Reka Varga, Chief of Staff at Philip Jeffries, a New Jersey wall-covering manufacturer, spent five years in the COO Alliance. A peer warning saved the company hundreds of thousands on a software purchase, and speaker insights on metrics reshaped how they track performance. The network also helped her hire a controller for their Japanese factory.
Chapters
I am Chief of Staff, so I am responsible for our design department, which oversees all of our R&D, our trend and forecasting. We also have visual merchandising and showroom construction. We're in the interior design industry, so we, we handle a lot of that. We partially own a factory in Japan that I'm responsible for with one of our colleagues, and I also oversee the executive team and our strategic sessions and weekly sessions and so forth. We are a wall covering manufacturer distributor globally. We're based out of New Jersey as our headquarters are based here as well as our main distribution center. And we service the high-end interior design industry. So we're B2B more so than B2C. My name is Rika Varghavian. I'm Chief of Staff here at Philip Jeffries. I've been a member of the COO Alliance for 5 years now. I initially joined because I was looking for another group. I had been part of Vista for a good number of years, and then I opted out for a few different reasons and had been looking for something to fill the void. So they have two in-person events, and that's what really made a difference for me. I very much felt like I was on an island by myself trying to fend off and trying to get every— or rally everybody onto the same page with a lot of the initiatives, especially with the leadership team. You know, it's hard. Everybody's Type A. They want to get it done their way. It's getting alignment and moving things forward. So that to was something that I desperately needed to just be able to have a peer group that I could reach out to. The in-person events, I have not missed one since I joined. One of the major things that came out of one conversation at a meal at one of these events, we were looking into a business operating solution system. We were about to go off and invest in something, and then I heard something from a member and they shared their experience. With one specific software program or solution rather. And it kind of put the brakes on the direction that I was heading and saying, oh, wait a minute, this is not the direction we need to be going. After hearing this, we really need to be heading in this direction. And it put me on the right track. We would have probably proceeded with what my original proposal was or what the adjusted proposal was. I would say 18 months and we would have said, oops, We made the wrong decision and now it's too late to pivot because we're all committed to this and it's too much of a lift to redo the work. I mean, easily a few hundred thousand dollars, if not a half a million. We had one speaker specifically speak on metrics. He was fantastic and I was able to take some of the learnings on which metrics to focus in on. We started tracking things that we didn't even realize we should be tracking. We also made some key changes in how we're doing our interviewing and hiring and onboarding process. At the mill, which really made a difference too. So for example, we had a key hire. We had a new, I would say probably like a controller-level hire that we needed to make, which was critical because we had somebody that was leaving, being retired out of the company, that had been running their financials for over 40 years. Some of the changes that we made in the interviewing and onboarding process, we were able to secure a great hire, which was really hard especially in the region of Japan. They're, they're in the countryside where it's really hard to get good talent to come in. And we were able to secure somebody that was a bit younger, still experienced, and he's been in on most of our strategic calls for the past year now. It would have taken a lot more lift from my colleague and I. Well, it's night and day. If there's any question, we're like, oh, we'll just post it in Circle. Or even Cameron. I've reached out to Cameron Herold multiple times with different things, and he's like, oh, just send me an email here and I'll connect you to this person. And I've gotten some great connections just by doing that. So I do not feel like I'm on an island anymore, for sure. To be able to connect with this peer group was priceless.
