Boss Life (35 page)

He agrees, so I continue. “Our meetings, you and I, have been going really well. I'd like to do something similar with an expanded group and focus on identifying and fixing production problems. I want to make sure that someone from each department is attending, so that we can come up with solutions that work for everyone. Bonus, everyone will be hearing about the solution at the same time. So you won't have to run from one end of the shop to the other repeating your explanation of what you want to do. What do you think?”

He considers the idea, then asks, “Who will be on the committee?”

“I don't want to bring in the whole shop. It's too expensive to shut down production. But I do want someone from sales, engineering, build, finish, and ship to sit in. Nick, Andy, you, Dave, and Bob. I'll be in charge to keep things moving.” Will thinks that it's worth a try, and we settle on eleven-thirty next Thursday morning. I decide to call it “Operations Committee.”

On Monday, after devoting the meeting to the health insurance renewal, I get an unsettling e-mail from my contact at the big defense company. His boss, the CEO, has been fired after being caught in an affair with a subordinate. The news makes the front page of the
New York Times
business section.

I try to muster sympathy for this guy whose private life has made the national papers, but I'm mostly concerned with losing the order. Andy hasn't ordered the wood yet, and I tell him to hold off.

Later, my contact calls to confirm that the job will be canceled. We have one of those “wutcha gonna do?” conversations; then I point out that we have a valid purchase order, and that the job is in process. He hems and haws a bit. I offer to let them cancel if I can bill them for the time we've put into it. We agree that I can keep $3,915 of the $18,000 deposit; I'll have to refund the rest.

This cancellation comes at a bad time. I'm going to be short on cash until we get paid for the net-30 jobs, and I'll be paying my expenses for the rest of November out of what I have on hand plus whatever deposits we collect from new sales. The only bright spot is the credit card bill. We haven't charged much since I paid it off last month, and the upcoming total is just $5,857.86. If we don't make some sales, I'll bottom out at around $40,000 in cash at the end of the month. After that, the net-30 payments will start to arrive, but only if there are no shipping delays and no installation problems.

The next morning, I log in to the Defense Department's Web site and check the status of our invoices. The site is for any company doing business with the military, and it has some amusing drop-down lists describing the range of products that are being bought, from solid-fuel rocket motors to naval patrol vessels to potatoes. There's another drop-down for quantities delivered, ranging from grams to drums to railcars. Somewhere a junior officer is receiving a railcar full of potatoes and can use this system to affirm that it has arrived on time and in good condition. And thirty days later, the money is deposited in the seller's bank account.

I search for our jobs by product, NAICS code 337211: Wood Office Furniture. Two of our jobs have been received, but not formally accepted, so I'll have Emma prod them to complete the paperwork.

On Wednesday, Dan sells a job worth $19,630 to a gas company in Colorado. And on Thursday morning, Nick gets a nice one: $32,182, from a repeat customer. Both clients promise to send deposit checks. We should have that cash next week.

The last two military tables are assembled and ready for crating. One, a very large U-shaped table for an army base in Arizona, sports an especially flamboyant combination of maple and Bolivian rosewood, along with a huge inlaid logo in the center of the U. The other, for a Special Forces battalion in Florida, is made from more modest woods but has an even better logo panel. At the end of each arm of the U, we've inlaid a shield-shaped panel, about three feet long and two feet wide, with a huge black widow spider above an Apache spear. My guys like to do this kind of work. Military logos are usually cool looking, and it's a thrill to hear about our clients on the news. After Osama Bin Laden was killed, I pictured the returning special ops unit gathered around the table we'd made for them in 2010.

—

ON THURSDAY
, we have our first Operations Committee: Nick, Andy, Will, Dave, and Bob, each representing a link in the production chain. They sit and stare at me, a little nervous. It's not Monday. We've never had meetings any other time.

