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How 150-Year-Old Recognition Firm Makes Shift to Engagement

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Steve Lipic, principal of Lipic's Engagement, formerly known as Lipic's Recognition, said he had an epiphany of sorts at the first Enterprise Engagement Alliance conference four years ago in Westchester County, N.Y, at which the original framework for Enterprise Engagement was presented.  His company, which he purchased from his father, was founded in 1863 as a writing instrument manufacturer.  Over the decades, as similar companies founded at that time discovered, there was also a significant market for their products in the corporate promotional products and gift marketplace. Out of that trend, Lipic's Recognition emerged about 15 years ago.

A Focus on Regional Clients and Personal Service

While Lipic's has annual sales well into the seven figures and handles national accounts, it focuses on companies based near his location in St. Louis, because, as Steve put it, “It’s all about customer service and accessibility. The more involved we become with our clients’ business,” he said, “the more they appreciate the fact that we can easily get over to their offices to brainstorm in person.”  Consequently, most of his clients are good-sized organizations you would never have heard of unless you were from St. Louis or the surrounding area, or are specific, little-known divisions of big companies that are based in his area.  While Steve has a track record that suggests he could compete for many services with the largest companies in the field, he says he rarely has to.

Steve, a Cornell graduate who become involved with the family business 18 years ago before purchasing it from the family, said that he always believed the key to long term success was to focus on the goals his clients were trying to achieve, not just the underlying products that were part of the process. At that first Enterprise Engagement Alliance conference, he said, he clearly saw the broader context in which his products were being used, and realized that he could take advantage of offering his clients a formal framework for applying a broader range of services besides products to help them achieve their goals. As Steve happily admits, no one who knows Steve would accuse him of being impulsive. Since his business remained profitable despite the serious recession, and he saw continued demand for his products, his real reason for making the change was to clearly distinguish himself in the marketplace to create a new business. He took his time, watched how the market was changing, and spoke regularly with clients. “We’re a 150 year old company,” explained Steve. “We like to take our time when it comes to making big decisions because if we’re going to make a promise, we have to deliver it.”

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Beginning the Shift to Engagement

About two years ago, his company embarked on making some fundamental changes. While not taking his eye off the ball of the business that has provided for his family for generations and which is an integral part of the engagement process, he began to actively prepare himself and key members of his staff to offer a broader range of products and services.  The new focus was to apply a formal framework to help them develop and implement strategies to achieve specific sales, marketing, human resources, and community-building goals with the support of all of the  people critical to success.

This meant that he would have to be equipped to help organizations create a formal engagement business plan and implement many of the coaching, communications, learning, rewards and recognition, measurement, and other aspects of the program well beyond rewards and promotional products. Upon analyzing the framework and the services he provided, Steve knew that to offer an effective solution, he had to start with knowledge. He decided to champion the effort himself within the organization with the help of one person on his team he felt best suited at the current time for a consultative sale in the area of engagement, and joined him in attending the Enterprise Engagement learning program at the last Rewards and Recognition Expo in 2013.

They both read all of the available curriculum on the Enterprise Engagement framework, and paid to have the EEA come to his organization for nearly a full-day training program with his entire team. He and the team member he selected to support his effort prepared for and passed the certification program. The day membership became available in the EEA, he signed up. 

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Listening to Customers

While all of this was going on, Steve continued to engage with his customers to feel them out on their needs.  He continued to detect a keen interest in the topic of engagement and a willingness to learn more about how to apply these principles in a concrete way to his business. Along the way, he identified that a key way to help organizations integrate all of these aspects of engagement is an easy-to-deploy, inexpensive technology that integrates all of the key elements of engagement to achieve specific goals. Most corporate Intranets, he said, reflect the same silos that stand in the way of effective integration of engagement solutions. In addition, “corporate I.T. departments  are buried. They don’t have time to rework the entire Intranet to mirror Enterprise Engagement best practices.  I had experience creating our own technology and while that worked for years, I had to question whether I wanted to be in the technology business. After careful analysis of his options, Steve found that most traditional incentive and recognition technology in the marketplace focused on carrots, recognition, or social media rather than on integrating all aspects of engagement. “After looking at the framework of Enterprise Engagement, I wanted a technology that made it easy to deploy, and, upon analysis, I realized I wouldn’t think of creating my own software for customer relationship management or for managing my accounting and inventory,” he said.  “My first choice was to find a technology platform I could adapt to my business needs.”