Preparing Our Business For My 2-Week Vacation to South Africa

The challenge facing our business and many others:

Just over 2 years ago, I joined a life group at my church (Grace Church in Erie, PA). Over the following year, I was blessed to grow close with several new friends from this group including one friend from South Africa who was in the U.S. working as an Au Pair. When she returned home in May 2022, she told several of us that we should come visit her in South Africa. When another friend said that she would, I also said that I would visit as well, after all I had been saving to do a vacation for my 30th birthday anyways. I made the commitment that I would visit in South Africa in May of 2022 but I really never figured that these plans would come to fruition. After all, it was very stressful to leave work for 4 days for an upcoming golf trip, how was I going to be gone for 2 weeks.

I often heard webinars and podcasts from ProShop ERP and EBITA Growth Systems (among others) that stressed the differences between a healthy business and an unhealthy business. A common theme of a lot of these conversations was how many businesses operated with an owner that was completely running the business. When they looked to retire and sell the business, the business had little value. Basically, that owner had just “bought themselves a job”. I realized that was the case here at Ripley Machine.

I initially ignored these warnings because I am still in my 20s and have no desire to sell and/or retire anytime soon. However, I began to recognize how unhealthy it is for a business to run in that manner, regardless of exit strategy plans. Several times it was recommended that owners go away for 2 weeks and see how their business performs. As we continued to work towards improving our business, plans for the trip to South Africa became more realistic and I realized that this may be an excellent opportunity for us to see how things went with me gone for 2 weeks.

In Fall of 2022, I had enough faith in our team to officially commit to taking the trip. I knew the trip was something that would be good for Ripley Machine as well as for myself. It gave our team a deadline to establish processes to be able to handle any of the daily tasks that I currently performed.

How did we go about preparing for this trip?

Over the following months, our management team began to identify areas where they needed me to perform a task or answer a question and we then worked to establish for a way to establish processes for each item that we found. There was a lot of organizational or “tribal” knowledge that we recognized that we needed to find a way to capture and have it easily presentable for members of our team.

The biggest obstacle that we needed to achieve was that I had to humble myself and realize that I had a very good team around me that I could trust and empower to handle duties. I am still working on this to this day but swallowing my pride and allowing my team to take more responsibilities was a huge part of our preparation.

One of the first steps we took was to begin to establish more work instructions. We used to have minimal work instructions in our ISO Certified Quality Management System. In the past year, we have added over 100 new work instructions and have made them easily accessible to our team.

We also began to fully take advantage of our ERP software (ProShop ERP) by utilizing numerous functions inside of the software. We began fully utilizing the tooling management software in the way that it was intended. By doing this, we were able to simplify our tooling purchasing process and all of the information needed to purchase tooling is easily accessible inside of the ERP. Our system will notify us when a tool needs to be ordered and we can easily what jobs the tool is needed for and where to order the tool. We also began to use the scheduling module of the ERP. By doing this, our operators could automatically start on the next job as soon as they are finished with the current job. We also were able to easily identify jobs that would be late. This enabled our entire team to be aware of jobs that we could potentially be late on and be able to work towards a solution to ensure that our customers get the parts that they need on time! We also added detailed notes about our customers and their preferences. This has helped for our team to be able to answer a lot of questions on their own (For Example: “Can we ship these parts early?”, “How should we package these parts?”, “Can we over or under ship on this order?”, Etc.). This work has enabled our team to have the resources that they need to handle a task and make decisions without the need to involve upper management.

We also trained our team on how to operate our quoting software software (Paperless Parts) so that they were able to utilize this tool to not only quote new jobs to our customers but also accept and process orders for previously quoted parts.

How did things go while I was gone?

When I walked out of the office on February 24th, I knew that things were in good hands for the next two weeks and that turned out to be the case. For a majority of the trip, I didn’t have cell service and was unreachable.

On the day that I returned to work, I was able to catch up on all  of my tasks by lunch time. This was in sharp contrast to previous short absences where I spend as much time catching up as I was gone for.

How will the changes that we made benefit our business moving forward?

Since I have returned, we have been able to continue operating with our team handling a lot of the tasks that I previously did. This has enabled me to spend more time focusing on higher level tasks that often were put to the back burner. We have also eliminated the need for management to become involved on minor issues or questions. This has allowed our management team to focus more on improving our processes and other areas of our business.

The changes have improved me as a leader as they have forced me to become more humble and to trust our team.

With our team handling more of what I once did, has allowed me to spend more time focusing on my desire to grow closer to God and serve Him through various service opportunities.

To hear more about the trip itself by visiting “My Vacation to South Africa (Part 2- The Amazing Details of the Trip)”.