I have learned some valuable lessons as a business owner. These are golden nuggets of knowledge that can lead to surprising success.

For instance, how do you get a group of random individuals to come together and perform as a team? And how do you lead them on to amazing production?

Here’s a production case in point—in February of this year we helped more customers than any other February in our 21-year history as a company!

So how do we keep everyone focused on production and “in the game?”

First of all, we give plenty of acknowledgement and validation to high producers. We reward our Big Dogs of the week each and every week. These are the employees who helped the most customers in that week.

We acknowledge people when they do their personal highest evers.

We have even broken it down to hourly production—providing instant rewards for the first to hit a target.

We also do a lot outside of the workplace that our employees are very proud of.

For instance, every week we do a 50/50 raffle. We sell tickets for $1.00 each. Employees can buy as many tickets as they wish.

A winning ticket is drawn at our weekly staff meeting, and that employee instantly wins half of the funds raised from ticket sales. The other half goes to a charity.

We often use these funds to help our local Community Learning Center. They provide tutoring and even a private school opportunity for students and families in need. We even have some CES employees who have been able to put their own children in this school and it has helped their kids tremendously.

Our employees have shown up in force to volunteer to landscape an apartment complex for homeless people. This project was called Going Home.

We recently helped a customer up in Ohio, Skyview Ranch,
who suffered a fire last winter, by doing some fund raising for them.

We spend time in every staff meeting acknowledging what specific employees have done right that week. An employee observes another employee doing something right and writes about it on a form and it gets read in our staff meeting.

We offer amazing training to our employees and the trainers acknowledge a couple Students of the Week each week at our staff meeting.

Do you notice a trend?

We focus on reaching out and helping others and we focus on what is good and right around us.

I have had employees thank me for this. They let me know how proud they are to work at a company that reaches out to help each other and others the way we do.

And guess what! I have a team that works hard for our customers, stays focused and takes pride in giving it their all when they are here.

For years we have had a Director of Community Relations who goes out in the community and finds like-minded people and groups who do things that uplift the community and we work out a way to help them.

All these activities have been written about in blog articles and have been presented on our own website at https://consumerenergy-soltn.us8.cdn-alpha.com/community-betterment-news/

And lo and behold, through this whole process we have discovered MANY other groups and people in the community working to change things for the better, to uplift the community. There are tons of good things happening all around us.

A problem became apparent. There is no single place you can go to see what people are doing in the community—specifically what they are doing to uplift the community. There is no single place to go and really get a glimpse of the amazing, good things people do. To solve that, CES is now sponsoring a soon-to-be-launched website called Community Good News Warehouse of Tampa Bay.

At this new website we will house EVERYTHING we can find that is going on in the community that is uplifting. It will be kept very current. So if you are doing something you think should be known, or if you have good news, let us know, we may just feature you! Even if you aren’t in our community, you may be setting an example others could easily follow. Or you could be doing something that affects lots of communities. In any case, let us know.

If you know someone we should interview, let us know. We’ll check it out!

Take a moment to go to our landing page, www.communitygoodnewswarehouse.com and download the free eBook, Increasing Your Community Presence today!