping hospitals and enterprises to certify relevant qualifications. From low-end labor-intensive services to high-end precision services, Sourdis has woven a long service chain, linking business opportunities, but the origin is just a group meal. After a business reaches its peak, gold comes.

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