survival steps

at todays staff meeting we talked about how kidder blaisdell is going to survive if the economy really slows down in the next three business quarters. I certainly don't know what is going to happen with the economy, but I want a plan if things get bad. I feel like I should share my plan with the staff.

Step one: regulate hours available to work. By controlling the amount of over-time hours that an employee can work we can reduce our biggest expense, payroll. Now, each person is only allowed to work 10 hours over time each week. Our next step would be to cut out OT completely, Then to reduce hours down to 32 per week per person, then to ask for volunteers to take time off.

Step two: continue to build the cash reserve account. Now we automatically save 2.5% of all sales.

step three: to try and get to a COD basis with all of our suppliers. Currently we pay cash with a few of our suppliers, and it really helps us to buy only what we need and to pay closer attention to how much and how often we buy. What happens is we spend like crazy for a month fall behind with the vendor go a month with-out purchasing, then pay extra fees, and the cycle starts again.

step four: Do more with existing assets. This is where the kaizen events come in. To continue to try and improve our system of doing things. Good systems with decent machines out perform bad systems with the best machinery. We are all going to have to do more with less.

If the economy continues like this or gets worse I want to learn as much as possible from the experience. It may be difficult but it won't put us out on the street. With an aggressive strategy in place we can actually come out a better company ready to handle adversity now and in the future.

We started to install 77. We have started at the top and are working down, on this job. I think this is going to be a very good move, one of things that always happens is that we start the install at the floor and when we get to the ceiling we realize that we have misaligned something and it is to late to fix. And the ceiling line is the focus, people tend not to look at where the cabinet meets the floor.