Boss Life (24 page)

At home, whenever I find a few minutes, I continue to search for a way to prioritize my “Boardroom” ad. I finally find the answer, deep in the Web site of an AdWords consultant. It involves reorganizing the entire account so that the ads I want to emphasize are in a separate campaign, with their own budget. If structured this way, I can ensure that the ads run over the whole time I specify. I'll make separate campaigns for “Boardroom Tables,” “Custom Conference Tables,” and “Modular Tables,” and leave the rest together. Four campaigns, four buckets of money.

The reorganization should be easy—the equivalent of dragging files from one folder to another—but it isn't. Google provides no mechanism for moving an ad from one campaign to a different one. Instead, I will have to manually re-enter all the information from the old campaign in order to make a new one. Each line of text needs to be correct. Each bid needs to make sense. That's a lot of work—there are dozens of ads, and hundreds of keywords, each with their own bid amount. This is not work that I could pass to an intern, even if I had an intern. It's both boring and important at the same time, like so many of my duties. At least it can be performed on a laptop, at home. So I get started on Friday and work whenever I can. I do most of the work late at night, after Henry is asleep.

Sunday morning: I return Henry to his school, then head straight to the shop to finish up the AdWords project. After a couple of hours, I'm one click away from activating the new campaign architecture. Will it be effective? Will it bring back the bosses? I don't know. The theory I came up with a few days ago still seems plausible, but I've devoted most of my time to figuring out a way to put it into effect, not to coming up with another alternative. But things can hardly be worse, so I press the Save button and the changes go into effect.

—

MONDAY
,
JULY 9
. I deliver the numbers. Cash in: $17,510. Cash out: $30,317. I started last week with $98,009, ended with $85,202. New orders? Just one, worth $9,636: a billionaire's girlfriend has decided to enter the fashion business and needs a large table to lay out dress patterns. He called and asked for a beautiful Mission-style table, ten feet by four feet, to be delivered as soon as possible. I tried Bob's trick and scheduled a call to review my proposal for later that afternoon. The proposal didn't take long to make, and the second call yielded a credit card number. Just that simple—this time.

The other nugget of good news: fourteen inquiries, a surprising amount for a holiday week. I explain my adjustment to the AdWords campaign and posit that the jump in calls is the result. And I tell everyone that the sales team is having its first training session today. All in all, this meeting has been more positive than those of the past few weeks.

At ten-thirty, the sales team drives four miles to Bob's office. This will be the first of our monthly company consultations. We'll also be going through eight group-training sessions, once a week. Bob starts the meeting with a preview of today's session: an introduction to sales, considered as a profession. He's clearly given this talk a million times. My bullshit detector is on high alert. As he continues, though, I relax. Somehow he manages to draw us all in, with interesting questions about our goals in life. His responses indicate real concern for each of us. This is a different Bob. He's less sales-y, more interested in the challenge of turning a bunch of woodworkers into closers. An hour and a half goes quickly. On the way back, I ask the others what they thought. Everyone is surprised at how well it went—Dan and Nick, in particular, had not been impressed when they first met Bob three weeks ago. He seemed to be arrogant and unsympathetic back then. He was much nicer today.

When we get back to the shop, Nick finds an order for a huge table, forty-two feet long, worth $31,362. His client is a smaller woodworking shop in Ohio that had built a lot of cabinets for a local college. When asked to build a new boardroom table, they realized that they didn't know how and turned to Google to find a source. Bob, the owner, has been very worried that the college will try to buy from us directly. He's kept us from any direct interaction with the client. We'll sell to him, he'll sell to them. The deal is structured in four payments. Bob gives us his credit card for the first: $8,000.

