Client Testimonials
Manufacturing Consulting Services, Inc. (MaCS)
Here are the transcripts of testimonials on a standard set of questions we asked our clients. Some were comfortable with video and some were not.
We gave them the list and asked them to respond to any or all questions they felt comfortable responding to. Some questions do not yet have responses. As future clients respond to the list, we will update the page.
The responses are listed by questionnaire number, company and respondent.
There are a couple of instances of duplicate questions to the same respondent because the responses were sufficiently different o warrant posting. This is usually because the testimonials were stated at different times in the consulting engagement.
The links with file numbers are the videos that the transcriptions were taken from. We will shortly post these videos on YouTube and insert links to them in place of the file names.
Thanks for reading.
1 Why did you decide to work with Tim Ward and MaCS?
1.1 [210-0637.mov]
The biggest reason we decided to work with Tim is first of all, being a small business, we have a lot of different jobs we have to do, a lot of different tasks and a lot of different hats we have to wear. So to be able to organize those, create different departments and be able to separate those and organize those so that they’re not all clumped together was a big reason. And then individually in those areas to be able to have a system so that it flows well and we can keep track of everything that we need to keep track of was huge. Because it was one big clump of everything that we had to do. And to separate those out and know the different tasks and be able to pass those off to other people as we grew. To stay sane. That would be the biggest reason for me.
Barter Buff,Monika Seibers, Owner
1.2 [210-0628.mov]
We’re a young company and as a young company, we’re looking to grow and expand and through the process, we realized that we were coming up short on a lot of our systems and procedures and maybe we needed some help with that.
Barter Buff,Tony Seibers, Owner
1.3 [210-0737.mov]
We could see that if we kept operating the way we were, that we would be in a problem in a few years. We had to change something, so our financial advisor (CFO) had experience with you in the past and thought this was the route we should take to improve.
Garbett Homes,Jeff Garbett, Process Improvement Manager
1.4 [210-0688.mov]
We decided to bring out a consulting service because our competitors were following down that path and we didn’t want to be left behind.
Pool Cover Specialists,Tony Ryan, VP Operations
2 What do you like most about doing business with MaCS?
2.1 [210-0639.mov]
We have a vision of our company and we have had a vision of our company to start with. To be able to see that vision have steps and to see how it’s actually going to work because all the steps are laid out and that we’re actually making progress. Because there are so many things in the beginning while you’re coming up with the vision of your company [that] would fall through the cracks: people that didn’t get taken care of or things we lost money on because we didn’t follow up. Seeing that all come together and that the vision of our company is solid is the most exciting part: that it’s going to work.
Barter Buff,Monika Seibers. Owner
2.2 [210-0629.mov]
Well as we looked at things we needed help with, we took his initial course, which is a two hour course and he taught us about what he can offer as far as helping us build our systems. As I got to working with Tim and we developed a relationship, I appreciated the fact that he’s open to hearing my ideas and listening to my concerns about the company and helping me to work on a lot of those things first. As we went through the process, I also realized that he found holes and problems with our company that we didn’t even know existed and he offered direction as to how we can correct those.
Barter Buff,Tony Seibers, Owner
2.3
Tim has a genuine interest in seeing my business succeed.
Debbie Jacketta, Owner & President, Jacketta Sweeping
2.4 [210-0689.mov]
What I like best is that it’s our ideas. In this scenario, I feel like we’re led in the right direction and then we make up our own paths. I don’t feel like it’s something coming from an outside source. I feel like it is something that’s being generated from the company internally. Coached as opposed to crammed for sure and it’s always been a open place to bounce ideas back and forth weather they are good or bad ideas, that’s what’s been very helpful to me.
Pool Cover Specialists,Tony Ryan, VP Operations
3 What problems/challenges has MaCS enabled you to turn into profitable opportunities?
3.1 [210-0640]
There are two main problems that we had, one was being able to follow through with our clients, making sure that they were taken care of, making sure that we remembered and knew what they needed and being able to follow through and not forget. We have close to 250 clients and each individual need that they had we needed to be able to follow through with. So coming up with what we call our pipeline, recording, tracing the progress of that and following through to the end and closing the sale is huge. Not forgetting things or letting people fall through the cracks.
The other biggest challenge was being able to help our clients use our system or our product. That is, training them and helping them understand and be clear that they can do much of it on their own. We are still there to help them if they need it, but them being able to do things on their own, taking less of our time is very big. So I would say that those are the two largest areas that have made a drastic impact on us being able to be profitable.
