Pillar2-Systems ⁽⁸⁾

The bad news you're not looking at is already costing you. Everyone else can see it. This article is still hard to write. Why? Because at the time it hurt. However, painful memories are often good lessons in life. This one takes place in the…

Price the problem you solve. Not the steel and labour it took to solve it. As a young supervisor for a construction firm I was often called upon to get specialty metal components made. It could be for a machine, a custom connection for a…

Musk's five steps, run on a roof drain seal years before he named them, and the two problems they didn't catch. When I was a roofing contractor there was one thing that consistently bit me in the ass. Drain connections. Roof drains look like floor…

The slow crews weren't the problem. The silence between shifts was. I once worked on the Alaska North Slope, on the oilfields called Prudhoe Bay near the Beaufort Sea. It was a beautiful, stunning and wickedly dangerous place to work. White in total darkness in…

Good people kept leaving my shop. The system I hadn't built was why. Pillar: #Pillar2-Systems When I was building U-Flow I ran into a problem. I kept hiring what I felt were good people who either didn't work out or left. Take for example Mike.

The fix isn't better people. It's a better system. Stop and do the math. Ten people in your Monday morning meeting. Ninety minutes. At $80 an hour loaded with benefits and overhead — and in most of the shops I work in, that's a conservative…

The 50% growth didn't come from a better slide. Paint sales were stalling. Not for lack of effort. The company had decks — competitive analysis, selling techniques, product positioning. All of it rolled out with the kind of fanfare that signals senior leadership is paying…

And why your last six-figure equipment purchase didn't fix what you thought it would. A steel manufacturer I worked at was in the middle of an oil boom. They were making money faster than they could count it. Smart leadership decided to reinvest some of…