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Norm and Dale take a "customers for life" view of sales and service, and empower their employees to do the same.

"We try to look at a customer's life value rather than incident value," Norm says. "You're far better off to make a customer feel good when he goes out the door, so we encourage our people to do whatever it takes to make sure he leaves with a smile on his face."

The extra mile

Lately, LCS has been making a lot of customers very happy indeed. By taking cues from other industries and adapting them to its client base, Lincoln has hit upon an incentive program that quite literally takes customers the extra mile.

LCS's 'Getaway Miles' program regards both product sales and rentals with "miles" that can be applied to everything from air travel and worldwide vacation packages to U.S. Open tickets, NASCAR tickets, concerts, golf clubs, motorcycles, big screen TV's or some 500 other products.

The program has been such a resounding success that Norma and Dale are readying a version for LCS employees, too. Their enthusiasm for the program borders on ecstatic. "Its success has been absolutely mind-boggling," Dale says.

Since launching the program in January of this year, LCS has signed up more than 650 companies and has awarded over 6 millon miles, based on rentals and selected product purchases.

"The rental business is expected to grow from $20 to $40 billion in the next two to three years, and we want a piece of that pie," he adds. "And with all these rental companies coming in, we want to retain our custom

ers, too. Today, 57 million Americans have a frequent flyer program, so it's a concept everybody already knows.

"And we've used it to really spike rentals. We give triple rental miles for every dollar, and once you exceed what you did with us last year, we double it to six miles for every dollar."

And since only owners of customer companies can sign up for the program, they control how the awards are allocated. Some use them to reward and motivate their own staffs, while others donate the miles to charities.

The program is also a valuable negotiating tool. The perceived value of miles added to a sale or rental transaction helps LCS divert pricing confrontations and convert potentially dissatisfied customers to happy ones who keep coming back.

Lincoln's suppliers have also embraced the program are "coming to us and asking us how they can participate," Dale says.

He also notes that setting up the software to track mileage by product and customer, which could have been an accounting nightmare, proved easier than they first thought, so much so in fact that he's been able to create some ingenious promotions. "We'll do things like offer 20 miles per foot on step ladders or so many miles per inch on diamond blades, " he says and laughs.

And perhaps best of all for LCS and its mile-hungry customers, there will never be too much of a good thing: Lincoln has exclusive rights to the program in the state of Wisconsin.

ESOP's fable

But it's tough to service customers without staff, so Lincoln works hard to retain its best and brightest. The company initiated an Employee Stock Ownership Program (ESOP) three years ago and is today 40 percent employee owned. In addition to a full benefits package, Norm and Dale cultivate a relaxed professional atmosphere and one in which "family comes first."

Every year, Lincoln also takes a large contingent of employees to the World of Concrete, which Norm and Dale believe invigorates them and helps keep them up to date on new products and industry trends, while demonstrating Lincoln's strong Midwestern presence to the industry.

Lincoln's dedication to employee training (see the training story in our Aug./Sept. 1999 issue) includes numerous manufacturers, industry and association training programs. Lincoln regularly participates in STAFDA teleconference seminars and periodically imports national expert sot address and energize its employees.

Norm and Dale also keep inside salespeople challenged by rotating them from store to store on a quarterly basis. Rental counter people will join the rotation next. And coming soon is an eagerly awaited Getaway Miles program for LCS

employees, too.

For Norm and Dale, the main benefit of having a stable, well-trained staff goes directly to the bottom line. "People buy from people," Norm says. "And when somebody comes in and is used to seeing Randy Bradford at the counter — and he's been out there for 15 years now — they grow to be friends."

Setting a course

LCS is on the growth and acquisition trail, too. It has just acquired its seventh branch (in Green Bay), and has purchased land that will more than double the size of its Oshkosh branch.

According to Norm, the future holds "more locations and more new products." But to achieve those goals, both Norm and Dale agree they must conquer their most pressing current challenges, those of finding and keeping good staff and fending off established and incoming competitors.

"National competitors with deep pockets are always going to be a challenge for a company like ours," Norm says.
"But on the other side of the coin, we're in our 43rd year here and we have a huge amount of customer loyalty built up."

Using its Getaway Miles program as a yardstick, that loyalty is at 6 million miles and counting.