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Breakthrough Thinking Drives Success In All Kinds of Buisnesses Bob Theis, president and CEO of Syracuse, N.Y.-base J.R. Clancy, Inc., might be aptly described as an enabler of creativity. He’d take that as a compliment. His company exists to provide behind-the-scenes workings that make theatrical presentations more dramatic, musical concerts more resonant. More than customers or clients, the creative geniuses who stage these performances are considered "partners" by Theis and everyone else at J.R. Clancy, and there’s nothing they want more than to "facilitate their creativity," he says. The company has been around for more than 120 years, and creativity is in its corporate DNA. It was founded by John R. Clancy in 1885 as a result of his experience working as a stagehand at the Grand Opera in Syracuse. A touring production from England paid a visit to Syracuse and found that some rigging equipment it needed simply did not exist in the United States. Harnessing his creative muse, Clancy developed and fabricated his own version of the missing equipment. Its success encouraged him to begin manufacturing stage equipment as a full-time venture. By 1910, Clancy’s business had grown to the point where he built the first single-story manufacturing plant in Syracuse, a radical idea at the time. Clancy’s creativity was reflected in innovations such as a steam-driven central line shaft that powered all the shop’s machinery. It was just as evident in the company’s products. Such stage-rigging industry standards as the "Welch" tension floor block (named after the company employee who developed it in 1925), automatic fire curtains and the stage screw all are products of J.R. Clancy’s prolific ingenuity. That kind of breakthrough thinking continued to drive the company’s fortunes for generations. It developed the first motorized rigging systems offering position control and motor synchronization for stage sets in the 1960s. The following decade saw the fabrication and installation of the industry’s first wire tension grid, which greatly increased lighting flexibility for stage productions, and the first divisible auditorium, at Houston’s Jesse Jones Hall for the Performing Arts.
Theis describes himself as "an entrepreneur by nature." With an undergraduate degree from Villanova and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business, he enjoyed a successful career in marketing with consumer electronics giant Sony Corp. through the 1970s. When he heard about J.R. Clancy from an acquaintance in 1982, he jumped at the chance to buy it.
BATTLING STALENESS "Here was a company that had been around for a long time, was the leader in its industry and had a rich history, but it had gotten kind of stale," he says. Sensing that the marketing and other skills honed during his tenure with Sony would be transferable to this new venture despite the different natures of the companies, he decided to go for it. However, he knew he would have challenges to meet and hurdles to overcome if he were going to succeed."The major issue was that the company was as old as it was," he recalls. "On the one hand, that kind of history and longevity can be viewed as a strength. On the other hand, it can be conducive to complacency, and there was some of that going on. You get an institutional mindset of, `We’ve always done it this way,’ or, `We tried that in 1952 and it didn’t work,’ and that can be tough to dislodge." Theis’s solution was to re-emphasize J.R. Clancy’s historical dedication to creativity on the product development side while introducing an entirely new approach to customer service and quality management. "We spend a lot of money on research and development, both on improving and refining existing products and in developing new ones," he says. "The process starts with us going into the field and asking end-users how they want a particular product to work. We have a lot people on staff who are former stage managers and stagehands, so we have a collective reservoir of industry expertise we can tap."
However, the most radical innovations at J.R. Clancy in the Theis era have come in the areas of customer service and quality management, especially over the past decade. In 1998, he and his second-in-command, executive vice president Mike Murphy, attended a Baldridge National Quality Program seminar in New York City, an event Theis describes as "a defining moment strategically" for the future of J.R. Clancy. "We decided at that point we were going to get ISO 9001:2000 certified, which we did within two years," he relates. With J.R. Clancy now the only stage-rigging manufacturer in the U.S. with this international quality-management certification, Theis and Murphy opened up a second front to develop performance metrics. "If our mission was to make our partners successful, how could we internally measure our success in fulfilling that mission? We asked ourselves that question and decided our customers could provide the best answer," he says.
THREE KEYS After months of surveys, research and face-to-face encounters, they concluded three things were most important to their customers. "First, they want the equipment there on time. There’s nothing worse than having a crew of $75-an-hour workers standing around with nothing to do," Theis says. "Second, the equipment has to be complete, otherwise they can’t complete their job. Third, it has to be correct. Almost all performance spaces are unique in some way, so everything we build has customized aspects to it."Theis dubbed this performance metrics system OTCC (on-time, complete, correct) and set stringent benchmarks for J.R. Clancy to meet: 98% for on-time and 95% for complete and correct. "We measure religiously, and people get paid on how well we do at meeting those customer-satisfaction criteria," he says. Lots of companies talk a good game when it comes to customer satisfaction, but few back up their words as radically, or creatively, as J.R. Clancy does with its Extraordinary Guarantee. In a nutshell, this policy gives every customer the right to make a deduction from their invoice if they incur any extra cost as a result of correcting a mistake made by J.R. Clancy. Theis admits to taking the occasional "big hit" on such a liberal billing policy, but he says it’s worth the cost of doing business as a company whose primary philosophy is to build long-term relationships with customers. His thinking grew out of an experience during his Sony days, when he was disturbed by the way the giant company handled a spate of consumer complaints following a less-than-successful product launch.
Another J.R. Clancy program is called M.O.P.S. (Making Our Partners Successful), which is based on a simple premise: Give first, receive second. The company provides leads on upcoming out-to-bid projects, passes along inspection referrals, helps with financing and provides other forms of assistance to the dealers and contractors who buy and install its equipment.
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