Can Your Shop Survive When You Are Gone?

SHOP MANAGEMENT

Can Your Shop Survive When You Are Gone?

Train your staff well and give them permission to make decisions when you are out of town. December 09, 2011
By Greg Kitson, Contributing Writer

In the early days of establishing policies, I would be worried to come back and look at my desk because of things that would be sitting there. Today, the pile is always small and manageable.

A principle that took me years to learn is that it’s never a good thing to have one person be so critical to the business that he or she can’t leave the shop without everything falling apart — and that includes the owner.

Any boss who has taken a vacation, gone to a trade show or scheduled a trip to visit clients knows that just about anything can go wrong in his absence.

At my shop, a great example has to do with our computer-to-screen (CTS) system. Despite the fact that there are two (three, if you count me) people — my production manager and our IT person — who are trained on how to troubleshoot problems, the system only seems to break down when two of the three of us are out of the office.

The first time this happened, I got lucky because it was while we were at a Specialty Graphic Imaging Association (SGIA) trade show. I was standing on the show floor with my production manager when we got the phone call saying the CTS system wasn’t working. In this instance, we walked over to the vendor’s booth and grabbed a service tech, who was able to diagnose the problem over the phone. The parts were sent overnight to the shop to put us back in service.

Keep this in mind: What can go wrong will go wrong — and at the worst possible time. Whether it’s a key piece of equipment, an employee not coming to work or an unsatisfied customer, you must train your staff to be prepared for any type of emergency and know what to do.

Every employee at my shop knows that when a decision needs to be made, they will be in more trouble if they don’t make it. This policy applies to everyone, from management staff all the way down to the newest employee with the least amount of responsibility. I have given my staff permission to make decisions, and I expect them to use this authority when I am gone. If a customer calls and says his order is wrong or asks where it is, my staff knows what they need to do and that doing nothing is not an option.

Another policy we have at my company is known as “The Three Bs.” When I am out of the office, I don’t get a phone call from a staff member unless it is burning, broken or someone is bleeding. Unless one of these three things is happening, I expect my staff to take care of the issue with the customer, vendor or employee. And if the situation warrants it, fill me in on the details when I get back.

Often, that will simply be a copy of an e-mail. One time out of 10, I may respond to that e-mail with a question, and sometimes they’ll respond that they handled a certain issue, but forgot to mention it in the e-mail. So, most of these e-mails are just FYI-types of correspondence.

I learned the value of this principle over time as I started traveling to trade shows, facilitating seminars and occasionally consulting with clients. As I was away from the shop more often, I quickly realized that I had not done a very good job of educating my staff and planning to be away.

While I was gone, I started getting phone calls asking, “How do I do this?” or “We have to make a payroll deposit,” etc. So I began to make a bullet list of all the things on which I needed to cross-train the staff.

Taking trips forced me to look at what information, tools and resources my staff had available while I was gone. And I realized once I provided those missing elements, they could do their jobs without me micro-managing. It was tough, but it now allows me to leave the shop with peace of mind and confidence that things will get taken care of in the same manner as if I was there — or maybe even better.

In the early days of establishing policies and training, I would be worried to come back and look at my desk because of the things that be would be sitting there requiring my attention. A lot of them were simple items that should have been taken care of. It was a pile of two- to five-minute decisions that I would have to review and then pass off to a staff member for action.

To correct that, I slowly started going back to individual staff members and saying, “This is something that you should have taken care of. Do you have any questions about how to do this?” And, in the beginning, I heard a lot of, “Well that’s something you always do.”

But over time, it improved and the pile got smaller — to the point where the only things that now are piled on my desk upon return are tasks that really need my input.

Another thing I learned was to communicate better with my staff. Instead of handing them a piece of paper and telling them what to do, I would ask, “What do you think we should do?” By asking this question, I would get some really interesting viewpoints, which also allowed me to grow.

An example of the types of decisions that I still make are when someone calls and says, “There’s a Little League World Series this weekend and they need 17,000 shirts by Friday.” Since this would be a big disruption to the production schedule, I have to look at the vision of our company and decide if this job fits in with what we want to do.

But my staff knows to gather all the support information that we are going to need. For example, when are we going to have the shirt inventory in house? How many colors are in the design? How many print locations? Does the design require special effects? All of these questions are dealt with so I can make a good decision.

Sometimes I also get involved in the “how-low-can-we-go” pricing decisions. For example, if the caller wants 17,000 shirts printed at $.07 a piece, that’s not going to happen.

Dealing With Decisions
Putting this policy in place does not mean that your staff will always make the same decision you would make. However, once you give employees the authority to take action, you — as owner — must stand behind the decisions they make. If you ever come back and reprimand an employee for making a wrong decision, that’s the last decision he’s ever going to make.

Instead, when you come back to your shop, review the scenario with the employee and make it a learning experience. Fortunately in our shop, management software allows us to do a good job of documenting every transaction, which makes it easier to review what happened and how to improve in the future. But, of course, new issues come up all the time.

A good example is last year when a charity called and asked us to print 50 sponsors’ typeset names on the back of 50 shirts it provided from its national office. We did that and donated it as a contribution. This year, the same group called while I was out. Because we had done it last year, the person who answered the phone responded with a “yes” based solely on the fact that I had agreed to do it last year.

This year, however, the charity needed 2,500 shirts printed, and it wanted not only the sponsors’ names but also their logos. So when the job came in, we got 50 business cards that had to be scanned and re-created so that no one company’s logo looked bigger than another on the back of the shirt.

Obviously, the scope and magnitude of last year’s job and this year’s job did not compare. This year’s job required about 15 hours of artwork time and about five hours of press time. So this is a good example of having to review and analyze the situation when I returned and point out that the employee hadn’t asked enough questions before agreeing to do the job.

Leave Your Ego At Home
As a shop owner, the key to making cross-training efforts successful is to get over your ego. Even though you may be an amazing artist, salesperson or printer, knowledge is useless unless you share it.

You have one of three choices to make as a business owner. You can choose never to leave your business and not have a life. Alternatively, if you own a small shop, you can hang up the “gone fishing” sign, and deal with the lost revenue and potentially dissatisfied customers who wanted something when you weren’t there. I advocate the third option, which is to do your prep work and then leave for short periods of time at first, then progressively longer, and learn from the experience.

If you are gone for a day and everything goes awry, then you have a lot to learn about training your staff to survive without you. However, if you leave for a week and your shop makes more money than when you are there, this means you’ve got a team that works well together. You’ve got somebody who is acting like a general manager, whether they have the position or not. And you have the freedom to go fishing, start another business, write for Impressions, speak at a trade show or even retire.

Greg Kitson is founder of Mind’s Eye Graphics, Decatur, Ind. For more information or to comment on this article, e-mail Greg at greg@mindseyeg.com or visit mindseyeg.com.

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