Order Reprints

By Joe Boomgaard | MiBiz
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

The Bissell Business Ventures team decided to move its offices off of Bissell’s Walker campus so it could focus on creating a culture based on a start-up, entrepreneurial mindset. The division has launched two new product lines and is also trying to breathe new life into legacy Bissell products. PHOTO: JOE BOOMGAARD

GRAND RAPIDS — Despite long-established companies’ deep pockets and resources dedicated to product innovation, they often struggle to innovate because their corporate cultures reward consistency and act to preserve the status quo.

To cure that tendency, Bissell Homecare Inc. decided to experiment and spin off a separate division that functioned like an entrepreneurially minded startup business.

While Bissell Business Ventures LLC has the backing of its parent company, it operates as a standalone book of business from an office on Monroe Avenue near Leonard Street just north of downtown Grand Rapids, where it moved in January. BBV currently employs 14 people.

“There are a lot of different ways to attack business innovation, but we decided to break out into our own division and look at how we extend the Bissell brand and accelerate growth … but not in normal means,” said Jim Krzeminski, president of Bissell Business Ventures. “We’re expanding beyond the core in our approach to products and customers. We certainly utilize the assets of the company from the supply chain and brand and where it makes sense.”

But while BBV has the Bissell “mother ship” supporting it in many ways, its culture is very different in that it operates in survival mode like any startup would. Employees have a sense of the company’s mission, speed and customer dedication.

“(Employees) become an owner of a business rather than a part of an entity,” Krzeminski said. “If we were under the wing of big brother, we might do things differently than if you create the mentality that you need to win every minute or every time. When you have to survive month to month and are worried about cash flow, it sets up a structure where it gets everyone on the mission. … We want blue ocean thinking, but at the same time, we’ve got to meet our numbers.”

BBV’s offices are similar in approach to what Meijer, Steelcase, Amway and Wolverine Worldwide have started at GRid70, a design and innovation hub in downtown Grand Rapids. Krzeminski said the BBV team wanted to get offsite from Bissell’s Walker headquarters so that BBV felt more like a different business with its own culture and clear focus: growing new opportunities for Bissell.

“We wanted to get a team here that lives and breathes business startup and innovation,” he said. “When you come here, there’s a different flavor, and a you get a sense of ownership and urgency. That all exists in larger companies, but it has to happen every single minute here.

“What’s great about small business is that everyone gets involved. Everyone is a salesperson, works with customers and knows our results. It builds a total learning environment for all people involved. Bissell started in 1876, but how you build a successful company can get lost as you grow. It’s interesting to start all over again and get back to basics. Here, you touch every part of the business. What I’m describing happens in startups every day.”

Since beginning in July 2010, BBV has launched two new products from start to commercialization. Its first “lynch pin” project was Bissell Big Green, a commercial-grade carpet cleaner available to consumers to rent at some 1,600 stores in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia. The launch of Big Green took Bissell into new classes of trade, placed its product in a different section of stores and required it to develop a store-servicing model to ensure the products were operating properly.

“We’ve been in the rental business for about a year now, and at the time, we looked at how we approached that new development and asked how we could break out and do more of that,” Krzeminski said. “Rental led us in that direction. … It looks like just a product expansion, but it’s a service expansion and a class of trade expansion.”

While the company has brand recognition in floor care products, Krzeminski said Bissell needed to think differently about how it interacted with rental customers. Research showed that 65 percent of consumers rent carpet cleaners at a grocery store, an industry in which Bissell lacked widespread familiarity outside of getting the stores to carry its products in the floor care aisle, Krzeminski said.

“Not only was it a different business model, it was a different group of customers that have been a relative unknown,” he said.

The other challenge with a rental unit is that customers judge the product by how clean the store’s personnel keep the units. In essence, he said, Bissell loses some of its brand control in the process, making the relationship with the stores even more important.

Bissell Business Ventures’ second project involved the creation and launch of a line of commercial floor care products for the first time in the company’s history. A business-to-consumer products company launching a business-to-business line required it to look at developing new relationships and distribution channels, Krzeminski said.

While continuing to foster the rental and commercial lines, the BBV team also turned its attention to one of Bissell’s legacy products: the sweeper. Rather than develop a new product, the BBV team decided to try a new word-of-mouth marketing strategy to reinvent how Bissell thinks of that product line. As a result, sales of sweepers rose 25 percent in one year, marking the largest growth spurt for the products in more than two decades, Krzeminski said.

“When we started, the theme was how do we make something old, new again,” said Charles Martin, director of new business development for Bissell and a member of the BBV team.

Martin, a transplant to Bissell from Whirlpool Corp., explained that the company wants to be remarkable with its products and services. The model for BBV borrows from the works of author Seth Godin, who wrote “Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable” and “The Big Moo: Stop Trying to Be Perfect and Start Being Remarkable.” A painting of a purple cow adorns prominent wall space in the offices as a reminder of the company’s mission, Martin said.

The idea is that people would be bored with a story about cows, but a story about a purple cow would be remarkable and spark interest. When the BBV team starts to investigate a new idea, they use the purple cow concept as a benchmark to determine whether the idea is worth pursuing.

“You want to be as remarkable as you can so people talk about you,” Martin said. “If you’re in business and people aren’t talking about you, that’s bad.”

  Order Reprints

TAGS:

• amway
• bissell homecare
• grand rapids
• jim krzeminski
• meijer
• steelcase
• wolverine worldwide