I start by repeating what I told Will last week: that we've all been working in isolation for too many years. Each person has been a Heroic Solitary Craftsman, dealing with their problems by themselves. That approach leaves us with no way to collectively solve our many problems—no avenues for good ideas to be brought to the attention of management; no forum for discussing ideas to determine whether they work for all of us, or cause problems for someone else in the shop. And no way to make sure that good ideas are still being used a week, month, or year later. This committee is intended to solve all those problems.

I outline for them how I think it will work: anyone can bring up a problem, anyone can suggest a solution, and everyone should think about whether that solution raises a different problem. We will meet weekly, every Thursday at eleven-thirty. I don't want the meetings to be very long, and if the topic raised doesn't affect every part of the production chain, then the people who aren't concerned can leave and get back to work. I conclude with a question: “Who wants to start?”

Silence. All the guys are waiting for somebody else to go first. Then Will Krieger says that he's noticed an issue with the data-port lids we're making. There's a visible sense of relief from the others. This is the kind of problem they understand: technical, finite, and fixable. For the next forty-five minutes, they kick around ideas, and by the end of the meeting, we've found a solution that we all agree will work.

We don't have any whiteboards or chalkboards. So I screwed a large sheet of cardboard to the wall. At the end of the meeting, I take a Sharpie and write:

11/15 Data-port lids:
Concept
Done
Sustain

I tell everyone that we'll list the problems we discuss each week on the cardboard. We'll start every meeting with a review of past problems. We'll be able to see exactly how each is progressing, whether they need more work or are now consistently being done. I've been mulling over how we can track what we've worked on, and this seemed like a simple idea to start with. The next day I ask Will how he thought it went. “It was good,” he says. “I think we should keep doing it.”

—

HENRY ARRIVES HOME
on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. He'll stay for a week. Next Monday, he's sitting with the crew, eyes on the donuts, while I go through the numbers. Last week was good in all respects. We booked $52,150 in new orders and received deposits from a couple of them. It was a light spending week—just my AdWords credit card and some vendor bills. We ended the week with $6,561 more than we started it, and we now have $102,105 on hand. I have payroll and a bunch of other bills, and I have to give my defense customer their money back—more than $70,000 altogether. If I don't get some cash, I'll have less than a week of funds on hand.

I'm worried, but not as panic-stricken as I was in June and July. All the military jobs are shipped, and the first three have been installed without problems. I should be receiving the money in mid-December. Sales have been OK, and we still have lots of work from October in our queue. If I'm prudent, and we sell anything in December, I should be OK.

Thanksgiving and Christmas are the biggest upcoming problems. The guys often skip the day before or after a holiday, and this year Christmas falls on a Tuesday. We'll lose six of the next thirty working days. Even worse, shipping slows down as well. Truck drivers like to see their families, and so our shipments take longer than usual. I'll need to make sure that jobs are crated and ready to go well before Christmas.

Thanksgiving week, sales are usually slow. Not this year. We book three more orders, worth $38,953. Two are Dan's, totaling $31,048. Nick does the other. I spend a lot more time watching Henry than working, but I do stop in to pick up checks that have arrived. We receive $27,468 and spend $70,674. I finish the week with $58,899 on hand—my lowest balance since July. I'm down $78,256 from my position at the start of the year. If I can even get back to a $100,000 balance by year's end, I'll be satisfied.

The following Monday, I report to the crew. Five working days left in November. Sales so far: $110,744. What are the chances that we'll close $90,000 in new orders this week? History would say low, but we had weeks in October that were better than that. Should I follow my most optimistic estimate or the worst-case scenario? I prudently assume that nothing more will come in this week, but that we'll get some sales in December. It shouldn't be a bad cash week: no payroll, and the credit cards, health insurance, and rent have been paid. I can last a week with no new sales, but they'd better pick up after that.

I spend the rest of Monday and Tuesday doing all the things that I do every day, but not really concentrating much. On Wednesday, I fly to San Francisco to see Peter. I'll be staying with my sister, and Nancy is staying home with our youngest boy, Hugh. Henry is back at school.

On Thursday, I visit Peter's office, a couple of blocks from Union Square. It's smaller than mine, and crowded. Peter and his coworkers sit shoulder-to-shoulder at a single long table. They're peering at oversize monitors. In the rest of the space are a couple of small conference rooms, a very well-stocked kitchen, and a hang-out area with comfy sofas. There are maybe fifteen people working this morning. I'm greeted with brief smiles and handshakes, but they all quickly return to their screens.

I ask Peter to show me what he does. His screen shows two columns of text—computer code. It looks like gibberish to me. The lines on the right match the lines on the left, with a few discrepancies—a letter or comma, or sometimes a couple of lines that are different from its counterpart. These are highlighted in a different color. The left side shows the existing code, the right shows whatever changes Peter is making. He spends long days parked in his chair, staring at this mess, and thinking.

I ask him: how do his bosses know who's doing a good job? He tells me that, first and foremost, good workers solve the problems they are given. The code that runs a Web site is an ever-evolving entity. The Web site is updated constantly as new functions are added, and it has to be rebuilt to handle more traffic as the user base grows. It's tricky. Updating the code without crashing the site is like trying to build a boat while sailing it across the ocean. You start with a rowboat, and if things go well, end up with an aircraft carrier.

That scenario guarantees problems. The engineers do their best to test the code before it goes live, but everyone is under incredible pressure to launch, whether it's perfect or not. So new blocks of code get shoved into the existing code base, often with little documentation. This can cause strange, unforeseen interactions with what's there already.

In our shop, once a table is shipped, it no longer interacts with our ongoing processes. If we lived in Peter's world, we might find that a change in how we build a table suddenly caused all the tables we'd ever built to collapse or burst into flames. On the other hand, software engineers can fix their whole code base from any place that has Internet. Our logistics challenges don't exist for them.

Peter's company measures productivity by the number of lines of code that have been tested and integrated into the new site. He's currently near the top of the whole team. He's working such long hours that sometimes he stays at the office for a couple of days in a row. “How does anyone know what to work on? How do the bosses know where everyone is?” Peter explains that the bosses hold regular meetings with each staffer and give regular updates to everyone about the overall state of the Web site and the company. His Web site, like many start-ups, generates no revenue. Cash comes from investors, who hope for a huge payout if the company is acquired by one of the monsters in the industry—Facebook, Google, Apple, or Amazon. There are also smaller investors looking for any company that can gain traction.

For Peter, the dream is still alive and well. His new company is getting repeated injections of cash, and their user base is growing. Peter and his coworkers have been told that they can expect substantial year-end bonuses, and if he stays for a year, he'll have stock in the company.

The site is functioning smoothly for the moment, so Peter and I spend a couple of days sightseeing. He seems to be very glad to have a break from the office. He tells me that he's given up exercise, and that his life consists of working and sleeping, nothing more.

As we walk around town, we keep seeing sleek white motor coaches: the famed tech buses, equipped with Wi-Fi and food, that shuttle employees back and forth between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. One has a Google logo painted on the side. Later, I look up how much they cost: about five hundred thousand dollars each. I've paid Google $627,416 since I started using AdWords. I've bought them a bus, and paid for food and a driver for a year.

This reminds me of something odd that happened last year. In my mail I found a smallish cardboard box. The return address: “Google, Mountain View, CA.” It's a mug, with “Google” on the side. No note. Apparently this is their attempt to express gratitude to a steady customer. I had already spent more than seventy-five thousand dollars with Google that year, and I got a two-dollar mug. I haven't heard anything from them since. Granted, Google makes searching for anything on the Web cheap and easy, and connects me with buyers whom I would never otherwise meet. But how would a hotel, casino, or restaurant treat a customer who spent six hundred dollars a day, every day? Any of them would do something a little more impressive to keep me happy.