Judge & Dolph
Judge & Dolph has served the alcohol beverage industry for more than 75 years and is now one of Illinois' largest distributors of wholesale spirits, wines and non-alcoholic brands. A family-run business that was bought in 1945 by by Chicago real estate entrepreneur Arthur M.Wirtz, Judge & Dolph expanded steadily throughout the 1990s by acquiring a string of smaller competitors – and in 2001 won the contract to become the exclusive distributor of Diageo brands in Illinois.
The Challenge: developing common goals
The company had an annual turnover worth $260 million and the Diageo contract was by far the biggest contract the company had won to date.
So to facilitate the contract, the company set up a new self-contained business unit, the Regal Division. Incoming general manager Julian Burzynski, a former sales director and manager of major markets at Diageo, felt it was like setting up a brand new company. With a mixed senior management team drawn from Judge & Dolph, Diageo Spirits, Guinness and Southern Wine and Spirits, he found that the values and goals of the new division had to be created from scratch.
“I quickly found that the goals and values were not the same between distributors and suppliers,” he explains. “There was an urgent need for a common and visible goal that everybody could subscribe to.”
The solution: a phased approach
• Phase one: high performance teams
In conjunction with McKinney Rogers, Judge & Dolph set out to meet the challenge. The concepts of Mission Leadership were introduced, with the first phase of this seeing the senior executive team of the Regal Division undergo training in High Performance Teamworking, a process that was then rolled out to teams the next level down. This was then extended to the company as a whole. Through achieving high performance and continually meeting targets, Judge & Dolph kept its executive team of top personnel for consecutive years.
• Phase two: Mission Planning and Analysis to establish clarity and focus
In parallel with the HPT program, the senior executive team also partook in McKinney Rogers’ Mission Planning program. In championing and overseeing this program, first for the Regal Division and then for Judge & Dolph’s other business units, Burzynski set himself a number of objectives.
The first was to establish clarity and focus, by creating a common vision for the both the Regal Division and the company. Using the new Diageo contract and the opportunities it opened up for the whole company, Burzynski moved the company’s sights to winning first place among the industry’s distributors in the whole of the country.
A new overall mission of the company was set, to deliver a ‘visible’ step change in business performance – measured by both sales of cases and ‘NSV’ (net sales value) points – in order to become the premier distributor of wines and spirits in the US. Linked to this goal were two others: to become a ‘$1 billion company’ and ‘To Win the War on Visibility’ (a goal linked to the company’s need to distinguish itself from its competitors).
This mission was broken down into individual missions for each division, tailored according to its function.
• Phase three: using the Dashboard to create transparency
Burzynski’s next task was to create better transparency so that everybody’s goals were clear. He did this using McKinney Rogers’ Dashboard. This tool, unique to McKinney Rogers, provides all users with a one-page performance overview of the business – focused on each individual’s goals and targets, taken from their Mission Analysis, with indicators to measure progress towards these goals. All dashboards are accessed via a centrally located service. Users are able to view their Dashboard and mission goals via Internet Explorer and Microsoft Outlook.
Using the Dashboard, Judge & Dolph employees are able to keep a clear eye on their progress against the missions and sub-missions agreed with their division – which are in turn linked to the overall mission set by the company. Through the McKinney Rogers Dashboard, Judge & Dolph has been able to monitor targets and set goals.
The use of the dashboard has played a major role in increasing Judge & Dolph’s performance and this in turn has helped meet key performance indicators set by Diageo at the start of the fiscal year. In addition, for the first time in the company’s history, both of the organization’s bonus targets were met – a great boost for morale, while all the hard work culminated in a spectacular year.
• Phase four: coaching to develop a sense of collective responsibility
Burzynski’s most ambitious challenge was to create a sense of collective responsibility for business results – a key focus for the HPT training received by all teams in the Regal Division, reinforced by the mentoring and coaching of individual executives that accompanies it.
“The prevailing view among many team members was ‘if I manage my piece of the puzzle, I’m okay’,” he says. “I had to get over the message that if four-fifths of the team meets their goals but a fifth do not, that is still a failure for everyone. Mission Leadership provided the infrastructure to set and maintain these goals.”
The Results: a bright future for Judge & Dolph
Building on their successful use in the Regal Division, Mission Leadership and High Performance Teamworking was rolled out to the Spectrum Division that handles distribution other than that of Diageo’s and Judge & Dolph’s Operations Division. With the help of Damian McKinney, the company is now looking at ways in which it can use better performance management to distinguish itself from its competitors.
A big incentive has been the stream of new branded products that Diageo has developed and launched over the past half decade. Supported by the new culture set in place by Julian Burzynski in partnership with McKinney Rogers, Judge & Dolph succeeded in distributing 60 per cent of their cases in the first 60 days – double that of their nearest competitors.
“When we were conducting a review of what we did right and wrong, this gave us strong indication that we were getting most things right,” Burzynski concludes.
Diageo awarded Judge & Dolph with three Golden Bar Awards highlighting J&D for its outstanding work in the marketplace and the important role it plays in its community. The Golden Bar Awards recognize distributors and brokers for performance across Diageo spirits, beer and wine brands.
Julian Burzynski feels that being recognized by the world’s biggest supplier is a clear signal that Judge & Dolph is firmly on track.
The future is bright for Judge & Dolph, and 2009 will continue its focus on delivering step change in competitive understanding as well as taking the next steps towards achieving its corporate goals through expanding sales, corporate acquisitions and organic growth.