Boss Life (32 page)

Steve Maturin was one of my first hires, in 1994. By 1996, I had put him in charge of the other shop workers while I continued to do all the sales, engineering, administration, and delivery. Steve is the archetype of the Heroic Solitary Craftsman. I didn't know back then that he was the wrong guy for a larger, busier shop that must adapt to changing technology. He was stuck in the past. He led by example and didn't care how closely his subordinates followed him. He worked very hard and fast, and expected the other guys to learn his methods through observation alone. He didn't want to spend time working with Andy Stahl to refine our designs. And he never made the slightest effort to keep me informed about what was happening in the shop, or to ask my opinion on how things should proceed. I let him get away with this for fifteen years. He was never quite my biggest problem, until the day came when he was. It was only the combination of his intolerable attitude and Will Krieger's initiative that led me to replace him. So now I have a new guy in charge, and I'm doing the same thing again—focusing on sales and letting the shop manager drift into failure. I need to change, and right away.

Inspired by the coaching I'm getting from Ed Curry and Bob Waks, I decide to schedule regular meetings with Will. I'm picturing extended sessions away from the distractions of the shop floor. I want to discuss—what? Whatever comes up. I hope that a free and frank exchange of ideas will help us work out a game plan for change.

I find Will at his bench on Thursday morning. He stops working when I approach. I tell him, “I've been thinking about how we can implement changes to the shop floor. I haven't been focusing on this because of the work I've been doing with the sales training and writing software. That's all finished. I want to take some time tomorrow afternoon to sit down with you and go over what your plans are, so that you and I can be on the same page. And I mean more than just a couple of minutes—I think that this is going to take at least an hour. Does that sound OK?” He thinks it's a great idea.

—

EARLY FRIDAY MORNING
, there's a message from Shiva's assistant. They want a final design and pricing by Sunday, the sixteenth. And it needs to be delivered in mid-November. Just like last time, the delivery date is the biggest problem. Eight weeks is tight even if the table were going to New York. Subtract the shipping time, and it's almost impossible. But I'll make one last attempt to land this job. If I can talk to her, maybe I can buy more time. I send an e-mail to schedule a conference call for Sunday morning, six a.m. If she doesn't agree to talk, I'll let the project slide.

I've just hit Send when Monica calls. I sent Brand Advantage an e-mail yesterday, the fifth day after delivery, asking for permission to charge their credit card for the $22,448 they owe us. I give her a cheerful greeting. “Hi, Monica. Can I go ahead and charge the card?”

She's grumpy. “No, you can't. You've got a big problem. The tables won't fit in the truck.” I'm flabbergasted. “What truck?” She tells me that they have leased two trucks to carry the thirty tables to each event, and they can't get them all in. “And why is this my problem?” She sputters that they don't fit and that she won't pay. I think fast. Telling her to deal with it herself won't get me my money, so I stay calm and tell her that we'll do everything we can to help. If she can get me the dimensions of the truck interior, I'll see if I can find a way to pack them. Oh, and can I talk to her boss? “He's very busy right now. I don't think he can come to the phone.” Grrrr. I keep my voice buttery smooth. “Really? He's got more important things than this? I'm pretty sure I can solve the problem, but I need to speak to him first. If you want all this to go away, I need to talk to him.” The idea of her problems disappearing seems to calm her down, so she tells me she'll ask him to call me.

Now I'm anxiously waiting for the call. After thirty minutes, Monica sends the truck's interior dimensions, and in less than ten minutes, after modeling the truck with my software, I solve the problem. Should I make a quick plan and send it to them? I decide to wait and see if the boss calls.

