Business

  • What are the Economics of Sustainability vs. Remediation?

    • November 27, 2019
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Business, Leadership, Safety
    No Comments
    The question of sustainability versus remediation is an economic one as much as a humanitarian one. This is a photo of a toxic looking barrel laying on its side.

    Companies that spend a lot of money on remediation, and are doing it only to avoid penalties and fines, are going to end up having bigger and more expensive problems than they were hoping for. When I was at Robroy, we had an old Duoline factory that was costing us $2.5 million every year in

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  • How Can Lenders Help Small Businesses to Grow and Succeed

    • November 6, 2019
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Business, Manufacturing
    No Comments
    Big pile of cash. Lenders can help small businesses succeed by making loans easer to get at lower rates.

    I’m not a fan of business credit or companies taking out big bank loans in order to buy a piece of equipment. When I was the President of Robroy, I always made sure we had the cash available to purchase machinery, and that there was an ROI to replace what we had spent. However, there

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  • Why Not Just Cut Everyone’s Hours During a Downturn?

    • October 30, 2019
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Business, Management
    No Comments
    A tube bender. Preparing for a recession doesn't just mean cutting people's hours.

    When you see that an economic downturn is on the horizon, just like the one we’re seeing now, the knee-jerk temptation for many managers is to start making layoffs and staffing cutbacks. “We need to reduce expenses by 10 percent, so let’s just cut 10 percent of the workforce.” That works in the short run,

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  • How Do You Recession-Proof Your Business?

    • October 23, 2019
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Business, Innovation, Productivity
    No Comments
    Empty shelves at a grocery store in Florida. Preparing for a recession is like hurricane preparedness.

    Trying to recession-proof your business is like hurricane-proofing your house. Now, we don’t get many (actually, any) hurricanes in Central Texas, but I’ve got friends in Florida who tell me all about it. They tell me the hurricane-prep is almost comical to watch: Five days before a major hurricane will make landfall, all the people

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  • What Signals a Recession?

    • October 16, 2019
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Business, Measurement
    No Comments
    3D graphic representing a recession bar graph and line graph.

    I believe we’re in a global manufacturing recession, it just hasn’t been fully reported yet. If you look at the quarterly earnings reports of the U.S. stock exchange, we don’t see that many companies that are showing top-line revenue growth, or they’re only showing very minimal revenue growth, which could be part of a price

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  • Is Manufacturing Output Really Going Up?

    • October 9, 2019
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Business, Manufacturing, Productivity
    No Comments
    A factory warehouse filled with inventory. A prime example of ??

    There’s all kinds of talk that the manufacturing economy is heading for a recession, even as manufacturing output is on the rise. But you may be wondering how we even know this, especially as the rest of the economy seems to be doing so well, including having low unemployment in the U.S. When it comes

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  • What Is Standard Costing in a Manufacturing System?

    • September 11, 2019
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Business, Manufacturing, Measurement
    No Comments
    A factory warehouse filled with inventory. A prime example of ??

    If you’re new to manufacturing, you’ll soon learn about a standard costing system, which is the standard cost of an item including material, labor, and overhead. This creates an inventory value, which is not the selling price of the inventory, but the production costs of it. For example, if it costs you $150,000 to make

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  • Are You Serving on a Good or Bad Board of Directors?

    • August 28, 2019
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Business, Leadership, Management
    No Comments
    Board of Directors of the Workman's Circle Loan Association, St. Paul

    As someone who has served on a board of directors at different times, I pay attention to corporate and nonprofit boards. A few weeks ago, I received an email newsletter from a fellow named Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures about his experience with boards of directors and the two types of problematic boards. He

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  • How Do Executives Deal With Impostor Syndrome?

    • June 5, 2019
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Business
    No Comments
    Sign that warns people, "No attendant on duty. Do not pay impostor." This is the perfect metaphor for impostor syndrome.

    I hear from a lot of people about their struggles with Impostor Syndrome, the fear that you’re not good enough for the job you’re supposed to do, and that you’re going to be discovered and outed as a fraud. The truth is the people who get Impostor Syndrome are not actual impostors. If anything, they’re

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  • Customer Confidence is Lost or Gained on Product Quality

    • May 29, 2019
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Business, Manufacturing, Productivity
    No Comments
    Ribbons from the state fair. I wish they gave these out for product quality; we surely would have won a few.

    A couple of weeks ago, I talked about how my old company changed an industry-standard method of production and acceptance of product quality by creating our own homegrown manufacturing process and instituting a policy of measuring every step of the process including cleanliness of the raw materials. Before that time, the standard reject rate was

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