TEMPLE, Texas -- Drayton McLane Jr., chairman of the McLane Group in Temple, Texas, and former longtime president and CEO of the McLane Co., will headline the 2007 NACS State of the Industry Summit in Partnership with CSP set for April 10-12.
McLane is one of the nation's most successful entrepreneurs and currently owner of Major League Baseball's Houston Astros. CSP and NACS recently caught up with McLane to talk about leadership and benchmarking.
CSP/NACS: One of the trademarks of the SOI Summit is the ability for convenience [image-nocss] operators to benchmark against their peers. What, in your view, is the value of benchmarking?
Drayton McLane: You never really know how good you are until you see what others are doing. You might be running a mile in 10 minutes and working hard and thinking, Wow, I'm doing really good. Then you go to a track meet and you see others, and all of the sudden there's some guy who can run a mile in six minutes. And you think I'm not nearly as good as I thought I was.
The only way you really know how well you're doing is when you compare yourself against other organizations and see how well they're doing.
Not only with benchmarking do you get to see the financial results, but also great ideas of how you merchandise, how you present your products and how you manage. That's the beauty of summits like thisyou get to see how well you're doing.
CSP/NACS: Why isn't it enough to simply look at your own past performance to assess whether you had a strong year? And why is it important to meet and hear from others, as opposed to staying in the office?
McLane: Unfortunately competition is not how hard you work, but how effective you are and how good your products are.
That relates back to the automobile industry. The U.S. manufacturers 30 years ago were not really looking at new trends and new ideas. They had become inbred.
CSP/NACS: What would you say are some of the key factors to being an effective leader and how would you define leadership?
McLane: The key factors are to have someone who understands the industry you're in and how to delegate responsibility and how to follow up and see they're getting results.
The other part of leadership is training. You expect people to get good results, but you first have to teach them how they're supposed to get results. You have to train people if you want to build your business.
CSP/NACS: Outside of distribution, what do you see as the biggest opportunities and challenges facing the convenience channel?
McLane: I think it's how the industry began: convenience. The stores are getting more complicated. But the keys are the same.... As stores have become larger, we need to continue to make them convenient, easy to shop and good customer service, and give good value.
In the convenience store, I continue to be amazed. It continues to serve different types of products and services. Twenty years ago, we never dreamed that convenience stores would be so much into prepared and fresh foods, or that they would be so intimately involved with fueling and electronic services.
Convenience stores continue to be dynamic and change. As industry leaders get trapped into the way they're doing things, they don't see the latest trends and ideas. That's why I think summits like this are so important.
CSP/NACS: Drayton, since you left the convenience channel 12 years ago, what experiences have you gained that you would apply to the industry?
McLane: Jim Collins' book [Good to Great] is supplied to almost every industry around the world. Leadership is synonymous in almost every industry; you just have to get it down to the specific items that you need that are important to your business.
I've learned a lot in different businesses. The Houston Astros is about baseball, but it's also about marketing, it's about management and it's about customer servicevery similar to the convenience-store industry.
Complimentary registration for the two-day 2007 NACS State of the Industry Summit in Partnership with CSP is available for all NACS retail members. To register, visit www.nacsonline.com or contact NACS meetings and registration manager Amy Ashley-Burke at (703) 518-4239 or aburke@nacsonline.com.
Suppliers who want to participate in the event or receive advertising information for the joint NACS/CSP SOI Summit publication, which features extensive coverage of the event and additional consumer information and category data, should contact CSP senior vice president and group publisher Jim Bursch at jbursch@cspnet.com or at (630) 574-5075, ext. 224.
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