How I improved business with an innovation committee

Valmont Interiors began as a business designed to fill a gap in the commercial building and interior fitting industry. Over the past six years the company has grown from a home operation into a $32 million business operating across three different states.

Part of the company’s success is due to the introduction of an innovation committee system, spearheaded by marketing manager Jacqui Esdaile. She explains the company has been able to gather some great product plans by getting employees to share their ideas.

How did you get involved with Valmont Interiors?

I knew Sergio [Pires, director] and Marcel [Zalloua, director] when they were working for their previous company. I had met them when I was an interior designer with another firm, and we had met up again by chance. They were looking for another designer, so we had a chat, they offered me the position and I took it. That’s six years in March.

When we started it was just the three of us and we were actually working out of their home. Now there are 36 of us in three cities, and it’s been very exciting to be a part of that growth and see how things have changed and evolved.

Where did the idea of an innovation meeting system come from?

We’ve always prided ourselves on being unique and having a different offering when it comes to our clients, whether it’s just design or design and construction. So we have a management meeting every month, and during that we always think of new ways to improve the running of the business.

We really wanted to be unique and think differently. We also encourage our staff to think different, and offer ideas on how we can work better, or run the office better.

How often are they held?

The meetings we have are every two months, and it gives the team a chance to bring their ideas to the table. We want them to take note of their surroundings, and share their ideas. It’s really about sharing knowledge among staff, and about our products, and how those can be improved.

And how long have they been running?

They’ve been running for about two years now.

It sounds like they’ve been pretty fruitful.

They have, and we’ve had some great ideas come out of them. It’s not just about running the day to day elements of the business. We’ve actually found a lot of great new materials, ideas and so on, and we’ve used them during client presentations.

So what usually occurs in a meeting?

The team has changed a little bit over the past few years. We try and involve people every six months. I think it’s a great way to get people involved. We usually go out to lunch for all of these meetings, it makes it more of a casual atmosphere.

It’s more of a roundtable discussion, and encourages people who don’t usually work together to work. It has lifted morale, and there’s an in-joke that it’s our little club within the office. It’s a nice thing to have.

What sort of ideas have you managed to get from them?

Suggestions about how they’ve come across ideas and how they can use them. Perhaps if they have seen businesses similar to us, how they think they present things and so on. We always take the pros and cons of certain ideas, get the staff to go away, and table what they think will or won’t work.

We’ve had some really interesting ideas where we’ve seen competitors doing interesting things, so we take it and give it a Valmont spin.

A lot of stuff to do with products, but even site safety. We used to manually record what would happen on a building site, but we’ve constructed a live system that updates immediately, and that came out of one of these meetings.

How do you choose who attends?

We designate people to attend. We have designers, project managers, site staff. We choose two people from each of the departments.

Would you recommend other businesses give the same idea a try?

We just want to be able to share everyone’s knowledge around. They are constantly absorbing things every day, when they are seeing clients, and a lot of the time the information gets lost because they keep it to themselves. We want them to share that.

I definitely would recommend it to other businesses. We have got some really diligent staff members who can be quiet, but when they attend these meetings they tend to come out of their shells. It’s a great way to encourage staff interaction.