A steering box going on a truck will put that truck off the road until it is fixed…. lots of things will contribute to the steering box failing, but you can wrap 99% of them up by looking at mileage driven, types of roads driven, loads carried, and maintenance and inspection schedules.
Bear in mind the recent British Airways debacle here, just the latest in a series of high profile IT failures that are so common they are now the new normal.
Go back in time and it was understood that by the time you’d bought your fifth truck, you’d be splashing out on a workshop for them, and a guy to sit in it, and any truck that wasn’t actually out on the road would be in the shop getting maintenance.
Years ago I worked for a small family owned and run (vehicle) recovery firm that worked like this, there was no hilarity because the recovery firm’s own vehicles never broke down, nor did any of the systems on those vehicles, ever, not once, never.
Some time later that firm was bought out by a bigger firm, who then became the default operator for 80 miles of UK motorway and immediate environs, nine months later, after the big circuit board under the passenger side dash failed for the third time (reach your leg over and kick it while doing 60 down a narrow road at night) taking the entire lighting system with it, I phoned them up from 130 miles from base (I was returning and dusk was setting in, so I turn the lights on and they play up, so I pull in at the next services) and told them, “Your truck is sitting in Michael Wood services with the keys under the driver seat, I’m off to the services slip road with a tacho disk on my finger, thumbing a lift home, by the way, stick your job up your ass.”
Nine months later that company killed someone, to this day I do not know the exact details of how and why and everything else, but it did not surprise me.
You see, when they bought out the old company one of the things they got rid of was Neil in the workshop, so nothing got routine preventative maintenance any more, it was a waste of money innit.
I can’t post it without redacting it to the point of uselessness, but last night I was working on a spreadsheet I knocked up, it has various things, cost of capital equipment, cost of workshop premises, cost of light and heat and phones, cost of this that and the other, and of course income calculated (automagically by the spreadsheet) six ways so total cash income / total machine hours worked / total machine hours worked as a percentage of total available machine hours, and of course capital, cash flow, and “burn rate” being the cost to keep the lights on with no work or customers.
I like things like that because I can play with various input factors and see how it affects output, one of the telling boxes tells you how many weeks you can operate until you are broke, I call this “time to die” if you are making a profit this turns into a negative number, what is interesting is how easy, and what changes, are required to cycle between a time to die of 3 weeks and a time to die of 40 weeks, assuming you are only working at 10% capacity.
It’s basically the proportion between your burn rate and your capitalisation, if you’re losing 10 quid a week and have 1000 in the bank you can carry on for two years trying to make the business work, if you’re losing 500 quid a week you have two weeks to live, which isn’t even enough time to plan the funeral (of the business)…
If the numbers aren’t where you want them to be, then you have to make changes, but the fact is, unless you’re living very fat and the first things to come out of the company are the manager’s e-class lease and the manager’s wages of 30k p.a. you may not have a lot of fat to cut, you may be cutting into the very meat of what makes the company long term viable.
What do you do then? Well, your company is fucked, so you down size or fold or don’t expand or whatever the spreadsheet tells you.
In my case the spreadsheet tells me that however much I want and need to invest in new and larger premises sooner rather than later, doing so could kill the business in just a few months, whereas waiting a bit brings the other set of problems of too much to do all at once, but at least I’m not going out on a limb financially.
“Going out on a limb” (as in the limb or branch of a tree) is a nice english expression, very expressive, very descriptive.
It makes you ask a fundamental question, is *any* part of this business about “playing the odds” type gambling?
In my case the answer is the core business is basically some variety of light engineering / manufacturing, so the answer is no, no core part of the business is about gambling, and unless you’re into prospecting for precious metals or something similar, it won’t be part of yours either….
…so…
…WHY THE FUCK do many businesses routinely gamble, because make no mistake, the BA outage is 100% down to a gamble that did not pay off, cut IT spending…. makes the spreadsheet look healthier…
Yes, it may well be the case that you can’t do everything right and not cease trading, so cease trading, or maybe explore if you are missing a trick or two, what you fucking do not do is just carry on regardless and hope for the best, maybe a unicorn shitting rainbows will appear on 17th June and transform the contents of Cell S43 from a negative integer to a positive one…
WHAT IS THE FUCKING POINT of a CEO if they cannot get this one hard question right, what possible other use is there for them?
