“To be successful in today’s manufacturing world, you have to understand what you can do well, you need to understand what your customers need and want. Equally important, you have to understand what your employees need and want,” he says.
“Just recognize, you’re not going to get it right all the time. You’re going to make mistakes. But you have to own them, and you have to identify and recognize when you make the mistakes, apologize — genuinely — and make the corrections and move forward. And we’ve done that in spades here.”
Open lines of communications
As a president and CEO, Brown had a new viewpoint.
“I spent 20-plus years sitting on boards of companies and wagging my finger at people, telling them what they need to do,” he says. “And then I (would) hop on a plane.”
There’s more work when you’re living inside, Brown says. You’re dealing with people leaving after they didn’t get a raise, or customers who leave because you missed two shipments when a forklift was inoperable.
With the growth plan, the most challenging piece was helping everyone understand the vision, he says. They also had to get people comfortable with sharing information.
After 23 years in business, they held their first off-site annual meeting. In addition, they started an employee engagement questionnaire.
“It’s very scary for an organization that’s never done that before to now invite employee feedback and participation,” Brown says.
You start to see similarities, particularly when employees don’t like things, he says. They’ll make comments like management makes promises and doesn’t deliver, so you have to be comfortable enough in your skin to look back at what you’re doing and where are the promises that you’re not delivering upon.
It’s equally important to deliver to your customers — many of whom demand price decreases today — because if you fall short, they’ll go elsewhere.
“There’s a symbiotic relationship between customers, employees and owners and managers of organizations where we have to find that balance with good communication,” Brown says.
Some changes under the improved communication include streaming active jobs and due dates on a production floor TV screen and having operations managers in profit and loss discussions.
Today, in year four of the seven-year plan, key hires are managers or people with specialty skills, rather than jack-of-all-trades personnel.
Going from 20 or 30 employees to 50 or 60, the challenges are compounded, Brown says. From trying to engage the employees and keep them productive to ensuring systems and process are yielding good data, while also incorporating accountability and real-time feedback and communication through the chain of command.
But the future looks bright.
“We believe we’ve got the foundation and the roots that are propelling us right now, and we want to harness that energy and continue to grow,” Brown says.
