If You’re Boat is Taking on Water, Stop Bailing and Plug the Hole
“Putting fires out” “filling a leaky bucket” or my favorite “constantly bailing water” are all analogies to the same set of problems companies face. It’s when far too much of management’s time is being spent reactively solving pain in the butt types of problems that significantly obstruct operations.
Growth will only exacerbate these problems. The concern for management however is that culturally this can quickly become accepted as status quo. “We’re busy because we’re growing.”
What you’re experiencing is actually symptomatic of poor systems. I’ll give you an example. A company is hustling hard to get their product out the door. A key step in the process is to send the product to an outside vendor for a small but crucial process in manufacturing. That vendor’s shop gets flooded and closed after a big summer storm and needs to shut down for a few weeks for the insurance adjustment and repairs. But they are the only qualified vendor for this process and now operations have ground to a halt. The entire company, even the management team, is flailing trying to get a new vendor qualified because the backlog just made them $500K delinquent to their customers. Then one of the employees on the shop floor casually recounts “oh yeah, this happened last year. They had to close for a week to mop up.” But no one took notice of the red flag …
People in corporate America are probably rolling their eyes at the lack of supply chain redundancy or qualification. In management’s defense, small businesses don’t have a team of supply chain experts building multi-source vendor networks. Growth for a small business often feels like figuring out how to build the airplane while you’re flying it.
As the owner or CEO of a growing small business you need to realize your job is not to be the chief engineer, or the chief accountant, or chief production officer or any other team role. You are now the chief system builder because the growing pains are indicating that you can no longer afford to run this small business like a small business. You are now running a growth business and that requires thinking about and building systems not so that fires are put out quicker but so that they are prevented from being started in the first place.
I know what you’re thinking, “but we don’t have time!!” Yes you are correct. You don’t have time. You need to focus on building a system for growth despite the short term problems because they will only get worse. Your boat is taking on water. You need to stop bailing and plug the hole.
