3 Phases of a Company - The First...Survival

A mentor of mine always used to say this to me, there are three phases of a company, the first is survival (I will give you the other later). 

There are probably many companies in this time of COVID-19 that are just trying to survive, and they are doing anything in their power to keep the company afloat. As a consultant, I go into a company and apply theories that will help a company get more efficient, more productive, but ultimately, it is usually all about making more money. I have been into companies during all three of these phases, but today we are only going to focus on survival. Recently, prior to stay at home orders and social distancing, I was working with a company where we were just in the beginning phases of an implementation of a tiered operating system. 

A quick Aside

Most of you will know what I am talking about, but briefly, it is tracking what is occurring at the point of the activity, and documenting any disruption in the process and what caused it. The thought is to drive improvement efforts closest to where the activity happens. Anything that cannot be solved at the activity level gets driven to the next level, which is usually the department level, and if it cannot get resolved there, it is driven to the plant level.

Now back to the story

Since we were just beginning the implementation process, and we did not want to lose any momentum, the plant manager and I decided that we would do some remote consulting. We set up an electronic Tier 3 (plant level) board, started doing the morning meetings by zoom, and went through all the normal process that we would have done if we were able to be together. This was actually a great platform, because the plant manager and I could discuss small aspects of the meeting live. Kind of like whispering in his ear. After four weeks of this, we decided to stop the remote sessions. They have now gone from the improvement mode back into the survival mode, due to the fact that they were doing additional methods to protect their workers. These measures drove them to do continuous sanitation of all surfaces, by a team of cleaners, 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week. There was a huge cost to doing this.

Survival Mode

In survival mode you will do anything that it takes to come out of the situation. Currently, for many companies, this means shutting down and relying on some government funding to keep you safe, but also afloat. For others it means putting extra expense into counting the number of people entering and exiting your facility, so you can regain part of your business, and still others it requires you to hire additional people to continuously clean surfaces and equipment. But, if you don’t take extreme measures in order to survive, the next two phases will be non-existent.

Being in survival mode is no fun, this is the exceptional measures that you will take to keep a business going, because, ultimately you care about the business, but more importantly, you care about the people.

The next phase next week.