Using resources you didn't think you had

Last week, I acquired a client who was having issues with keeping their staff employed at their firm. I will admit that these days, there are companies handing out sign-on bonuses like M&M candies. During my initial meeting with the general manager, I asked her to give me a roundup of staff and workload per employee. I was given a list to study over the weekend. My first observation was that the AV resources were being overworked which explains the amount of time it took them to complete projects on time and on budget. One thing to take into account is that once a company and a client sign on the line, there is no more money to supplement the job unless there is a change order of some sort. The company was hemorrhaging money at an awful rate due to the volume of projects versus having to hire new people and having to train them to bring them up to speed. The company is also an IT and security firm offering lots of cool services. Those other department have their share of issues, but nothing in comparison to the AV department. If fact, the IT and security department had enough bandwidth to sustain their output. The client told me that they are willing to hire additional people to make things happen. With that in mind, I set out to figure out why, aside from people leaving, they were falling behind. I told the client that before I recommend additional labor, I need to figure out a two fold problem. Problem #1 is that people are not lasting a year. Problem #2 is the falling behind projects on AV project. Of course, most may think that throwing in additional labor is the solution. This is what politicians do. If there is a problem with resources, they raise taxes and hire additional people. That's the sign of a poor manager who would rather not study the problem and fix it with money. When I took a look at checks and balances, I saw that their profit margin was being affected to a point that they would only have enough capital to go another year at best. I realaized that their staff was already putting in extra hours out of good will in order to get things delivered as close to on time as possible. The IT department was way ahead of their responsibilities as was the security leg of the company. One of the first things that I noticed was that the sales department was giving away the jobs. They were pricing them at ridiculous margins, which is why the purchase orders were coming in at a healthy rate. Also, I don't want to mention the margins on cables, connector and hardware. Additionally, they were buying cables from distribution. I told them that I would be setting up accounts with cable companies to buy direct for all three disciplines. This company also had a leftover inventory of hardware in the stockroom that was way behind the date in which they could return items for credit. This was all top of the line equipment that could be implemented on new jobs. Several years ago, I once worked for a company who had a vast amount of inventory in their stockroom and instead of applying incentives to these items, they would threaten the engineers with losing their job If they didn't implement these items in future projects. I will be establishing a spiff program in order to deplete this equipment ASAP! Getting back to the labor issue, when I spoke in private with a couple of the engineers, they told me that they are tired of putting in 65 hours per week in order to get the projects out the door. At the low rate that these jobs were being sold, that pile of purchase orders was not ending anytime soon. When I asked why the other department couldn't lend a hand when things became busy? The answer was that these other department didn't know much about AV. But, could they draw lines in Revit or 2D CAD? I asked the CAD engineers in the other departments the same question. Their answer was that no one had ever mentioned it to them and as a result, they were not seasoned enough to tackle an AV project once in a while. I went back to the owner and told her that I would be willing to hold a class on AV design and how to create the document necessary for all disciplines to be seasoned enough to cover for other departments. The same goes with field crews running cables, terminating and testing. There are a few other discrepancies that I noticed in the proposal generating and SOW creation process that could be streamlined and made more client friendly in the sense that they wouldn't need a lawyer to sit next to them while you are reading an AV scope of work or a bill of materials. I see this all working out well for everyone involved. That's all I have for now. More to come in the following weeks.