The Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce Competitive Edge Series with guest speaker, Steve Griggs

The Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce Competitive Edge Series , sponsored by Frontier, was excited to announce their speaker Steve Griggs, President of the Tampa Bay Lightning. The Tampa Bay Lightning attracts a large-scale fan base, ranging from business leaders to young kids. They want a World-Class experience for everyone that comes into the building. The Lightning have created a family in the community, one that Steven Stamkos, who has been a part of the community since he was 18, was willing to take a pay cut for to stay a part of this family.

Steve Griggs already knows that #TampaHasSwagger! He is the creator of the Lightning swagger gear, which includes the white away jerseys. Steve mentioned that the Tampa Bay Community, the Lightning team and the organization created the swagger together.

The Core Values for the Lightning are excellence, service and community. All three of these are a key component to creating a World-Class atmosphere on and off of the ice and everywhere within the building.

The way the World-Class environment was created was with the Blue Ribbon training program, which Steve hopes to bring on the road to other companies. When Steve first took on his role, he noticed how the front line and the back line employees were separated and just not happy. With the Blue Ribbon training program, he brought together One Team. This One Team approach brought together the part time workers as well as the full time workers, ensuring a welcoming approach to the fans. The top priority was the happiness of the fans, followed by the part time staff, the full time staff, the leadership crew and finally Jeff Vinick at the bottom.

Service was the pivot point of the organization. Electrifying Experiences were ignited by World-Class service. The employees receive a coin if they do something excellent to create an Electrifying Experience for a guest or another team member. An example that Steve shared is an employee noticed a guest service attendant was feeling ill and not wanting to get checked out. The employee pushed the guest service attendant to go see a doctor and ended up saving the guest service attendant’s life and prevented a heart attack. It’s moments like these that Steve is happy his employees are electrifying experiences for each other as well as the guests of the building.

A new approach was created for the season ticket members. The Lightning experienced 66 consecutive sellouts and has 14,500 season ticket members. The transition of ‘season ticket holders’ to ‘season ticket members’ was a huge step in making the fans feel like they were valuable to the team. An increase from 2 season ticket reps to 14 season ticket reps was put into play to keep in contact with every season ticket member. Bolts for Life was created to really showcase the value of a fan. Sixty percent of the season ticket members are a part of Bolts for Life.

The Tampa Bay Lightning has come a long way under the supervision of Steve Griggs and Jeff Vinick. In 2015, some recognition the Lightning received from ESPN includes #1 overall team in the NHL and #1 in game day experience. A unique recognition the Tampa Bay Lightning received is the NHL Net Promoter

Score, which is Season Ticket Members encouraging others to become Season Ticket Members. The Lightning also received a 96% in fan experience and in 2014 and 2015, they were in the top places to work in Tampa Bay according to the Tampa Bay Times.

Steve Griggs takes serious pride in how far the Lightning have come. His system of making the employees feel valuable helps the fans have the best experience they could have from the moment they step foot into the building. With 180 full time employees and 850 part time employees, Steve takes the time to say hello to each one and make sure they understand the vision. As Steve said, it costs nothing to be nice, but it makes all the difference in the atmosphere of the building. Steve mentioned that Jeff has created a goal, and once the Lightning reach the top, another peak will be set. They will never stop improving and they are truly a humble organization that strives to give everyone who steps into the organization a World-Class experience. Website: https://www.tampachamber.com/

Categorized in: Work

This post was written by Justin