Small Business

By John Gardner

When a university business professor asked me to describe my management style, I called myself a fire fighter. That went contrary to his experience in management at Fuji, a Japanese company with a very methodical style. My father was a career fire fighter, which is why I chose that comparison.

Product fundraising (school food and gifts sales) in the Fall is a lot like fire fighting on the scene. Just when you think things are under control, hot spots flare-up. Fire fighters must address them quickly and effectively. So must fundraisers.

School / Group Hot Spots

The fundraising group does take some heat from the community because they are selling  as well as what they sell; product selection, price, size, quality and usefulness. A local choir director referred to fundraising products as “trinket sales”.

The group can also find hot spots from faculty and staff. Teachers don’t want extra work or disruptions to the day. Unloading trucks, distributing product, and disposing of the extra trash is not the janitor’s primary responsibility. True. Bus drivers have to transport the children and their fundraising products on product delivery day. Students carrying more move slower and bus drivers have a schedule to keep. True.

When I made a delivery for one of my reps and walked into the middle school office, I found a hot spot secretary rolling her eyes, but in conversation with her, I learned she was the one going to have to count and account for all the money that was about to come in. Plus, she gets to field the calls to the office over the next few days from parents complaining about errors, breakage, shortages, etc.

Donuts or cookies can go a long way with secretaries, teachers and custodians. Bus drivers are more difficult because they don’t come into the building.

Late deliveries almost always spark a flare-up. Schools have planned their sale as part of their overall school calendar, so when delivery is late, they end up delivering fundraising product when they were supposed to be inviting people to the book fair or selling chili supper tickets.

Salesperson Hot Spots

When they ask for a guaranteed delivery date, the good sales rep will use a calendar and worked backward from that date and then added an extra week to take care of the unexpected. Unfortunately, the rookie rep will sometimes promise things he/she shouldn’t to get the sale and then, as they say…..heat rises. So when the salesperson commits the company, the manager or distributor “takes the heat”.

Another hot spot is substitutions and back orders. When people get their [big store] ad, they rush to get that special deal only to find the item “didn’t come in” or came in “limited quantity”. Sometimes there is the “rain check” (back order?) and other times pictured items have been replaced (substitution?) The customer grumbles but usually waits, lives without, or takes the substitution.

There are the tally or packing errors, even if the error was that the dyslexic customer wrote the item number backward. And, of course, I noticed long ago that most of the ‘shortage’ claims were for chocolates, not candles. Hmmm.

Never mind that there are 300 orders containing 4000 pieces of product. Do you realize a 1% error in packing means that you could mis-pack 40 items? now, those 40 errors can include bad handwriting mis-interpreted or the human problem of ignoring the scanning system (scanning bar codes to verify order accuracy). My error rate is much lower than that….by the way.

Distributor Hot Spots

The fundraising distributor office gets the calls from the end customer, the group and the sales rep. That’s a triple whammy from the down line. Then there are the internal employee problems (quitters, sickly, and even dishonest). Here are some things I recommend to significantly reduce the calls (or at least the problems) from the end customer and the group:

1. keep a copy of all orders. The multi-part order form makes this easy. When someone claims a “shortage”, we pull the order form and have found that we weren’t making nearly the errors previously accused of. instead of “short”, we find that many got what they ordered, just not what they wanted. Or they got what we interpreted to their non-existent item number…and since
2. mark questionable items on the customer copy of the order form, they are usually apologizing when they call because they realize THEY made a stupid mistake.
3. print YOUR toll free number on the pack slip or collection envelope. When they call the school and claim they’re short, 1) the secretary relays the message and we cannot confirm, 2) as soon as the school secretary takes the fourth irate parent call, you and your company have probably lost a customer. When the customer calls US, we can deal directly with the customer and 1) determine that it was a customer error, in which case customer is both apologetic and appreciative that we are handling THEIR error and 2) when we ask the school later how things went, we tend to hear,”I never heard a complaint.”
4. scan for order accuracy verification on the packing line. When the school claims a ‘shortage’ or a ‘missing order’, we can show them a report indicating all orders were scanned and all orders scanned correctly. Few will ever question a bar code scanner.

Human Resources / Personnel Hot Spots

• Temp Agency hires, including no shows, dishonest or undependable.
• Senior Citizens – great workers, dependable….but consider extra breaks.
• College Students – are you willing to work around class schedules?

I once had a team of 4 college students. They were great to have around and worked well — when they worked, but they were constantly calling me at the last minute to tell me about a study group or other conflict. I had told them I would try to work around their schedules, but at one point, brought them in to my office and explained that….

“You need to treat this opportunity as if it were a real job.”

• Home School Students/Parents – good choices, but for only half days.

Supplier / Vendor Hot Spots

• Didn’t order or produce enough product, even though sometimes that is due to distributor under-projecting or under-ordering too.
• Have problems with their suppliers, raw materials, slow boat from China, etc.

Dealing with Hot Spots

1. Put it in perspective. Fundraising is seldom fatal. You don’t have people inside a burning building.
   

   In the early ’90s, one of my sales reps had a daughter killed in a college van excursion. I took that October pre-cell-phone call from the police trying to locate a dying girl’s father.

   In 1996, at the end of September, my business partner had two of three children killed in an auto accident.

   Consider those perspectives when you encounter late deliveries, substitutions, back orders or computer/software problems.

2. Keep your cool, especially when the heat is on. Can you imagine the Fire Chief screaming at the fire fighters even when the fire seems out of control? We can learn something from those folks, as well as from the 911 dispatcher or the airline pilot.
3. If there is a fire on the river bridge, put out the hot spot, don’t nuke the bridge that you may need to get back across later. You never know who you might be buying product from or who may become your new sales rep — or your new customer.
4. Don’t call in the 5-alarm to get the cat out of the tree. If you always act as if everything is an extreme emergency, those you call get accustomed to that and eventually react accordingly. Don’t call it an emergency until it really is. Don’t cry wolf until you see the furry animal at the door.  If you establish a calm reputation, then when you really are in a critical situation, you can know that your situation will get higher priority treatment.
5. Most damage can be repaired, and sometimes the structure is even in better shape after the fire. One of my best long-time large sale school customers almost threw me out of the building the first time I met her. Some of our most loyal customers are those who had the most significant or problems, which we worked through together.
   

   I watched my dad ask his fire fighters to take axes and saws and cut into the side of a house — and asked him later why he was doing even more damage to the house. His explanation was that he had to do some minor damage to the house to get at the fire so he could save the rest of the structure.

   Always try to save the structure.

6. Everyone is fighting the same fire from their individual perspectives and most are doing their best with the situation they have. They probably did not intentionally under order to cause damage. Vendors didn’t create dock strikes or problems with transport carriers in China ports. No one knew that the xyz widget would be so hot that it would be difficult to get adequate supply quickly. The computer programmer or IT guy did not intentionally cause a file, data or computer problem.
7. Be positive when you can. Sometimes it seems that sales and customer service people only hear the bad stuff. Know that there is good happening as well.