Mrs. Fields shares recipe for success with Realtors

NEW ORLEANS – Nov. 20, 2006 -- Debbi Fields, founder of the Mrs. Fields cookie chain, shared with a packed room of real estate professionals this week her secret ingredients for achieving success in a customer-focused business: one-quarter cup of passion, one-quarter cup of perfection, and one-quarter cup of perseverance.

Take those three P's, bake at 375 degrees, and you get quality customer service that results in happy customers and clients you will have for life.

"Whether it's cookies or real estate, it's truly a relationship business," Fields said during the 2006 Realtors'® Conference & Expo's final session in New Orleans, as part of the Entrepreneurial Excellence Series sponsored by Countrywide Home Loans.

Perky, preppy, and amazingly petite for a cookie maven, Fields told practitioners that the way to get to the top of any profession is to provide the best service by taking service to the extreme.

"Celebrate greatness, continuously improve on average, and never allow mediocrity," Fields said. "If you provide the absolutely best product and service, then people will believe in you."

Growing up as the youngest of five girls of a father who worked as a welder making $12,000 a year, Fields said she has always lived by her father's motto that real wealth comes from family, true friends, and a passion for what you do. Fields said that she always loved eating chocolate chip cookies and used to make them using ingredients that she could afford: margarine, imitation vanilla, and fake chocolate chips. When she got her first job and her first paycheck at 13, Fields said, the first things she went out and bought were real butter, real chocolate chips, and pure vanilla extract.

"I had the amazing realization that butter was better!" Fields exclaimed, sending the audience into laughter. "At 13, I learned about the importance of quality and I made a pledge to never go back and compromise perfection."

The road to success wasn't all paved with real butter for Fields, who loved to work so much during high school (as the Oakland A's first girl foul catcher, assistant manager at Mervyn's department store, and a professional water skier) that she learned upon graduation that "D" didn't stand for Debbi. Her sisters' nickname for her was, "Hey, Stupid."

Married young and now a mother of five girls herself, Fields said she found the drive to do more than just being "a housewife" when her husband's business colleague corrected her speech and told her not to speak at all if she couldn't speak proper English.

After a good cry, she vowed "to never again feel like I do right now," Fields said. "I wanted to be a somebody. I made a commitment to myself to prove that I wasn't stupid."

Fields built her business from one store--in Palo Alto, Calif., in 1977--to more than 3,000 locations worldwide. She sold the company in 1996 and retired in 2000.

Fields offered more ingredients for success:

• When Fields interviewed to hire employees, she asked them to taste a cookie to see if they were naturally excited about the product, take a tray of cookies out into the streets to entice buyers, and stand at the front of the store and sing the "Happy Birthday" song. She said only those "I can" candidates with the right attitude were the right hires who could help her grow her business. "Anybody who has to write a manual on customer service is trying to hire people who hate customers," Fields said.

• In dealing with competition, Fields said that she was determined that no one was going to make a better cookie. She told practitioners, "Build a better product and take it to the extreme. And the only way to do business is to have phenomenal integrity."

• If you own your own company, before opening your second location, go on vacation for two or three weeks without calling in or e-mailing. If your office is working flawlessly without you, "then you have successfully taught and transferred your business philosophy" and you're ready to open your second location. If it fails without you, then don't open the second office until you have successfully taught and transferred your philosophy, Fields said.

• Failure is not a bad word. "With any venture, if something is not working, it just means stop and try something else," Fields said. "But don't keep doing something that isn't working."

Fields said that she has never been in the cookie business. She has always been in the "feel-good feeling business" that happens to be in the form of a chocolate chip cookie.

"The most important thing I think any of us can do is to make people feel important," Fields said. "Every day that you can make your customers feel like the most important people in the world will lead to relationships that last a lifetime."

Source: Haley M. Hwang for Realtor® Magazine Online

© 2006 FLORIDA ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS

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