Q. How do you decide whether someone’s idea will fly?
The way I handle it is, ‘We probably need to table that for another six months.’ Rather than say, ‘Pooh-pooh, that’s a bad idea,’ give it a chance to run its course. But rather than waste a lot of time on it now, just say, ‘We need to table that for six months. Let’s bring that back up in May.’
The idea is let’s not do anything until we know that this is what we have to do. It’s not like if we do this, we’re going to get more business. It’s like, wait a minute, get the order and then we’ll do this. You’re not going to generate new business or necessarily make good decisions based on, ‘Boy, if I had this, our business would be that much better.’
It’s being patient, not panicking, not being in a position where you have to say, ‘Oh, we’ve got to do this now.’ Do you really? Usually you don’t. Usually you have more time than what you think.
Everybody has a core business and when you take your eye off that ball is when you usually get in trouble. So the advice I would have would be stick with what you do best. Continue to improve on that. Don’t expect to do something just because you’ve got a piece of equipment that can penetrate this market. If you don’t understand the market and you don’t have the personnel, you can’t do it.
Q. How do you debate and weigh the options to make a decision?
We don’t necessarily make decisions based on one person. We try to talk it through and everybody respects each other’s area. There’s always some debate in the process. Recognize that everybody has good ideas. You don’t make a decision without consulting the group.
As an example, in the summer, we were close to putting in a whole new IT system. It was a pretty even split. Sometimes procrastination does work, because it came down to, ‘Guys, the market doesn’t look very good. Let’s look into our own IT system and see what we have.’ So we hired a young fellow out of college instead of spending a half-million dollars on a new system. We found out that our existing system was able to handle the needs that we needed it to, but we just never had anyone with the aptitude to be able to make that work. If we didn’t have the debate and if, all of a sudden, myself or anybody else said, ‘Let’s do this,’ it could have been a mistake.
A lot of times, people try to throw money at a problem versus saying, ‘What do we really need?’ At the end of the day, you realize that it still comes down to the process, to the people. And no matter how good a system is, if you don’t have the right process and have the people, it’s not going to work.
How to reach: Frontier Steel Co. Inc., (412) 865-4444 or www.frontiersteel.com