Arguably in 2017 any airline is no more than an IT company that happens to fly a few aircraft around, so the IT has to be flawless, as does the aircraft maintenance and operations, and if at the end of the day the market is such that you can’t make money, you should close up shop.
Back in the day of the BMC mini, Ford could not work out how British Leyland were doing it, so they went out and bought a few minis and took them apart, and came to the conclusion that their initial analysis was correct, BL were selling mini’s at a loss.
Back in the late 70’s and early 80’s this was seen as the insanity that it was, abetted by the added insanity of a government propping up a failed car maker rather than face the mass redundancies of a closed car maker.
But the fact is BL didn’t have to die, it just had to stop making shit that sold at below cost, even if all that was left was a company that made steering wheels and seats for Ford, it would have been better than what happened, because sooner or later the music fucking stops.
Anyone here remember Pan-Am?
BA *can* go bust and cease trading and be no more, I used to fly on it when it was BOAC, so the history is there, at any time someone could have seen the writing on the wall, seen that the future was that all aviation companies would really just be IT companies that happened to fly the odd plane, and become the best aviation IT company in the world, the one that powered the back end of every other aviation company, even if they stopped flying planes themselves…
IBM basically do a turnkey banking mainframe, complete with software, sure, you need a licence to operate as a bank, and you need customers and their money, but products like that are one of the reasons IBM is still trading today.
Microsoft is basically an office software suite company, that just happens to make a few operating systems to run the office software.
Apple computer is basically a specialised phone hardware handset company.
Amazon is a prime example of what BA or Pan-Am or any of the others could have been, an IT company that happens to sell shit.
Fed-Ex and UPS got global because they are basically IT companies that happen to move shit, quite aside from the fact that they also just happen to be one of the larger aircraft operators, fleet size wise.
In the US you have Swift trucking, they are only eating everyone else’s lunch because everyone else in US trucking is on a par with British Leyland in the 70’s, they are still a complete shower of shit waiting for a chapter 11 near you.
I genuinely don’t know about today in 2017, but as recently as 2010 when I was working in IT self employed I’d tell people quite truthfully that both my business, and EVERY SINGLE business website that I developed for a customer, were all INDIVIDUALLY more profitable than Amazon, and it was quite true, a 500 quid small business website that paid for itself within a year with increased sales is more profitable than every business that makes a loss.
And Amazon’s losses were not clever tax dodging accountancy tricks, they made an operating loss year on year on year, and yet they kept growing and people kept investing and buying shares.
Apple is cash rich, but it has sweet fuck all else going for it, so the only thing Apple *could* do is open the only bank trading today that isn’t insolvent and doesn’t use fractional reserve banking, they could buy several of IBM’s mainframes and banking software suites… but they won’t… they have a fag at the helm who is obsessed with being cool and PC spot on.
I get it, I really do… when you run things through a spreadsheet and do proper math you get unpleasant answers most of the time..
But the analogy is the doctor who tells you that you have cancer in the testicles did not give you that cancer, he isn’t changing the reality one iota, he is just informing you of fact.
Nowadays the only doctor we want to see says “Whoa boy, you have one YUUGE BIGLY set of balls there my friend, and they are getting even bigger every day…!” in a tone tinged with envy and appreciation, but not in a faggy way of course…lol
Back in the recovery yard back in the day, it was the business that made money, or didn’t, and part of the reason it did was the wagons were always ready to roll and never broke down.
Neil in the workshop wasn’t a profit centre, and you couldn’t make him one, it’s not possible, you have to be a total asshole to think it is even possible without changing who Neil is and what he did.
But Neil wasn’t treated like a separate subsidiary of the business, he was in integral part of the business.