An hour later, Mark Jones, president of Brand Advantage, is on the phone. I thank him for choosing us to do this work and commiserate about the difficulties we've had. He's gracious. “Yeah, this whole project has been, um, mishandled from the beginning.” Is he saying that everything has been our fault? OK, we didn't make that one crate correctly, but I fixed it right away. I point this out and tell him that this latest problem really isn't our responsibility. We had no control over what size truck he leased, and it's not our problem to figure out how to pack the tables. Monica should have planned that when she got the prototype. Mark agrees. I throw him a bone. “Monica sent me the truck dimensions, and I've worked out a solution for you. You'll be able to fit fifteen tables into each truck with room to spare. But I'd like you to pay me the money you owe me before I send it down.”

Long pause. “How much do we owe you?” I tell him: $22,448. Another long pause, then: “Paul, I'll be honest with you, I don't have it. This whole thing is going to hell, and I won't get paid until we do the first event.” Is he trying to stiff me? I can let him solve his own problems and hope I'll collect the money—when? If they continue to screw up, they'll never get paid. Maybe he just wants to see if I'll go away, or if I'll threaten to call lawyers, or if I'll settle for less now and hope for the rest later. I have an idea. I ask, “How about a partial payment?” He comes back with, “I can do fifteen right now.” I have little confidence, based on their performance so far, that they're going to emerge from the mess they're in. And I need money right now. “Can I charge the credit card?” Mark tells me it's maxed out, but that he'll cut a check in the next fifteen minutes and e-mail me an image of it. I'll have it Monday. Trust him or not? I'm going to have to. And if it bounces next week? I'll deal with it then. Fifteen minutes later, his bookkeeper e-mails the picture of the signed check.

Nick says, “I've been listening to you deal with this shit storm all morning. I just want to tell you that I've picked up three orders.” Nice work! Another $27,401 coming in. He continues, “The first one, Bright Jupiter Inc.—you won't believe it—I asked for a deposit, they told me to charge the entire amount. They want to pay for it all this quarter.” That's $18,871 to go along with the fifteen grand I'll get on Monday. Whew!

All this has happened before lunchtime. I've got my first session with Will Krieger in an hour. What am I going to talk about? First thing: I want to make sure he knows that he's one of the bosses now, not just another worker. I want him to see things from my perspective, so that he doesn't waste time with plans that, while they might make sense from the shop floor, I can't approve because of factors that he knows nothing about. What's the best way to bring him into my world? I decide to start with a question that I've been pondering for a while: am I paying the right wages?

I suspect that I'm paying more than I should for some of the guys. Others could probably earn more elsewhere, but don't realize it. When they do, I could lose a valuable worker. I don't know what any of them would make in another shop, only that, when layoffs loomed in June and July, nobody jumped ship. Why not? I'd like Will's thoughts on the situation.

I make a quick spreadsheet. The first column is a list of every shop floor worker—the people he is directly in charge of—starting with Will himself. Alongside each name, I put the current pay rate in dollars per hour. These numbers range from twelve to thirty dollars an hour and add up to a total of $186 an hour. (This is just gross hourly pay, excluding vacation time, health insurance costs, and taxes.) I label the next column “Other Shop Pay” and the column after that “What We Should Pay.”

Will arrives, and we retreat to my private office. I shut the door. My first question is a warm-up. “How's it going out there?” Will shrugs. “It's going.” “Are any machines broken? Do we need any new tools?” He says that one of the veneer sanders could use a tune-up, and the veneer splicer is way out of adjustment. “And how is Nathan Johnson working out?” Will's brow furrows, but he says that he's doing all right.

I could have had this conversation on the shop floor. I'm not learning much from Will, and he's not learning anything from me. Time to change tack.

“One of my goals for these meetings is that you and I talk about what's happening in the shop with complete candor. Nothing held back. I'm going to be relying on you to tell me how you see things out there, but you won't have the same viewpoint as me unless you know what I know.” He nods. “I'm going to be asking you to make decisions about all the guys, and that's going to involve making judgments about their performance. And you can't judge somebody's performance unless you know how much money they're making. I've been wondering for a long time whether I'm paying the right amount to each person. And I want to discuss that with you today.”