Barter Buff,Monika Seibers, Owner
3.2 [210-0630]
As I mentioned, as a small company, we started putting together some programs and things that we wanted to utilize and then realized that we didn’t have a lot of experience. What Tim was able to help us do is look at the systems that we already had and modify them to get away from busy work that doesn’t matter.
A good example is customer service. We realized that we needed to be finding better ways to listen to the customer, to reach out to the customer and then look to the future. Tim was able to show us that as we grew, if we wanted to continue our company in other [geographical] areas or just in growing our company, we needed to plan for the future with the employees that we were going to hire, with the systems that we would be using to keep track of our clients information. All these things that you don’t consider at a certain level that can become problems later if you’re not looking toward the growth that you’re looking to achieve. So I appreciated the fact that he was able to help us with not only the current challenges, but pulling out challenges that we were going to have in the future. What this helped us to do in our profitability, as we were able to better our system to reach out to the client, we were better able to help them make more purchases with us, which in turn made us more money.
Barter Buff,Tony Seibers, Owner
3.3 [210-0690.mov]
Almost every one. I know that sounds loaded, but there have been many possibilities, may changes we’ve made in the company. Some of the biggest ones were through-put times. Most of our stuff has been generated on the shop floor, but we’ve made huge, huge through-put changes. In one circumstance, one shop was running 5.3 man hours per cover with an accumulation of 10 employees and the current run time in that shop is about 2.7 man hours per cover with 5 employees, so we basically doubled through-put with half the staff.
Pool Cover Specialist,Tony Ryan, VP Operations
3.4 [210-0691.mov]
One of our biggest constraints in our facility was floor space. We have a smaller facility, we are a world wide manufacturer and we were cramped for space. After about a year and a half of working with Tim Ward and Manufacturing Consulting Services, we were able to reclaim almost a whole division of floor space and we are currently renting that floor space out to another company and making profits that we never would have foreseen before.
Pool Cover Specialist,Tony Ryan, VP Operations
4 How effective has MaCS been at finding and eliminating the root causes of problems in your business?
4.1 [210-0641.mov]
That brings me right back to a conversation that we had of I didn’t know what the root causes were. I knew there were problems and I was just frustrated! So sitting there and voicing those problems and then having Tim say, “Well, this is the problem and this is the problem.” And I was like, “Yes, that’s it!” And so it’s super effective. I couldn’t voice them, but Tim could figure out what they were and that was great. That was a huge relief for me.
Barter Buff,Monika Seibers, Owner
4.2 [210-0739]
Very effective. It was very early on that we found some of the root causes that were causing us a lot of waste. Interestingly enough, some of the things we thought we were best about, we thought made our company better, looking now from the lean perspective, I see that those are actually inhibiting us from improving. For example, our homes, just the way that they look, the design of them, they are too complex. We think we’re a “production” [basic, first-time home-buyer] builder, but we actually build custom homes and try to sell them for production prices. One of the things that I thought made us better then everyone else, now I look at as one of our biggest problems of being a production builder is that we don’t operate like one.
Garbett Homes,Jeff Garbett, Process Improvement Manager
4.3
Tim Ward has done a great job of identifying and eliminating the root causes of problems in my business. Before working with Tim, I did not even know I had root causes of problems!
Debbie Jacketta, Owner & President, Jacketta Sweeping
4.4 [210-0692.mov]
I would say very effectively. Before we had a hard time visualizing what were our constraint problems, what were our flow problems. With Tim’s support and the tasks he had us do, it help to point us in the right direction to find many of the problems that we thought were problems, weren’t the root cause of the problems. Most of the cause of the problems were up stream and he has been very effective in helping us find those problems.
Pool Cover Specialists,Tony Ryan, VP Operations
5 What has MaCS “Fired” you from?
5.1 [210-0642.mov]
A full time job! Even though I had more than one full time job in my being part of creating a company. It’s brokering. We have now hired a full time employee, our first full time employee and she does that job and it’s a full time job for her, which puts me in charge of a couple of other full time jobs, but that is one full time job that I don’t have to do and it’s being done wonderfully and it’s very productive and it’s amazing.
The next is “Orientation.” There is one more that is almost complete and that’s exciting to me too because I am ready to hand that one off. That is being able to train our people [clients} on how to use our services. Orienting them and training them to be self sufficient in being a part of our organization. That is very exciting because that takes the people [clients] into what we do, being completely able to use our services without their hand being held the entire time. And then that frees up our time. