Aaron J. Crowley

Stone Industry Consultant

You know that it’s bound to happen…a breakdown when you can least afford it. Whether it’s a truck that blows a power steering hose on the way to an install, or an electrical short on the overhead crane with suppliers lining up outside to deliver material, these breakdowns rarely occur when it’s convenient.     

Nope, if something is going to fail, it’s going to happen during crunch time.

Such was the case last week when the drive-dog bolt on the spindle of our CNC sheared off.  It couldn’t have happened at a worse time!  We were under the gun to finish a high profile project for a high profile contractor and in an instant, our operation ground to a halt.

Miraculously, we found the drive-dog on the floor and a fifty-five cent replacement bolt at the local hardware store.  

Unfortunately, the threaded insert that held the bolt in place was ruined while extracting the broken bolt. As it turned out, that wasn’t something the local hardware store stocked. 

So there we were: no insert and no production. 

By the time we finally tracked down the two dollar replacement part (and a couple of extra replacement replacements), we’d lost an evening and almost an entire day’s production.

The obvious moral to this story is, well…obvious: It’s not a bad idea to keep some replacement parts on the shelf for our trucks and stone equipment, which are complicated and expensive systems that can be rendered inoperable by the failure of rather simple and inexpensive parts.

The less obvious moral to this story is possibly more important. 

Our businesses themselves are complicated systems made up of innumerable parts (procedures, processes, and practices) that when functioning, enable us to successfully sell and deliver our countertops as promised to the customer. But when one of these “parts” breaks down, not only does the operation stop, it can go backwards in the form of lost sales and expensive oversights and misunderstandings. 

The truth is that there are more parts to our business systems than we can identify, and to varying degrees they are all important.

But for the sake of space and maximizing the “impact per part,” it’s time to perform a diagnostic test of the following two parts of our business operations.

1. Post Quote / Pre-Sale Follow Up:  Much effort and expense goes into generating a qualified lead. Education and presentation of our business’s unique advantages are added to that.  Finally the drawings are scaled, labor costs calculated, and materials are sourced and priced so a competitive quote can be sent.

If the post quote follow up breaks down and goes dormant, passively waiting for the customer to call back to buy, our sales system will cease to function properly.

Sales will be lost.   

2. Post Sale/ Pre-Cut Layout Approval: Many customers spend many an hour finding the perfect slab for their project. It seems an increasing number of them will not accept the unpleasant surprise of mismatched seams, “unique” characteristics in the middle of their island, or irregularities in the surface or finish of slabs they hand-selected.

The only way to minimize the post install trauma for the customer (and brain damage for the fabricator) is to actively involve them in the layout of their counters on the slabs after they have been selected and before they are cut.

Then seams can be discussed, unique characteristics can be avoided, and concerns about the finish can be discussed before it’s too late to return the slabs.

Fixing (or implementing) a process to ensure that someone in the sales department follows up on quotes and designing a system to get customers in to view their layouts prior to cutting might seem like little things in the grand scheme of a dynamic and complicated fabrication business. And in reality they are.

But then again, so is a two dollar insert.

Aaron Crowley is a stone shop owner, author, speaker, and consultant to mid-size stone companies. Contact him at aaron@fabricatorsfriend.com.