LEADERSHIP

excess capacity. AICC reported that new orders and output contracted in June for the first time in two years. Contracting orders and excess capacity will create an opportunity for boxmakers to consider their plan of attack, particularly with the looming recession.

Turn Up New Sales Efforts

This is the time to turn up the dial on new sales efforts. You will need to be strategic to keep pace with your existing sales level or see growth. This means pursuing prospects with the potential for high annual spending and higher margins.

Now is the time to identify the types of opportunities and accounts that will give you the biggest bang for your buck. Think about annual spend, margins, monthly order size, geography, ease of work— anything that makes them a good fit.

Start with your customers, and find those you would like more of, the ones that are easy to work with, bring good margins, and meet your other criteria. Focus your efforts on these types of accounts.

Consider rating your current accounts as A, B, or C. The A’s are the prime accounts that meet your criteria for order mix and frequency, spend, etc. The B accounts are good opportunities—perhaps not perfect but worth pursuing. The C’s are what is left. They fall below the threshold you’ve set for providing good opportunities.

Getting the Most Out of Current Accounts

Evaluate your B’s and C’s to determine if they have the potential to move up to A’s and B’s, respectively. For those that meet most of your profile criteria, except for annual spend, evaluate them to see if there is potential. Look at what you estimate—or know—their annual spend to be versus what it is. Start with the ones with the most potential, and find out what additional needs they have and if they are open to your help. If your reduced share of a company’s business is because of something your company has done (e.g., unacceptable quality, shipping, customer service), you will need to make amends if there is a chance of growing it. Sometimes there is nothing you can do to increase your share of a customer’s packaging spend.

Once you begin seeing growth from your existing customer base and winning bids on the right type of new opportunities, it’s time to clean house. Any C accounts—those that take a lot of effort for little return—break up with them. They are hurting your bottom line. It may not be easy, but it is necessary. With a looming recession, it is necessary to ensure that you are optimizing all of your resources.

Targeting the right accounts is a step in the right direction, but without processes and a supporting sales model, to create a continuous flow through your pipeline, creating growth may be a struggle. Our previous article, “Death of the Traditional Sales Process” (July/August BoxScore), lays out a plan for redefining your sales infrastructure and processes to proactively attack the right type of accounts.

Surviving and Thriving in Tough Economic Times

Overarching goals for most businesses are growth, profitability, and survival, especially in tough economic times. Those who panic and start chasing every opportunity, no matter how low the margins or how bad a fit, will be stuck with low-margin, bad-fit customers when the crisis is over. This will not help you reach your goals for growth and profitability, and your company’s survivability may be on shaky ground. Taking a strategic approach to target the right types of opportunities will help you survive and maybe even thrive during these challenging times. 

Todd M. Zielinski is managing director and CEO at Athena SWC LLC. He can be reached at 716-250-5547 or tzielinski@athenaswc.com.

Lisa Benson is senior marketing content consultant at Athena SWC LLC. She can be reached at lbenson@athenaswc.com.

AD

Klingher and Associates

Preparing Machine Operators to Lead

BY SCOTT ELLIS, ED.D.

Our industry has an honorable history of promoting from within. We also have a very poor success rate with operators who transition to supervision. Th is is due in part to the interpersonal challenge of managing one’s peers, but the main obstacles have to do with the disparate skills and motivations required for achievement.

Th e best operators possess people skills to a degree that they can train others and share the workload with the whole crew. Th ey are motivated by a will to better their individual or crew performance and by competition with other shifts or machine centers. Th ey strive to safely produce quality products at the speed of demand, be that from the next process in line or the shipping department. Th ese are admirable and useful traits. For those who keep score with a cross-training matrix, operators engage by gaining profi ciency at multiple machine centers. Th ey may have the added incentive of pay diff erentials earned at the varied processes, but the matrix is motivating even without pay increases. Incidentally, there is a new course on Packaging U that features the use of the cross-training matrix.

Th ose who manage a team successfully share the traits mentioned above, but they have a more elevated perspective of winning. Th ey appreciate the contribution of an individual or a crew, but they focus in on the coordination of the entire team to safely produce quality products at the speed of end-user demand. Th is diff erence in perspective requires technical and interpersonal skills that come only with experience. Provision of experience is the diff erence maker for leadership success.

It reminds me of baseball—because everything reminds me of baseball. Players are motivated by the team win but focus on individual performance. It is rare that a retired player moves directly to team manager, as they must gain experience assisting, coaching third base, or wrangling pitchers to develop the necessary skills and perspective to manage.

Preparation of leaders may be accomplished by a variety of methods; I will off er one strategy here. Start a leadership club including all current production managers, including leads and supervisors. While participation is mandatory for current managers, machine operators are required to attend only two consecutive meetings before deciding to participate long- term. During this time, they will learn that participation is a plus for consideration for internal promotion. Th is “exclusive” club will accept volunteer assistant operators that qualify (length of employment, attendance, etc.). Also, there is no shame in an operator being content to make a career of the position. Th e existence of the club and the gains that will be made over time will create an expectation for operators to lead their teams.