He thinks for a second and then asks, “Wait, you want me to know how much all the guys get paid?” He looks uncomfortable. “Yes, I do. You need to know this if you are in charge. Otherwise, you have no context for thinking about them. Payroll is our biggest expense, by a long shot. I want to turn this into a profitable business, so that we can all work hard knowing that it's producing enough money to secure our futures. I couldn't find a way to make that happen with Steve, so we stumbled along for years. I don't want that to happen with you. I want you on my side, and I want to be on your side. This is where we start.” I open up my laptop and show him the spreadsheet. “Take a look at this.”

He looks at it, and then, when it sinks in that he's seeing everyone's pay rates, he pushes the laptop away. “Um, I'm not sure I should be seeing this.” I turn it back in front of him. “You need to see this. It's another reality. You're used to thinking of the shop as tools and woodwork, with people doing stuff. I see it that way, but I also see the numbers behind all of it. The whole business is like that. The numbers are just as important as the rest of it, maybe more important. If they don't work, we won't be here.”

While I'm talking, he's looking carefully at the spreadsheet. His first comment: “You're paying Tyler Powell wa-a-ay too much.” We spend another forty-five minutes filling out all the cells. He says that he doesn't know what the guys would be worth in other shops, but I tell him to make his best guess, because that's what I do when I don't have hard facts. So he gives me what he thinks each person would make in the real world, and what they should be making here. The totals for both columns aren't far from where we are now: real-world wages would come to $182 an hour, as opposed to the $186 we're spending. But that's in aggregate. We go back and discuss each worker. When I ask for a summary of each worker's performance, he offers thoughtful evaluations of their strengths and weaknesses. He's clearly been paying attention to their work.

We both agree that Steve Maturin is getting foreman money without the responsibility: overpaid. And Dave Violi puts in a tremendous effort in the finishing room, and his skills are top-notch: underpaid. Tyler Powell is making the same twenty-five dollars an hour I paid him when I brought him on in 2007. Will thinks that he's worth eighteen dollars an hour, tops. He works very fast, but he makes a lot of mistakes. He doesn't do things the same way every time, which to my mind means he's trying to find better methods, a good thing. Will sees it differently. Tyler's experiments usually end up with rework. But even with the backtracking, he still completes his jobs much faster than our targets. Will is judging the quality of his output; I'm focusing on the fact that he consistently beats his targets. By that measure, he does much better than everyone except Steve and Will, but we give him only very easy things to do, because he messes up more complex work. There's no obvious solution.

We review the rest of the crew. Will has abandoned whatever qualms he had about judging his former peers. We have a productive discussion. I wrap up with this thought: “We have these mismatches between what the guys are getting paid and what they should be getting paid. I can't afford to give the underpaid guys a raise right now, and I hate to just go out and cut someone's pay. It's cruel. People build their lives, and particularly their debts, around their income. If I just cut pay because I feel like it, it can cause real trouble. So your challenge is to find a way to make the overpaid guys worth the money we're paying, and to make the shop profitable so that I can give the underpaid guys a bump. You seem to know how these guys work. Now it's time to define a standard method of work for each thing we do. You're going to be spending more time teaching and less time doing your own work. That's OK. Just do it, and let's see what happens.” He leaves with a thoughtful expression on his face. I'm very happy about the way this has gone.

—

SUNDAY MORNING
, six a.m. Shiva sent an e-mail yesterday agreeing to talk at this time. After she logs on to Glance, I give her a tour of the table I've designed, which does everything she asks for. She can see how it fits in the room, how the wiring works, and how we will switch the accent stripe from leather to wood. She's very impressed, but would like me to send her images and pricing.

I don't want to send either without some commitment, or a conversation with the actual decision makers, but she says that it will be impossible. “I need images and pricing today. And the sample. We will need the sample to make our decision.”

The sample. It's going to be a pain to make—and a bigger pain to ship. “It will take some time for us to finish it. We're very busy in the shop right now. And it will take time to ship it. Are you sure you need it?” She is. The job is worth $47,884. And it might open up a new market for us. I send her pictures and the quote.