As the featured guest at the Customer Value Club, Mika Sutinen discussed Customer Value and Growth.
Mika serves as the chairman of the board in several interesting companies, including Reaktor, Ellun Kanat, Framery, and SGN Group. He also works as an Industrial Partner at Vaaka Partners, where he develops owner value in companies owned by Vaaka.
Growth isn’t created; it’s earned by providing the customer with more value in the present than before. This might seem like a play on words, but it represents a significant attitudinal difference, emphasized Mika. He reinforced the theme of growth with two examples.
As the chairman of the board at Framery, Mika asked the CEO to report every three months on the progress of value delivered to the customer. After the initial confusion, the engineering-driven organization accepted the challenge. What we allocate time to strongly signals what is meaningful. If, as a board, we ask the organization for decimal point accuracy in numbers, that’s what we’ll get. If we put customer value on the agenda, it will also be on the management’s agenda.
During his tenure as CEO of Musti ja Mirri, Mika calculated that the potential CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) of a single dog owner brings the company a margin of 9000 euros. Consequently, Musti ja Mirri introduced a new practice: every employee had the authority to address a customer complaint with a budget of 150 euros. Understanding the customer’s lifetime value provided concrete tools for maintaining customer loyalty and managing the value experienced by the customer.