Neil had a few sidelines going, lots of the stuff we recovered wasn’t going anywhere except the scrapyard, and by the time it went there the fuel tank had been drained and any wheels or trim that was in primo condition was also “missing in action”, nobody outside the company knew, nobody got screwed, it was all slightly grey but it’s the way things always were done, and if it meant Neil was so loyal to the company that turned a blind eye to all the goings on that didn’t affect the business, well, Neil would sometime put in a 14 hour day fixing a wagon *properly* instead of patching it up in 4 hours, roundabouts and swings.
Paul, the owner, always said to me (and the other drivers) there is an equipped workshop there, help yourself to it and Neil and filters and oil and anything else you want, but if one of my trucks comes in, your car gets pushed outside, done or not…
So the staff worked together, the owner is asleep in bed, one of the spec lift boys would get a call and go visit the incident and decide what needed doing “head gasket” was a popular diagnosis for people that wanted a recovery more than needed one, or more than needed to wait around for a repair the next day, and depending on the length of the run they knew who to call, long distance was me, so they’re sat with the motorist and they give me a call at 2 am saying they have a vehicle to go 380 miles to Newcastle, 20 minutes later I was leaving the depot with a fully fuelled and prepped wagon, maybe an hour or an hour and a quarter after the motorists first cal they were loaded and heading home at 80 mph (motorway recovery wagons are exempt vehicles..lol) and they might even get there at around the same time they would have if they had not broken down.
We got tips ALL the bloody time, from a £20 note to a bottle of booze.
The other company took over and the tips stopped overnight, I’d turn up at the motorist (no spec lift vehicle had gone out to see them) and the first thing I’d hear is where the fuck have you been, I called this breakdown in 3 and a half hours ago and every fifteen minutes since… I’d just show them my job sheet showing I did not know they existed 30 minutes ago, and say “Now, you wanna start again, because if you don’t I’m going back to the depot and then to bed, I’m not paid to take your shit”
Not long after the lighting board incident happened for the third time and I quit.
That company has long since ceased trading as a major / police motorway breakdown / recovery service, they are back to being a local garage and repair shop…. which they were when Paul started and built up the business that they bought out and drove into the ground with piss poor management and penny pinching.
Before I’d quit they’d phone me up and say “Hey, the GPS tracking says you are doing 85 mph!!” I say yeah, I’m paid per mile, the faster I go the more I earn, besides, the vehicle is exempt, the po-po all know it and me (we are the ones they call when there is a pile up or their own vehicles die) and anyway the sooner I get back the sooner you have a vehicle back on the available roster…
incoherent sputtering from the other end of the phone, but you’re only supposed to go 60….
bitch I’ve been doing this job longer than you.
I was the last but one of the workers brought over with the wagons and everything else when they bought us out to quit, and I put that 100% down to refusing to do anything but long distance, the other guys got all the shit, and quit.
Neil lasted two whole days.
He was smarter than the rest of us, but not as smart as Paul, who saw the writing on the wall and cashed out and walked away.
He probably did not use a spreadsheet, it was probably pen and paper, but the sums would have been the same.
My business may or may not grow / expand / survive etc, but some things I do know.
- It’ll never go titsup leaving creditors / suppliers / employees owed money.
- It’ll never have to use the money from Peter’s job to pay for the materials for Paul’s job.
- It’ll never break a promise to a customer or not be able to offer them an apology and a 100% refund on the nail no waiting.
- It’ll never offer “terms” or any other kind of loans to customers in exchange for work.
- It’ll never borrow or lease money to buy capital equipment.
- It’ll never be so tight for money I can’t turn down work just because I don’t fancy the job or the customer.
- It’ll never take me out if I decide to close the doors and move on to something else.
- It’ll never turn me into a worthless cunt like 99.9% of managers and CEO’s and all the rest out there today.
- It’ll never be something you can point to and use as an example of why the empire is fading into oblivion, though I’m quite happy to be seen as feeding on the rotting carcass of same…
- It’ll never be something that goes against the basic math of a spreadsheet when it comes to management and financial planning.