Business
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What Owning a Business in South Africa Taught Me About Managing Diverse Groups
- February 21, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Leadership, Management
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Years ago, at the start of my career, I worked in the fencing manufacturing and construction business. I manufactured a chain link fence and installed it myself too. That was in Durban, South Africa in the 1970s, when it was a different time and place. I just came back from a visit to South Africa
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How Will 3D Printing Change Manufacturing and Warehousing?
- February 14, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Manufacturing
I saw a funny tweet a couple years ago that said “I bought a 3D printer and printed out another 3D printer. Then I took the first one back.” We’ve come a long way from the beginnings of 3D printing, when you could pretty much only print out small plastic objects with a $2,000 “home”
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The Power of Three: How We Owned Three Brands and Ran Three Sales Forces
- December 13, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business
When you’re a manufacturer with a national reach, you’ll often work with manufacturers reps as well as your own sales force. In fact, your sales force will often call on the manufacturers reps as part of their territory. Manufacturers reps often have access to projects and clients that you might not otherwise get because they
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Headquarters and Second Offices Don’t Have to be in Expensive Cities
- November 29, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management
The big expansion news over the last few weeks has been Amazon search for a second North American headquarters and the speculations about where they’ll actually place it. Dozens of cities are all clamoring for Amazon’s $5 billion investment and hoping to be the city to employ 50,000 employees, many with six-figure salaries. Many cities
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I Don’t Believe in Remote Work for Employees
- November 15, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management, Productivity
This one is going to make me unpopular, especially with today’s modern marvels of broadband technology, video conferencing, and our ability to multi-task and work anywhere in the world. I don’t believe in remote work for employees. (Not a big shocker, I’m sure, since you already read the headline.) But I believe that if you’re
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How Do You Recover From a Devastating Incident?
- October 25, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Leadership
Regular readers of this blog know that I’ve had to fire a lot of people over the years, usually related to performance issues. But in the 21 years I was president of the company, I never had a layoff. That was one of my precepts of managing a business: I believed layoffs were really a
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How Do You Keep Up Company Morale?
- October 18, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Leadership, Management, Measurement
Company morale can have more dramatic rises and falls than a roller coaster. You’ll have your seasonal ebbs and flows, highs before a big product launch, lows after a major crisis or periods of poor performance, as well as the occasional holiday-related highs. But you can also have pockets of high and low morale throughout
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Do You Have a Disaster Plan for Your Manufacturing Company?
- September 6, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management, Manufacturing, Safety
With Hurricane Harvey passing just a couple hours southeast of me, and Hurricane Irma hitting Florida, I have been wondering what businesses in the affected area have done to protect their data and information from disaster. I’ve heard stories of businesses that have had to shut down because they lost their financial and client data
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Treat People Fairly, and They’ll Be Fair With You
- August 9, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Leadership
I’ve always tried to treat people fairly, even going above and beyond what’s expected of me. I’ve been in more than a few situations that I didn’t need to do this. I wouldn’t have done anything wrong, and I could have received a small benefit to myself in the end. But by treating the other
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If You’re Going to Do Something, Do It Right or Don’t Do It
- July 27, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management
A few months ago, after I left Robroy and started my own consultancy, I received a very nice note from an old manufacturer’s rep named Jack, and it brought back a lot of memories. David, I keep up with you through Brian C. and John S.. I’ll never forget you calling me when you got