Lemonade out of lemons

The ups and downs experienced this year have required our shop to make hard decisions, including staff reductions.

While not easy, these scenarios are part of the normal business cycle shop owners and managers will encounter at some point. It’s important to move forward decisively and demonstrate confidence in these situations. With owners involved in daily machine shop operations, their visible attitude will permeate throughout the shop and, therefore, they must display confidence, decisiveness and total authority. Or, make lemonade out of lemons when things aren’t so great.

How is that accomplished? The exact steps won’t be the same for everyone and will depend on the company’s situation, but when conditions require staff reductions, activities must continue to move forward for the benefit of the company. These ideas seem to work well for most shop owners I know.

It’s important to arrive early and stay late, and observe everything and everyone. When business is consistently good, delegating tasks is easier because a shop typically has more employees. But a common scenario in 2015 is doing more with fewer employees. Day-to-day operational awareness will make a difference.

Communicate with customers, vendors and employees so you don’t leave them wondering about the company status, who’s left to handle their relationship, any issues with payments or cash flow or whatever could impact them. Generally, it’s better to inform proactively than reactively.

Although transparency is important, as owners and managers, we don’t need to make our expenses known to employees. We have justification for certain expenses and shouldn’t have to explain them to subordinates. A meal with a customer, a trip to see new equipment and other similar tasks must continue. Keep these expenses as low-key as possible to minimize concern among the troops that you’re still experiencing the good life while asking them to make do with less. Unfortunately, employees can easily misinterpret these expenses.

Demonstrate support for the employees left handling additional duties by giving them reasonable time to adjust. It may take a few days or more to learn new software and establish good relationships with customers and vendors while remaining effective at their regular tasks. Those who remain need their jobs and don’t want to fail, so provide support to ensure they don’t. This confidence in your employees will provide some much-needed peace of mind.

As previously stated, staying passionate and motivated during turbulent times isn’t easy, and it’s nice to have the ability to delegate a demanding task. But your presence is required to instill confidence among the employees, as well as customers and suppliers, that things are under control. No one has that impact like you and your lead team, which in our case, is other family members.

When the shop had to implement a recent layoff, I had coincidently scheduled a family vacation that week, so my dad and brother handled it and communicated the situation to the rest of the staff. Hopefully, you have a solid support team around you as well, family or not. CTE