Don Desrosiers

This month I’d like to chat about management theory that is applicable to your entire operation rather than simply to your shirt department.

My favorite diversion from engineering my Tailwind Shirt System into plants all over the continent is training managers. I love doing that. My style is very different than the styles of most other managers, and those differences have certainly been instrumental in the development of the Tailwind system.

A year or so ago, I wrote about “looking for trouble.” These are minced words for “proactive management,” which is something that you surely all know I wholeheartedly endorse — even live by. If you have never managed pro-actively, it is unlikely that you really know what it is. On the other hand, it is almost a sure bet that you think that you do.

In a nutshell, pro-active management is fixing problems before they occur. Spending time looking for trouble, anticipating foul-ups and expecting errors in both judgment and in adherence to procedures is time very well spent as long as you actively pursue remedies for them as aggressively as you fight fires. If you don’t, you are simply a day-dreamer, a worry-wart or both.

A rather lengthy conversation with a client/drycleaner/smart business man a few days ago has prompted me to revive this subject because I found a way, during this discussion, to guarantee that you cannot be (or cannot become) a proactive manager. A little bit of hindsight has rubber-stamped my thoughts.

My client has associated himself with the local chapter of one of the major drycleaners’ organizations and now finds himself immersed in a sea of skeptical, hard-working businessmen who actually criticize him for making the correct business decisions.

How do I know that his are the correct business decisions? Because he constantly makes investments in his business and these investments — investments of energy and enthusiasm as well as financial ones — result in increased profits. I believe that this makes them the correct business decisions because that is the reason — the profits — that we all do what we do in the first place.

His critics, by their own admission, are not profitable. Making decisions and changes and investments that result in the enhancement of profits must surely be the correct path to follow.

Pro-active management is a critical part of this process. As CEO of your company, (or manager, supervisor, head-honcho, boss or top banana), it is paramount that you spend your time actively seeking out problems or potential problems and then fixing them in a smart, systematic and well thought out manner.

Alternately, you will find that a problem, perhaps one that you dread, will surface at the worst possible moment and you are forced into a knee-jerk reaction solution. If you had done the former and spent hours, days, weeks or even years considering the eventuality of the crisis-du-jour, you would be enjoying the astonishing luxury of a very well thought-out solution to a problem that has all of the signs of one that would catch everyone by surprise — except you.

I remember such a situation about 10 years ago. I had three vehicles for five delivery routes. When I had one out of service for a brake job, I wondered to myself how I would deal with having two vehicles out of service at the same time.

Many managers would say “Don’t even think that!” Their fear is that thinking about it would actually increase the likelihood of its occurrence.

Admit it, you’ve probably said that or, at very least, have heard someone else say it. Actually, this is an absurdity. It is an absurdity that can cost you your sanity. Random occurrences of events (good or bad) are inanimate concepts that have no ability to remember, think, retaliate or plot against you. (As if I really had to tell you that.)

So, I had one vehicle out of service and I addressed the issue, but instead of reveling in my solution to the problem, I thought about what I’d do if I were down to only one truck. Being out one truck was tough, but workable. But two trucks? How would I handle that? How would customers be affected then?

I simply could not afford to buy a back-up vehicle, the obvious solution. Surely, you can guess that this eventually did happen. I had thought about it for months and during the course of that time, I built a framework of piping (internally, we called it “the cage”) that could easily be slipped into a rental box truck. That framework of racks was stored in the garage for years and came to good use several times. The cost of renting a truck was dear, but far cheaper than owning a spare vehicle.

Critics may have thought that I was a lunatic for contemplating this catastrophe well before it happened, but I believe that they are wrong. The fact is that I would have been stressed to a much greater degree if I had put it out of my mind until it had to be dealt with.

Surely, a knee-jerk-reaction-type solution would have been “seat-of-the-pants” by definition and quite unlikely to be as effective as what I devised with months of thought. Feel free to steal the “cage” idea, with my compliments.

But I did say that I came up with a way that makes it impossible for you to be a pro-active manager — how to keep it from happening. This is, of course, something that I do not recommend, but I suspect that it is something that happens many times at many plants all over the country. If you find that I am describing something that you are doing, no disrespect is intended. I urge you to take my comments constructively.

What can you do that is so wrong? It may surprise you. There is always so much talk about cutting labor. I should know, I talk about it in my sleep. Some managers believe that they take the most aggressive possible step towards having a microscopic labor cost, by taking the place of any hourly employee. This is extremely wrong!

Here’s what I think happens:

A manager finds him or herself in a situation where payroll is too high. Peers suggest some sort of professional help (no joke intended). There are professionals in this business that can help you with virtually every aspect of drycleaning and laundry, not to mention perhaps the most important thing of all: how to run a business.

Any one of the “numbers” guys will set goals to speed up production. He or she will compare your operation with what others have done and are doing. A fabric care consultant will show you how to make effective use of time at the spotting board or at the press station. Some one like me will show you how to substantially reduce labor in ways that you were sure was impossible.

A manager finds these situations and then fixes them. An employee who sometimes wears a manager’s hat will not. Trust me.

This type of person, a manager incognito, knows about the professionals that can help and thinks this: “They’ll simply tell me that Fred must press pants faster or that Betty Ann needs to press 55 shirts per hour. That’s dumb. If I push them any more, they’ll quit.” Or, “If they press faster, they won’t make a full week’s pay, which they must have.” Or, “If I change anything here, my people will quit because they don’t like change.”

To these people, and there are a lot of them (please take this constructively if you are one of them), I ask you a simple question: Who runs your business? Is it you, or your employees?

Often happening in perfect synchronicity with these thoughts is this thought: “I’ll fire my spotter-drycleaner and I’ll do his job. I’ll save $500 per week plus $5,000 in consulting fees. All the consultant would have said, ultimately, is that I have one too many people.”

Wrong. Actually the consultant wouldn’t have said anything like that. Any consultant worth a dollar will prove to you that you are overstaffed — not tell you, prove it to you.

Furthermore, and surely most important, he or she will need you to manage your business. If there is no one there to run the business, will it run itself? Yes, it will. But you can bet your bottom dollar that it will not run in the direction that you hope for.

If a pilot stops flying an airplane will it fly itself? If it isn’t too sophisticated, it will run on its own for a while, then run out of gas, crash and burn. Chance of arriving at the intended location? Extraordinarily slim. Chance of arriving at the intended location in good shape? Zero.

If the aircraft is a good bit more sophisticated, like a more complex business with layers of management and support staff, the pilot can turn on the auto-pilot and the plane will run on its own, perhaps for some time with seemingly no ill-effects. But if there is no input from the management (oops! Did I say management? I meant pilot) the business’s fate (there I go again… I mean airplane’s fate) is doom. Chance of arriving at the intended location? Extraordinarily slim. Chance of arriving at the intended location in good shape? Zero.

The lesson, obviously, is that if you aren’t in a position to run your business, you are doomed. You can not run your business from behind the spotting board or from a press station. I think that it’s important that managers know how to clean and spot and press. But if they do it as a matter of course, their business will never prosper. They have a job and they probably hate their job, too.

If you find yourself in this situation, how do you reverse it? It’s not easy. Nothing worthwhile ever is. Like any other investment in your business, there is a price up front and a payback later.

Get out of the box.



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