Every morning when you walk into your modular home factory
you are expected to make decisions. Some are relatively easy because you’ve
made similar ones before. Others take a little more time and possibly involve others’
opinions.
What you have to ask yourself is “What are the implications
of this decision 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years from now?”
There is a cause and effect derived from every decision you
make. It’s called the Butterfly Effect. In chaos theory, the butterfly effect
is the sensitive dependency on initial conditions in which a small change at
one place in a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences
in a later state.
If a builder calls the service department at your factory
and asks for reimbursement for work he had to do to correct a problem created
at the factory, the service manager has to make a decision. If it seems logical
to him and the reimbursement is within the established guidelines, the decision
is easy and the builder is kept happy. If the decision is not to pay him
because this builder is so demanding, get ready for an ever increasing battle
through emails and phone calls. This will not be a happy builder.
A lead comes into the factory from someone looking to build
a home and wants to know their local builder; who actually assigns that lead? A
secretary, the sales manager or maybe it just languishes on someone’s desk for
a week or so until the lead has gone stale. A quick reply from the factory will
make a good impression with the prospective new home buyer. Not getting back to
them for a week will probably find the buyer has already contacted another
factory.
The factory sales rep has worked on this house for months,
quoting, redrawing and requoting only to find out that another factory is also
quoting the same house using your drawings. They are $3,000 less. Do you ask
the sales manager if you can match it or do you ask to see the details of the
other factory’s quote and lead time to produce it? One decision means you will
lower your profit and still might not get the house to build. The other means
that you are putting the builder on the hot seat to produce the paperwork
showing he is getting the same home from the other factory and again you might
not get the house.
As for bigger decisions having a permanent and possibly
adverse effect on your factory’s future; consider this scenario. As the owner,
you decide to go 100% into building all your homes using closed cell insulation
and Hi-R-11 windows because you want to save energy and get better HERS Ratings
for your builders and their customers.
At first you are hailed as a frontrunner in the energy
movement in the modular home industry. Then slowly your builder base begins to
migrate to other factories that don’t have such high and costly standards. Within 10
months your builder base is almost depleted and your production is suffering.
You decide to offer both your old specs and the new specs to builders but it is
too late. A few of your builders might return but it doesn’t help. The decision
is made to either close the factory or sell it. All because you thought you
would set a standard that builders would embrace for their customers.
You can’t sit in your office and second guess ever decision
you make and you can’t take forever to make one either. The best way is to make
decisions based on your and/or your colleagues’ experience and then run with
it. If it goes badly, it usually does so quickly and most times gives you a
chance to rethink it.
The higher you are up the decision making ladder, the
tougher the decisions.
