Labor Efficiency Anew

Many ask the question “how can I get technicians to be more efficient with their labor hours”. I suggest that having proper supervision is the best way to get each and every technician to be more efficient. Imagine if you will that you had one good supervisor for every eight shop technicians. (I know that many of you don’t have that many – in which case you are in what I call no man’s land. You are too small to have the proper levels of supervision and that leaves you with too little time to increase the labor sales revenues.) I want to have a supervisor in the middle of the eight technicians. I want the workstation for the supervision on the floor with the technicians. They can see the supervisor all day long as the supervisor can see them all day long.

Let me ask a simple question. Will the men be more efficient with the boss in their midst? Will they be more efficient with the boss watching them all day long? I also want the supervisor to spend at least fifteen minutes with each technician every morning and again every afternoon another fifteen minutes.

Will labor be more efficient? You bet.

The afternoon discussion will have another question. Will you finish the eight hours of labor I gave you to do today before you go home? If they say “yes” everything is good.

If they say “no” what is the first question that you ask? I thought you would say that. That is not the right answer. More on that later. The time is now.

TESTIMONIALS

Friday Filosophy v.05.13.2022

Milton Friedman (July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) was an American economist. He believed in monetarism. Monetarism is the theory that how much money the government prints each year has a huge effect on the economy. He supports the government printing the same low rate of money each year rather than a different amount each year.

Friedman was born in Brooklyn, New York to a Hungarian-Jewish family. He was raised in Rahway, New Jersey. Friedman studied at Rutgers University, at Columbia University, and at the University of Chicago. He worked thirty years in Chicago with George Stigler as a leader of the Chicago school of economics.

During the 1970s, Milton Friedman's idea of monetarism gained popularity and he became an economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan. Friedman believed that the government control over the economy should be limited. He supported cutting taxes, lowering government spending, getting rid of government rules that limited the economy and letting parents choose which school their taxes paid for. His political views were libertarian. He was against forcing people to join the army, and said that getting rid of United States military conscription was the thing he was most proud of doing.

Throughout several decades, Friedman made many documentaries, books, and interviews to express his views to the public. The main books he wrote were Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose.

When government - in pursuit of good intentions - tries to rearrange the economy, legislate morality, or help special interests, the cost come in inefficiency, lack of motivation, and loss of freedom. Government should be a referee, not an active player.

Inflation is taxation without legislation.

Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.

We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

I think that the Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of government. The one thing that's missing, but that will soon be developed, is a reliable e-cash - a method whereby on the Internet you can transfer funds from A to B without A knowing B or B knowing A.

I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible.

Governments never learn. Only people learn.

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.

The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties’ benefit.

Indeed, a major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it... gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.

Universities exist to transmit knowledge and understanding of ideas and values to students not to provide entertainment for spectators or employment for athletes.

The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom.

And what does reward virtue? You think the communist commissar rewards virtue? You think a Hitler rewards virtue? You think, excuse me, if you'll pardon me, American presidents reward virtue? Do they choose their appointees on the basis of the virtue of the people appointed or on the basis of their political clout?

I'm in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my values system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal.

Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.

The Time is Now

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May 13, 2022

Operating a Business in the “Learning Space.”

For the week's blog on Lifelong Learning, our Founder Ron Slee addresses the topic of operating a business in the "Learning Space."

Our backgrounds, Caroline and I, are in education. More specifically in Classroom Face-to-Face Teaching. As teachers we are concerned with our students and their growth and learning in the specific subjects that we are teaching. We have tests, quizzes, and discussion groups to help us in tracking the learning levels and growth of each student. And, please, never forget that all of these different aspects of teaching allow us to understand what is working and what is not. Many people overlook that aspect of tests and report cards.

In the e-learning world there are many more challenges in the creation of products that will help in employee development. The first question we must ask ourselves is “does our current offering, the assessments, classes and lectures match what the market needs?” This is an ongoing challenge as the market is constantly changing. The question becomes “are we delivering the proper learning products to the proper people in a manner that they find interesting and productive?”

