'Seat of the pants' management not 'lean' Washington DC

As someone with entrepreneurial parents, I grew up in a small business environment. My parents owned a small printing and publishing company in a small southern Wisconsin town populated by erstwhile farmers and closet Scandinavians.

My father sold advertising for a weekly shopping guide and oversaw the offset printing operation. My mother sold job printing and managed the office and composition area (too small to be described as a "department").

During the better years, they employed maybe four full-time people, plus themselves and a handful of part-timers, including myself and my brother, when we weren't playing sports, pursuing female companionship or hiding beer in culverts. (Wally and The Beave, we weren't.)

Basic business management for Leader Printing in the early '50s to mid-'70s pretty much entailed keeping track of employee time sheets, scheduling production, ordering paper and ink, taking care of accounts receivable and payable, delivering printed matter and logging the sales figures.

"Lean" meant meeting deadlines, controlling costs and not wasting paper and ink.

We used a part-time accountant to keep the books. Otherwise — at least early on — a lot of the critical data was kept in my parents' heads. Profits were measured by how much was in the checking account at the end of the month.

But apparently they had a good enough handle on cash flow and profit management to keep the business in the black and to help put three kids through college.

This is no rap on how my parents ran their business. Back then, small "mom and pop" businesses were sometimes a seat-of-the-pants management endeavor.

Paint me red and call me Tomato Boy, but I'm sure there are more than a few woodworkers who, even nowadays, are operating in loose management mode. I know this firsthand. As just one example, a few years ago I interviewed the owner of a MAJOR residential furniture manufacturing company who, when asked how he cost-justified a large piece of new capital equipment, he told me, "I check the balance in my checkbook."

I think he was only half kidding. For him, lean management meant following his instincts based on years of experience. Avoiding waste and getting product out the door as fast as possible was his home-cooked Kaizan experience. (By the way, his company must still be making a lot of money because I see its semis on the highway all the time. I'm sure you've seen them, too.)

In this issue we take a hard look at how lean and other related concepts affect every aspect of a woodworking business, from the basic philosophy of lean to sales to production execution to planning to marketing. Readers should look at this special report as one complete story rather than a series of editorial "silos," as one of our editorial consultants, Don Shultz, is wont to say.

Lean has as many facets as the Hope Diamond. But unlike this massive chunk of ancient compressed carbon, the process is continuous. If you stop or get sidetracked, it's like an unfinished horse race. If you're not going to keep going and going in the right direction, you'll never reach the finish line.

So, I encourage you to read and reread what our team of lean experts has to say. Because if you don't incorporate lean concepts into your business, you may not only be accused of running your business by the seat of your pants, you may end up on the seat of your pants.