One of my employers, the director of a metalworking company, once told me the most important analogy: a healthy company should be a bucket, not a colander.
Farm sense also knows: when it rains, you have to catch the rain for the days when it is dry. The same goes for order getting from a customer: there is potential profit in that.
But only if you can save it.
A good company is efficient if it brings in as much of this money as possible. But in practice, most companies are a bucket with many holes: a colander.
When is your company a colander?
- Mistakes are often made that could have been avoided
- Employees are always retyping and making the printouts
- Quotations are issued far too late and thus have already been given to competitors.
- Orders are produced late, resulting in urgent transportation costs or worse: penalty clauses.
- You forget to bill things because they are not reported in the office (or worse: no digital after-calculation capabilities at all)
- You sometimes forget that still gets money from customers and third parties, such as a scrap dealer.
- You buy software without doing proper preliminary research, and then never use it again.
These are all examples of how your company is like a colander. No matter how hard it rains, it pours out just as hard.
The point is:
Turn your colander into a bucket. Catch what you can. Use modern process improvement methods and technology to maximize productivity and profits. That way you’ll be ready for the dry days and have a thriving business. 🌻