Of course, we have to first define our purpose which with us is very straightforward “We want to assist people in the identification of their individual potential.” However, as you will no doubt realize, that is a challenge all by itself. We also add that our goal goes further in that we want to offer products and services that allow each of the interested people to realize that potential.

That meant that we had to identify the specific aspect of the employee population that we could help with the most. Our conclusion was that we wanted to touch everyone who led people and everyone who interacted with customers or supported people who did interact with customers. That covers nearly everyone in the product support disciplines, the distribution channel, in the capital goods industry. We recognized that although there is different jargon and some different practices that most of the capital goods industries needed similar things. Construction, Agricultural, Light Industrial, Material Handling, Engine, On Highway Truck and Trailer, Marine are some of the industries we are focused on today.

We have a lot of operational experience in these industries and we have multiplied that experience with our large group of Contributors who contribute to our market with blog posts and podcasts and assist in our newsletters. These Contributors, all forty eight of them, have deep understanding of all aspects of the operations of dealers and distributors.

One of our challenges is to bring our product to the market. It is a rather daunting task to attempt to cover all of these companies by ourselves. In order to penetrate this huge market worldwide we have created a smaller group of specialists to help us. They are aimed at educators, the industry associations, the manufacturers of the equipment as well as influential dealers and distributors.

We first communicated directly with industry associations. This is, of course, where I was first teaching in the distribution channel, with the Associated Equipment Distributors (AED). I personally did all of their parts and service operational training from the early 1990’s through 2015. We did Parts Management, Service Management, Product Support Selling and Parts and Service Marketing training. We also provide training services to manufacturers, in some cases worldwide. Companies such as Caterpillar, Deere, Komatsu, Volvo, Ditch Witch and Vermeer to name a few. I also was involved in many industries convention and annual meetings.

We recognized that we need to have a community of influencers.

We were very fortunate to have the help of Steve Johnson. Steve, until he retired was the Vice President of the AED Foundation. This foundation was the area of training and employee development for the association. Steve has been in touch with a large number of schools across the US and Canada establishing, what he calls, Centers of Excellence. These are the schools that he has selected to represent Learning Without Scars across Canada and the United States of America. We are extremely excited about this aspect of our business.

We have established two streams of learning products: one for academic credit and the other for workforce development. For the academic credit stream, we have created classes that will earn seven academic credits (that is fourteen classes as two of our classes earn an academic credit). For the workforce development stream, we have one hundred and eight classes; thirty-six for the parts business, thirty-six for the selling and marketing businesses, and thirty-six for the service business. We also have eighteen job function skills assessments for the workforce development stream. We are currently working with university professors to create a selection of Lecture Series. We hope to have the Lecture Service earning Academic Credits as well. There is a lot of work involved and a lot of effort put in by a lot of people. This is not an easy thing to get done.

One of the challenges for industry is being able to identify the individuals who are the best fit to help companies succeed in their businesses. Universities do this will various tests, such as the Executive Function Test. Businesses do this with various personality profiles such as Briggs Meyers, Personalysis, Caliper and many others. Associations do this with their individual “certification” programs. Manufacturers do this with their technician training and certifications.

As an Accredited Provider with IACET, The International Accreditors of Continuing Education and Training. We are the only ones in the world with this accreditation. We are going to be pursuing further accreditations this year to make our products even more unique to the marketplace.

I hope this gives you a more complete understanding of the “business” we have been building for the parts thirty plus years. I would like to extend my thanks to all of the students, the more than twenty-five thousand of you, that we have had in our classes all around the world. I sincerely mean it when I tell you that this would not have been possible without the contributions that each and every one of you have made I the classrooms with me. Thank you all so very much.

The Time is Now.

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For our course lists, please click here.

February 27, 2023

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