Laughing. Dancing. Singing. At an employee recognition event?

     You’re likely to see it all at the Shelby headquarters of C.A. Short Company, a leading national vendor of recognition, service and safety awards for employees. To honor anniversaries and outstanding service, C.A. Short employees create remarkable special events, from mock game shows with door prizes to “manager car washes,” where managers wash employees’ cars for contributions to a good cause. Employees even created a “You Rock” award for a colleague who pulled off a stellar practical joke.

      A decade ago, things weren’t so jolly.

      Chuck Davis faced a grim task. The holding company he worked for owned C.A. Short, then a vendor of holiday gifts for employees. C.A. Short had once generated sales of $30 million annually. By 1992, business had sunk to $18 million. Everybody and their brother – Kmart, Wal-Mart, Hickory Farms, the store down the street – began offering holiday gifts or gift certificates for employers to give employees. The recession hadn’t helped, either, as textile and other layoffs meant fewer corporations were likely to provide gifts.

      Davis’ mission was clear. He had to fire C.A. Short’s president, hire a new leader, and transform this staid investment into a competitor in its field. But Davis never did hire a new president. Instead, he became the president.

       In the process, he re-invented C.A. Short. The company changed its focus to recognition, service and safety awards, with holiday gifts as a secondary product. Today, it counts Nationwide Insurance, Westinghouse, and DuPont among its clients. With $25 million in annual sales, it ranks fourth nationally in its industry. But unlike ten years ago, Davis says, the sales are solid, with good prospects for ranking second within a year or two.

      To engineer the turnaround, Davis began by recruiting and hiring some first-class managers. His team identified the company’s core competencies as designing, administering, and fulfilling recognition programs. But they realized the company couldn’t make money by concentrating on holiday gifts, or really on gifts at all. C.A. Short had to be known for its programs – its unique service that helped employers recognize employees in a meaningful way. “It was a huge paradigm shift,” Davis says.

      Then came the painful decisions. Most of the company’s employees weren’t willing to change. Davis eventually had to let about 100 people go. He became the target of angry phone calls and letters. He remembers it as a remarkably unpleasant time.

      The new team turned its attention to pricing and customers. C.A. Short’s income was low partly because it hadn’t raised prices in a decade. Some customers didn’t respond well to price increases during a recession. Davis had to let them go, too, referring low- margin business to his competitors.

Expanding the Product, Examining Sales

     With a new emphasis but fewer customers, Davis began making sales calls. Hundreds of sales calls. He was a natural salesman, had been since he began selling real estate at 16. He sold some $500,000 worth of business in his first year at C.A. Short, while also supervising others.

      But he kept running into an obstacle. Most prospects wanted to offer employees jewelry with their corporate logo. They wouldn’t even consider C.A. Short unless the company could manufacture jewelry.

      Davis contacted Balfour, a jewelry manufacturer, and asked if Balfour would create lines just for C.A. Short. The owner was willing to go him one better. He sold C.A. Short his entire book of service award customers, along with $4 million in inventory. Now, C.A. Short could offer exclusive jewelry designs and custom logos to its customers.

      It was a good beginning, but only that. Davis knew plenty of people didn’t care about getting jewelry plastered with a logo, even if such gifts were standard in the industry. As the workforce became more diverse, employers need to offer many more choices. And C.A. Short needed to help them by providing a range of gifts, from Waterford crystal to televisions and gas grills. The idea was to get people of all different backgrounds excited about the gifts they could choose.

     The new program helped C.A. Short begin to differentiate itself from competitors. But one key element was still a problem: the sales force. “I made every mistake you could make,” Davis says. He tried to copy competitors by using independent sales reps. He stole competitors’ reps and discovered they wanted to do things the way they always had – creating no difference between C.A. Short and others. He promoted his best salesman to manager. He made bad hires. “I’ve gone through 100 sales people and at least 10 managers to get the great sales team we have now,” he says.

Introducing Innovations

     In 1995, the company introduced The Marquis Program, a service award program featuring C.A. Short’s most popular items in an online catalogue. As part of the program, C.A. Short would handle all administration, from ordering to shipping. The program took off, transforming the recognition industry and spurring many copycats. Davis kept looking for ways to pull from the pack. By investing in technology, he could track where gifts were at any stage in the ordering process. This is standard practice among recognition companies today, but in the mid-1990s, it wasn’t.