On Wednesday, Nick calls me over to his computer. “Remember when Sam Saxton talked about using a screen-sharing program to review proposals with customers?” I dimly recall the discussion. Sam had been emphatic about the value of doing this, and I had done nothing about it. “I think I found the program—it was called ‘Glance,' right?” That sounds right to me. Nick continues, “I think this would be really great. We could show people our SketchUp models while we talk to them, instead of just static images.” We give it a try—he's in his office, I'm in my private office. The proposals we send are nice, but seeing the model zooming in and out, looking inside, and coming up from underneath, it's an entirely different experience. Nick asks whether it would be OK to try this with a client. He sent them a proposal and scheduled a call this afternoon to review it. When the hour arrives, Dan and I are sitting behind him. We're curious to see how this works.

Nick calls the client. We wait while he rounds up a few colleagues. Nick starts by asking if there are any questions. There are: how many people will the table seat, how will it fit in the room, what about the woods, where will the data ports go? All this is clearly presented in the proposal. At least we think it's clear, but maybe it isn't. Eventually Nick tells the client, “Hey, I can help you guys understand the design better. I can show you the models we used to make the proposal, live, in real time.” He tells them what to do to log in. When they're connected, we'll hear a tone. We hear typing, then, “OK, we did it.” Nothing happens. Nick speaks to the client, “This can take a little while.” I'm counting seconds. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. Finally, at forty-two seconds, we hear the tone.

With the connection made, Nick brings up different views of the table, zooming in and out, and pulling back to show how the table fits in the room. The questions change immediately—everyone is much more interested in what we have to say, and their confusion has vanished. Nick wraps up the call by scheduling his next contact, just like Bob told us to do. “Wow, that really was great,” I tell him. “I'm going to try that with my next call.” Dan says he'd like to use it, too.

Later that afternoon, I walk around the shop floor. The mess is getting out of hand. Having the whole crew do the cleaning isn't working. On my way back, I stop to see Will Krieger. He's been working for me for twenty-three months. In August 2010, a week after I had hired a new bench worker, Will called. He'd just been laid off and had seen the want ad I forgot to discontinue. I had nothing to lose, so I agreed to see him. When he arrived the next day, he didn't look like much: T-shirt and jeans, long ponytail, scraggy beard and mustache, and carrying a lot of weight. But his résumé was impressive. He'd graduated from a good trade school, worked in three different shops, and represented the United States in cabinetmaking in the 2009 WorldSkills Competition—the trade equivalent of an Olympic competition.

I gave him my standard shop test, a four-page document with fifty questions, covering mathematics and geometry, plan reading, machine identification, wood species, and safety procedures. I wrote it in 2007, when I was doing a lot of hiring, having realized that interviews told me little about an applicant's skills. It's proven to be a good way to weed out the bad applicants without much effort on my part. I let applicants take as long as they want, ask me any questions they wish, and tell them to double-check their work. Most of them take an hour, and some more than three. When I handed it to Will, he glanced through the pages, raised his eyebrows, and got started. He completed it in nineteen minutes—a new record—with a perfect score. I hired him on the spot.

Will has the rare combination of superb technical skills, an inquiring mind, and a winning personality. And he has helped me solve problems from the day he arrived. I started him in the finishing room. That job was being done by a guy I'll call Old Crusty. He was high-strung, expensive, and lazy, but very highly skilled. He knew that if I fired him, work would stop going out the door, and clients would stop paying me for completed projects, and I'd be in trouble. So he did just enough to keep me from canning him, but not one bit more. It's very difficult to find good finishers and I couldn't be sure that a new hire would work out before I ran out of cash, so I had let the problem fester for years. While accepting my job offer, Will casually mentioned that he knew how to finish. So that's where I started him. His skills were evident from the start, and Old Crusty knew that his power over me had vanished. He quit a week later.

Alone in the finishing room, Will set to work. By pulling huge overtime, he cleared out the logjam of unfinished tables that Old Crusty had left behind. A month later, with the situation under control, he came to me. “You know, we're mixing our finishes by hand, in small batches. It's screwing up my work flow. Either I run out of finish in the middle of spraying a big table, or I have to mix up too much for a small job and end up throwing a bunch away. We could get a mixing pump that automatically mixes the finish as we spray it. That would save lots of time, and I wouldn't be throwing away buckets of unused finish.”

