Cherry Republic’s State of the Company meeting had a packed agenda of 18 items to cover in three and a half hours. During our meeting, we laughed often, cried, celebrated and really rolled up our shirt sleeves and got some important stuff done. You can see the theme for the State of Company (and for the next 90 days) on the red banner– The journey of the Republic continues. Amazingly, we were eating lunch together exactly 3 hours 30 minutes later.
We started with a warm-up of Rock, Paper, Scissors Smack Down! led by Dawn, our TC store manager. Rhonda, our shipping clerk won by throwing a ROCK and guess what… she had never played this classic hand game before!
Next, over 20 of our staff got up and recognized others for the terrific contributions they gave in 2015. Here, I am giving Jason, our VP of Sales and Service an automatic wine bottle opener for helping set a culture of integrity and trust.
We recently received the fancy bottle opener in a trade with one of our customers who received the gift this past Christmas. Of course, this customer would rather have cherries! Here are some other things our staff received in appreciation for their good work. All were received in trades from our customers in the last week or so.
After we took some time recognizing all the good work done in 2015, Todd and Nat talked a little about how we did financially. We grew 13% over the previous year. That is a great growth number, but I should warn, that our cost of goods and our expenses overall grew at a bigger rate, so our profit was still as thin as a one sided pancake. The graphs they showed us were a little like the math joke graph above.
We are big into self improvement as individuals and as a company. And so we spent 20 minutes talking about new ways to better ourselves. Much of this section was about incorporating the the principles and processes of the Entrepreneurial Operating System into the company. If anyone has read the book Traction, they would understand the big changes we are undergoing. Click here to see a short video about EOS.
We can’t show you much of our 10 year vision, our 3 year picture, or even our 1 year goals and 90 day rocks, but above are our values! Many of you will recognize them.
Did you notice our 5th value. That is new from the last year. Our entire company is excited about “We Journey”. It’s about all of us staff together holding hands as we walk on a trail striving, bettering, overcoming and climbing. But why? What’s it all for? It’s to get to those good spots where we can spread our wings as individuals and as a company and soar. Here’s a great video about a journey together that shows it so much better than I can write it.
Marketing made a presentation and here are a few new cherry products Cherry Republic is working on for spring. Here also, are some colors and looks for spring. There is much more planned for 2016, but we will share these surprises in detail in the months to come.
The entire staff was energized by the meeting! How can I tell? Look at the bright eyes and smiles on the faces of each and everyone of our staff! I hope this gave you an uplifting peak into our little up north company on the rise and starting to soar.