      The combination of competitive pricing, range of gifts, talented people and technology impressed Connie Argus with Nationwide Insurance, who selected C.A. Short to handle Nationwide’s service award program nationally. C.A. Short won the contract over 13 other bidders in a three-round process. “Chuck came back to us with suggestions and creative ideas. He led us out there on the edge,” she says.

     The company had been presenting gifts in award ceremonies, but that wouldn’t be possible if the employee chose a huge TV or some other bulky item. Davis agreed to provide shipping anywhere – the employee’s home, vacation place, or adult child’s home.

     So that Nationwide would still have something to give employees at their banquet, Davis designed a presentation box, embossed with the honoree’s name and including a framed certificate. “Doing a very nice presentation became a lot easier,” Argus says.

      Did she trust Davis immediately? “Heck, no! Are you kidding?” she says with a laugh. “All the vendors claimed they could give us a wide range of product. Most of our experiences with vendors have been over-promising and under-delivering. The opposite happened with C.A. Short. The gifts cost less to the company – we saved about 25 to 30 percent of what we’d been spending. And they meant more to the recipients.”

Recognizing Your Own

      As Davis became something of a guru in the recognition business, he realized a stunning truth. C.A. Short’s prior management had done a lousy job of recognizing its own employees. So he set up a banquet at which employees heard how valuable they are. “Many people actually cried,” he recalls. “It really moved me. It taught me that anytime a person is recognized properly, they grow. They become more loyal to the company. Their attitude improves. They enjoy their job more, and the company makes more money.”

      Planning events has actually become something of a plum assignment at C.A. Short. “People want to be on the employee relations committee, and they want more meetings,” says C.A. Short’s human resources director Susan Campbell.

      Christine Bertha saw the same spirit when she visited C.A. Short in March 2003. Bertha, with Heinz North America, a division of the food company H.J. Heinz, was looking for a new vendor to handle service awards for its 10,000 North American employees. “At C.A. Short, they seemed to know all the ins and outs of a complicated business, and they were a lot friendlier than other vendors,” she says.

Spirit from the Top

      If that’s true, it might be credited to Davis, who by his own admission is a Type A personality, theatrical and ambitious.

     By the time he was 18, he had obtained his real estate broker’s license and sold millions in property. He earned a B.A. in two and a half years, attending night classes at Franklin University in his native Columbus, Ohio. Over the next ten years, he was involved in acquiring, restructuring, and selling businesses with a combined value of more than $50 million, while purchasing and developing more than $30 million in real estate. He later bought and sold companies as a venture capitalist in oil, retailing, industry, and restaurants, including Arthur Treachers’ Fish & Chips. With his father, Davis took C.A. Short private in 2000.

     Davis is drawn to excitement. He learned how to walk on hot coals just to see if he could do it. He is certified to scuba dive with his teenage daughters, and his son is learning the sport. He has practiced wing chun, a form of kung fu, ever since a hockey team beat him up in a bar when he was a teenager. “I use it as a form of meditation,” he says. “It takes your mind off everything else. If I’m thinking about Nationwide in class, I’ll get my nose broken.”

    “He’s a character,” says Nationwide’s Argus with admiration. “I think Chuck Davis has a need to chart his own adventures in life. The more challenging, the more difficult to accomplish, the more he’s attracted to it. He doesn’t tackle small challenges.”

     And that’s lucky – for C.A. Short. As companies continue to cut their workforces and reduce the amount they spend on employees, selling recognition has become more challenging. “We have to be more innovative and offer our customers more recognition for their dollars,” Davis says. Fortunately, innovation doesn’t scare Chuck Davis.

Recognizing Employees

     Chuck Davis advises national companies how to improve their recognition programs. Here are his essentials for a successful program:

1. Human interaction is important. Recognize an employee’s anniversary or other milestone in person, not over the phoneor via e-mail.

2. Recognize employees in front of their peers. One-on-one recognition works, but it’s more powerful in front of a group of the employee’s peers. Hold an award ceremony, banquet, barbecue, or whatever is appropriate for your company Consider offering a plaque or certificate that can be visible at the employee’s work space year-round.

3. Family involvement. Whenever possible, invite family members. Design the program so the family is involved in some way. Your event will have even more impact.

 4. Present a useful and functional gift. If you’re in banking or insurance, a pin might be a valuable symbol of achievement. But blue-collar workers might a beautiful tool kit more. Offer a range of gifts your employees will care about. Encourage employees to review the gift catalogue with their families, so family members can select and enjoy the gift together.

5. Immediate gratification. Look for a vendor that provides gifts promptly and on-time. No one wants to receive a certificate of recognition a day after the awards ceremony.