Craig Roeder was preparing for the worst two years ago at ProTrans International Inc. He was hoping the logistics services company would have a lot of goods to transport and services to provide its customers. But with the manufacturing sector forecast to take another big dip and the auto industry on life support, it didn’t look like that was going to happen.
“There was a tremendous amount of shrinkage of capacity that went on at the end of 2008 and through the first six months of 2009,” says Roeder, founder, president and CEO at ProTrans.
“As it turned out, it wasn’t quite as bad as was anticipated. So now we’re no longer shrinking capacity. Now we have to add capacity. Just making that switch back and forth in a timely fashion on an on-demand-type basis has probably been the most challenging thing that we’ve dealt with in the last year and a half or two years.”
Roeder and his team pulled the 461-employee company through the tumult, but it left everyone feeling pretty stressed out. It wasn’t an experience Roeder wanted to repeat.
“We wanted to become a better managed organization,” Roeder says. “We didn’t say, ‘OK, we’re already working 50 hours a week, let’s all go out and work 65.’ That wasn’t the concept. We said, ‘We’re going to become a better managed organization. We need better data and information that we’re making decisions off of.”
Roeder wanted to get a better grasp on what was and wasn’t working in his business and prepare his people for change to better position ProTrans to adapt to the evolving marketplace.
