The February cash squeeze, and why it is usually a scheduling problem
Seasonal cash crunches in the Valley are rarely about sales. Four times out of five the money is trapped in work-in-progress that was released to the floor too early.
8 min read
Notes from the floor
Short, practical pieces written by our own consultants between engagements. No gated downloads, no lead-capture forms — if it is useful, take it and use it.
Latest
Recent notes
Published roughly monthly. Written by Steve Lee unless credited otherwise.
Nine numbers your Monday meeting actually needs
A weekly operating review should fit on one page and take twenty minutes. Here is the page we build for most clients, and the three metrics we usually delete.
6 min read
Promoting your best technician: a checklist before you do it
The promotion is often right and the preparation is almost always missing. Six things to put in place in the fortnight before the announcement.
7 min read
Quote accuracy is a process problem, not an estimating problem
When win rates fall and margins on won work fall with them, the estimator is rarely the cause. Where the error actually enters the quote.
9 min read
How to run a cycle count your warehouse lead will not abandon
Annual counts tell you what went wrong last year. Twenty minutes a day tells you today. A practical setup that survives a busy season.
5 min read
What an operations review finds in the first two hours
Before any data arrives, the floor itself gives away most of the story. The seven things we look at while walking in from the parking lot.
6 min read
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From the archive
Three ideas we repeat constantly
“Every hour of waiting in your process was created by a decision someone made for a good reason. Find the reason before you delete the step.”
“If two managers disagree about a number, you do not have a reporting problem yet. You have a definitions problem, and it is cheaper to fix.”
“Nobody resists improvement. People resist being changed by someone who has not done the job.”
Let's look at the numbers together
A first conversation costs nothing and takes about thirty minutes. Bring one problem that keeps resurfacing — a late shipment, a bottleneck, a report nobody trusts — and we'll tell you honestly whether we can help and roughly what it would take.