Wait. Did I just hear an employee identify a production problem and propose a solution? I never get that from Steve Maturin, even though he's in charge of shop operations. Will's idea sounded promising. I started with the obvious question: “What's a mixing pump?”

He explained, “You know how we have to mix the catalyst into the finish to get it to harden? I'm doing this by hand. I can only do a quart at a time, as the finish starts to harden as soon as the catalyst is mixed, and I only have fifteen minutes before it goes bad. A mixing pump has two chambers, one for the finish, one for the catalyst, and two lines that meet at the tip of the gun and get mixed at the exact moment of spraying. So we only catalyze the finish we are putting on the piece. I never have to hand mix, and we don't have to throw any extra away. And the gun is smaller and lighter, since it doesn't have a reservoir. Much easier to spray.” Sounds great. “How much does it cost?” He looks down. “I don't know.” I told him to find out.

He returned the next day. “I talked to the rep from the pump company. Each one goes for about ten grand, and we need two, one for sealer and one for topcoat. Twenty thousand dollars. So I guess that's that.” He started to walk away. I told him to stop. “How much time do you spend hand mixing every day?” He estimated two to three hours. “And how much finish are we mixing, and how much does it cost?” Two to five gallons, at $135 a gallon. “And how much do you throw away?” Half of that. “Two gallons a day of waste, that's $270. Three, no, let's be conservative, two hours of your time that I could charge out at $85 an hour. That's $170. We're wasting $440 every day, and there's 220 working days in the year. That's $96,800. Those pumps will pay for themselves in three months.” He asked the obvious question: “Do you have twenty thousand dollars?” I didn't. But I could lease the equipment and pay it off over three years. Payments for twenty grand would be about six hundred dollars a month. I told him to go ahead and get a formal quote. He left with a spring in his step.

A couple months later, I watched him spray a large tabletop. He's dressed in a protective suit and respirator, holding the gun out at arm's length and slowly moving back and forth as he sprays. He finished and came over to see what I wanted. Nothing at all, I told him. “I'm just watching you. You do a hell of a good job.”

He took the compliment with a smile and gave one back. “You know, I couldn't believe it when you told me to go ahead with that pump. I never worked for a guy who would spend five dollars on new equipment, and twenty grand would be out of the question.” I thought about that for a second: “I don't think I've ever had an employee ask me to spend twenty grand on a piece of equipment before.” It's true. I constantly catch woodworkers fiddling with half-broken tools, even stuff that costs less than a hundred dollars. “Just ask me for a new one,” I plead. “I'm happy to pay for it. You're wasting more time messing around with that thing than a new one will cost. And you aren't getting any work done.”

Will smiled. “Yeah, my last boss was just like that.” I pointed out that the last shop he worked at had suddenly gone broke. He laughed. “Well, this place is different.” I sure hope so.

Will did the finishing job by himself for a year, working fifteen to twenty hours of overtime a week. Then he told me that a friend of his, a finisher, was looking for a better job. Could he tell him to call me? I thought, Why not? Will has good judgment and knows what kind of worker I want. And that's how I hired Dave Violi, who has been just as good as Will.

After Dave Violi settled in, Will asked me whether he could move out to the shop floor, to get back to actual woodworking. I said sure, as long as Steve Maturin could find work for him. That wasn't a problem. Steve immediately put him to work on our toughest construction problems. After I fired Eduardo, I was a little surprised that Steve assigned Will Krieger to build table bases. They're easier to construct than tabletops, so it seemed like a misuse of a highly skilled worker. On the other hand, Eduardo's bench was on the opposite side of the shop from Steve's, and Eduardo had regularly made errors that caused problems in the finishing room. Maybe Steve was thinking that putting his best guy on that task would solve the error problem and release him from the obligation of walking across the shop. A win for the shop floor manager, if a bit of an insult for Will. But Will didn't complain. He moved his tools to Eduardo's bench and got to work. Within a week, perfectly built bases were flying together in half the time that Eduardo took. Shortly after, Will designed and built a hydraulic clamping jig to speed up part of the process even more.