Drama is fine for the theater,

not so fine for your business and life

BY RICH SCHMITT
Management specialist

I was talking to my son a couple months ago. He is single and not in a relationship. He was saying that he really wanted to reduce the drama in his life. I asked what that meant and he said that work, friends and girls were creating a lot of stress for him. He said that the girls in his life were especially stressful and involved a lot of active work to maintain happy, peaceful relationships. He said further that some just seemed to be in a continuing state of crisis that required that he be doing something to bring peace to the relationship on a regular basis. I asked where he was finding these girls and, while I won’t be specific, he does not seem to be looking for girls at church socials — if there still are church socials for young men in his area.

With vast consulting experience, I suggested that his recruiting process might be flawed and that I thought there actually were girls who didn’t require excessive attention for a good relationship. I suggested that he should focus on lower-drama relationships going forward. He said he would consider whether it was worth it.

As I was thinking about wholesaling in 2012, I think this would be a good year to actively reduce the drama in our lives. I doubt that we can eradicate all of the drama, but I think there is a lot of low-ROI (return on investment) drama that can probably be eliminated that would make our lives more pleasant and productive. The first step is to consider some of the drama areas and then to select the drama that we want to eliminate.

Some thoughts

1. Drama customers. While it is always tough to fire customers, in the current market it is even tougher to justify. With that said, there are some customer drama-queens that you ought to at least consider firing. They consume an inordinate level of resources. They often generate low to negative profit when you consider the drag that they create on your company. They can be terribly demoralizing.

a. Chronic complainers. Some customers must have had or have an unhappy life where they feel the need to gripe about everything from the weather, to the traffic, to the world as a whole and, so you don’t feel left out, about your company.

When I worked for a Fortune 50 company, I had a customer who was unhappy about everything we did with him. It just seemed that he was mad at us all the time. One time, he called me to loudly remind me how horrible we were. I told him that we were working very hard for his account, that we appreciated his business and we were frustrated and disappointed that all our hard work resulted in making him so unhappy. After a minute, he said that he really wasn’t unhappy with us, it was just his style to complain aggressively whenever there was a problem. It was the turning point in our relationship as he realized that his style created so much drama in the relationship. So before you end any relationship, always try to reform the offender. If you finally decide to end the relationship, you will have a clean conscience knowing that you have done all that you can. Efforts to change drama-customers doesn’t always work because some of them enjoy complaining and are probably happier when they can make your life a little more miserable.

b. Complainers who have valid complaints. It is important to separate the chronic complainers from those who like you and can help to identify the important problems for your company to address. Some of your team will put these customers in the same bucket as the chronic complainers since they both create added work and drama. Management must differentiate between the two types and deal with each class in vastly different ways.

2. Drama Employees. As with all labor issues, consult your labor attorney so you remain in compliance with local, state and federal laws. Sadly, the morass of laws that companies must comply with seem to be getting more complex and sometimes less based on common sense. While many drama employees were probably removed as a part of the belt-tightening that most companies implemented, sometimes new ones appear over time. So take stock of your team looking for these:

a. Chronic complainers. Some probably learned it from your customers while others are just “naturals.” Either way, they can create a lot of management stress and consume a disproportionate amount of time that could be spent leading the productive people on the team. They demoralize and annoy your happy workers and their productivity is impacted as they devote hours nitpicking about all facets of the company. As with customers it is important to distinguish between the ones who are just not happy versus those who care and can provide management with important insights into the company and its processes.

b. Chronic poor performers. Beyond the obvious productivity issues created by poor performers, there is the drama they create for management and the morale-drama they create among the good members of your team.

c. Non-team players. This group is often the toughest drama–creator since they are sometimes the most talented and most ego-centric employees. It is a day-to-day recalculation comparing the good that they do with the damage they inflict. In my career, outside sales and IT people have been the most difficult. I think that the skills and personality that makes these people great also seems to make them more difficult to work with.

3. Drama vendors. Ideally manufacturers are there to help but sometimes that is not the case.

a. Inconsistent objectives. Many manufacturers are publicly traded companies. Sometimes their quarterly performance focus can cause them to cycle from Jekyll to Hyde over the course of a quarter. Every time they change direction, make new requests or demands, it creates drama in your company. While sometimes these changes are for the good, they create extra work as your company adapts and adjusts to the supplier’s new policies and edicts.

b. Poor performance. This can occur many ways:

i. Shipping errors. Every messed up order becomes a succession of missed commitments, reorders, credits and extra work for your team.

ii. Invoicing errors. Every invoicing problem also results in extra work to correct the problems and get the accounting adjusted.

iii. Excessive shipments to fill orders. When a supplier sends a big order in 10 separate deliveries, it creates churning that spawns drama. (10 receipts of inventory, 10 invoices, 10 put-aways)

iv. Unreliable. When you can’t count on your suppliers to do their job, it adds drama and extra work for your team.

c. Poor product quality. This is getting shot in both feet.

• Your customers are upset so your sales team must focus on fixing the problems versus selling.
• Your inventory team may become the quality control group for the supplier and expediters to get the working product into the customer’s hands.
• You may need to find a second, reliable source of supply.
• Plus you have the cost and drama of processing returns, warranty claims, credits, etc.

When you find yourself justifying a high-drama vendor because they give you a little better price, review the list and ask yourself if it is worth all the drama that you must endure.

4. Drama Markets. Sometimes fully serving a region involves operating in some good and some bad markets. While you might like to cherry-pick a couple of the sweet ones, your success in the region may require that you endure some rotten-apple locations. Some of the clues are:

a. High employee turnover
b. Employee conflict with other employees and customers
c. High inventory shrinkage
d. Theft
e. Vandalism
f. Armed robberies.

I think staying in poor markets is always an explicit decision that is not taken lightly. There should always be ongoing activities to improve the branch’s performance.

5. Drama Product Lines.

a. Non-strategic lines. Ideally your stocking list is a premeditated, carefully crafted list of products

designed to fully serve your targeted types of customers. At least that was the plan in the beginning. Then as they say, the plan got altered to address the events of the day, week or years…in other words, “stuff happens.” The result is often a non-strategic offering that includes lines that just don’t make sense now. (Some probably never made sense.) Many wholesalers kid themselves thinking that these lines are benign. They are not! They divert inventory dollars, sales focus, buyer time, management direction from the lines that are the keys to your success and thus ought to be your priority.

b. Overlapping lines. While there may be a need to source some products from multiple suppliers, there is a real cost and a drama cost in the process.

• Many plumbing wholesalers have too many faucet lines. They hope their broad offering of special order products will somehow attract additional business but for many that is just the dream and certainly not the reality.

• Just reducing the sales calls from manufacturers will reduce your drama, even if you enjoy talking to their people.

Certainly this is only a list of thought starters so I challenge you to take a couple minutes to review where your stress and drama is coming from and to remove a few from your life. While I don’t think a drama-free life is possible in the world today, I think an effort to reduce the drama can make us all more productive and less stressed as we head into 2012.

Rich Schmitt is president of Schmitt Consulting Group Inc., a management consulting firm focused on improving the profitability of distribution and manufacturing clients. Rich is also the co-owner of Schmitt ProfitTools Inc. (SPI), a business producing print, CD-ROM, web and palm-based catalogs as well as pricing management and analysis software for wholesalers. Go to www.go-spi.com for more information.