Hello, my name is Gary Shotton If you have listened to my videos for very long you kind of know that I have a background in agriculture and so now I’m going to talk about the subject of green grass, the Grass is Greener on the Other Side. That’s an agruculture term because if you have cattle and you have a fence and you have nice luscious eating in a field or pastor or wheat field and then somehow the cattle look over the side of the fence they look on the other side and they try to break out of their pin or their confinement because the Grass is Greener on the Other Side. And, I’m making this analogy because when we’re in life and we’re in business and we’re just going through life, we have a tendency to look at our situation so yeah guess what, “I think it would be greener on the other side”. I think I want to abandon what I’m doing and do what they’re doing because is sure looks better it sure looks more interesting. I want to jump outside of my boundaries and do something else because the Grass is Greener on the Other Side, as I look past my fences, my box. Well, let me talk about my side of the fence. My side, outside my box as owner. So we’re kind of dispeling some kind of illusions that you might think of when you think of the owner and the boss. You see him always driving a nice vehicle. He’s got a nice expense account. He’s basically free to do come and go when he wants. And you know what life ought to be really easy over there, I mean I would really like to do that. He has no restrictions. Well, let me tell you it’s not quite like that on the boss side, on the owner side. I would just like to share some of the thought patterns over the last 30-some years of how I view things. First of all, I feel that I have a huge responsibility. You see workers in the background. I have 45 families that are looking to me for a paycheck every Friday. We pay every Friday. I used to, in a previous business, pay every other Friday. That means right now, I have a $35,000 to $40,000 payroll every Friday. It used to be $50,000 because we’re up in sales. That means i have to have that money there. I can’t tell my workers, “I’m sorry, I didn’t have the money today, can you can you wait till Monday?” What do you think that’s gonna do? Nobody’s gonna like that, everybody is counting on that paycheck. So there’s a bit of pressure all the time. It may look like I’m kick back and relax, but I’m constantly thinking about that. It’s not a bad thing. It’s just part of the job. I look at the safety. I think of the responsibility that I have to these workers. Every time we have any meeting Every time we discussed in a group setting, we talk about safety. No way do I want any of my employees to get hurt. I don’t want to have to report to their family, their spouse, that they’re seriously hurt or they’ve been killed. These machines are powerful, they could kill somebody. If you have a trucking company, if you have something that has motion or movement, or any size, any power to it, you better be thinking about safety because you are the one that’s responsible. You’re the one that make sure that they know they can come to you with any safety issue not be disciplined you’re the ones thats culminating intended propagating the idea that you have to bring to me any safety concerns you have and you’ll never be discipline because it never would I have one of our workers do something that I wouldn’t do I wouldn’t work in that situation if they’re still concerned I would never make them do something they feel it’s unsafe i have a process here that I kind of go down a list that says no here’s my priorities safety number one that’s number one priority for my employees and guess what when my employees know that I’m concerned about them personally including their safety and they know that i have concerned for their well-being they make a better employee and if we have a better employee we have better customers because they’re serving my customers our customers were one team they’re happier and they’re better able to serve my customers are our customers than if they’re unhappy number two quality guess what you can’t go get a bad meets that are a bad hamburger or a bad clothes item are bad service that you’re under car dealership that sticks with your customer for a long time you know good news but they’ll tell a few people bad news they don’t tell the whole neighborhood you have to focus on quality and does that mean you’re gonna be perfect no we don’t make every single part correct but we know that when we have a bad part we know that we are able to digging into that four or five layers deep to determine what really caused that problem and when we know what really caused that problem then we can fix the cause so that doesn’t happen again that’s what you’re going to have to do I didn’t do that very well in my previous business I kind of had an attitude that you know we screwed up a move that’s when we have a moving and storage were moving furniture from one house to another and we say well you know that one didn’t go so well that customers pretty mad at it but you know they’re kind of lost in the shadow they probably won’t tell that many people will just go on and do better next time no I gotta go back and figure out what went wrong I didn’t do a good job at that what went wrong why did I get wrong what can we fix so that doesn’t happen again that’s what we do now it’s much much more every one of our customers want on-time delivery that means we told him we’ll be there in three weeks it needs to be there in three weeks not three weeks and one day in three weeks on time delivery is whatever the customer is expecting you to have this product or service delivered to you in time then that’s what we expect and that can be six months if that’s customary to our business not many things are six months let me tell you that lead time is coming down tighter and tighter and tighter my customers are ordering later and wondering it sooner they’re not wanting to have give me much lead time I’m pushing and thinking of ways to make sure we can have our customers needs and a reasonable lead to all let’s get the prize oh well you know my costs are going up so surely I can raise my price not you cannot raise your price are you kidding me call my workers want to raise in pay and yet I can’t raise my price that’s right guess what my customers are expecting my price to go down there expecting to be to get more efficient and lower my price that’s my goal that’s my expectation that’s my requirement by my customers to lower my price so we have to have better systems better operations we have to be more efficient because basically here’s the sale price here’s the price of producing them that if you can kind of look through air there’s my margin of profit and guess what it’s getting room early then right well it’s getting really really thin and so I have to have higher volumes i have to have more efficiencies that is a given now the last one that’s kind of coming up on this is speed it’s different than the lead time speed is something that can I be the first one to the market can I be the fastest one produced you know I have to have a particular service station that i buy gas has got into the food business over the last 15 years because i saw where their business was going to fade out from from just pumping gas to making more profit and selling food so they opened up kitchens at every one of their new service stations where they sell gas and guess what they sell there’s pizza guess what i used to buy my pizza from the piece of place I buy my visa by pizza now from my filling station guess what because it’s quick I don’t have to give them up one hour lead time I don’t have to wait 20 minutes i can come in order pizza and walk out in 10 minutes full feats of good-tasting high quality pizza in 10 minutes speed we have to have safety first quality second on-time delivery third lead time for price and speed well guess what grass is not always greener on the other side bottle this is helpful hope you 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