Mitzi Perdue

Take Action: Beating Your Competitors

Act Faster Than Your Competitors

The super-successful people I’ve known have all had a huge propensity for action. They had tremendous agility in carrying out projects rapidly.

I remember one night in late 1951, my father Ernest Henderson, co-founder of the Sheraton Hotel Chain, told his family over dinner, that he had just decided to get into the credit card business. The Diner’s Club Credit Card had just come into being.

Father reasoned that with a national hotel chain and a database of tens of thousands of clients, that Sheraton could get into this attractive new business rapidly. He told me “We thought about getting into it today, and we started working on it today!”

In fact, he and his business partner Bob Moore rolled out the Sheraton Credit Card in a matter of weeks. “We can make decisions and put them into effect much faster than our competitors,” Father told me. He went on to say that he was pretty sure that it would take his competitors months if not years to make and implement such a decision.

This agility proved profitable. He and Moore created a large, fully functional credit card system. A few years later Sheraton was able to sell to another credit card company for a fortune.

Actually, I got to learn more than you might expect about credit cards. My first job at age 15 was as a file clerk for the Sheraton Credit Card part of Father’s business. I and eight other file clerks sat in a small office with shoe box-size containers filled with alphabetized credit cards. There were thousands of these boxes, and our job was each day to match credit cards with lists of people who hadn’t paid their bills. In these cases, our job was to remove the cards and record the credit card number. People at the front desks of the hotels were given lists of credit card numbers that they shouldn’t accept.

But we also knew who paid promptly and who spent a lot. We had codes that enabled the front desk people to know when they were dealing with a VIP.

I was impressed that Father could come up, in such a short time, with an elaborate plan for vetting the cards. It meant that we knew a lot about the spending habits and reliability of each card holder.  Thus, when he sold this part of the company. the cards had a lot of value because.

The credit card example was actually emblematic of his approach to business. He told me that being able to respond rapidly and with agility either to opportunities or to problems was one of the key reasons for the explosive growth of the Sheraton Hotel Chain.

Mitzi Perdue is a speaker, author, and businesswoman. She is the widow of Frank Perdue and daughter of Ernest Henderson, co-founder of the Sheraton Hotel Chain. Permission is granted to reprint this blog post in your newsletter or magazine with the following byline and clickable link: www.MitziPerdue.com. Please let Mitzi know when you do this!

To find out more about her programs and services,
write to: Mitzi@MitziPerdue.com
or call 410 860 4444.