Sarah Rosales's Fuckup

"Incorporating inclusion into the process of change in business is like adding a splash of every colour to your canvas – it may seem chaotic at first, but it's the secret sauce to create a masterpiece of innovation and collaboration!

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At the start of my 20years + years in Automotive, pricing and internal markup between Sales, Service and Parts departments was a large barrier to sales volume within the franchise model. But I had to the best concept cooking that would shift the way the business model operated! Change here we come!

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I did away with margin, had fixed buy price for all departments, even going as far as printing the pricing so all could see… the icing on the cake was incentivising those I believed were at the top of the influence tree – sales. Sounds fantastic right.. until I had 50 very pissed off parts managers on the phone yelling at me who felt duped! Those that I worked with daily, those I need to also buy into the program had no idea and hit them out of left field , I didn’t involve, engage or include, to me they were the little fish, they weren’t important.

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The following year we ran the program again, not really changing anything but I did seek feedback, I did listen and I did include, it was double the success of the first one. The idea was sound and concept was fantastic but it meant nothing as I needed a whole lot of people to make it work.

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Change is difficult and it is even harder when you don’t feel heard. To this day with any change I am trying to make or create I stop and think about who are the big fish and the little fish and everyone in between."

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