Quality Customer
Service Starts
At the Top

Charlie Nakama is one of those leaders who worked his way up through the ranks of the company. After starting out as a part-time employee in the lumberyard, he is now a manager at City Mill’s store in Pearl City, Hawaii.

Employees under his care know he treats them with respect and will never ask them to do something he wouldn’t do. That kind of leadership has increased morale among the employees, lowered turnover rates and created a store with a reputation for outstanding customer service.

City Mill is a chain of eight stores serving the island of Oahu in Hawaii. When he first applied for a job at the store in Hawaii Kai in 1993, Nakama may have just been looking for a way to pay the bills. He had left college so he could support his mother and younger brother and sisters.

But even if hardware retailing wasn’t in his original plans, he soon found himself eager to expand his opportunities. After about a year on the salesfloor, he applied for a transfer to be a receiver at the store in Kaimuki, the smallest yet busiest store in the chain. Then, in 1996, he entered City Mill’s management training program.

One of his first assignments as a new manager was to coordinate a complete reset of the store at Hawaii Kai. By carefully coordinating each vendor, Nakama was able to ensure that no department was shut down during the reset. A few years later, he was given the same task at the Kaimuki store. Here, he coordinated the reset as before, and this time finished the entire project in six weeks, a record time for City Mill.

Nakama’s diligence and strong work ethic had its effects on keeping the store operating smoothly and growing sales and customer counts. When he was promoted to manager of the 50,000-square-foot store in Pearl City, Nakama noticed that while traffic into the store was good, the average transaction was low. The first way to increase sales would be to increase lumber sales, he decided. He began pushing for better service to his contractor customers, and sales figures made double-digit increases.

Every morning, Nakama conducts a 15-minute warm-up meeting with his employees, which is his morning pep talk to encourage better customer service. “We’re constantly raising the service level,” he says. “Finding new ways to wow customers is difficult because they get used to a certain level, so I encourage my employees to always look for ways to give the customer more than they did the last time.”

August 2006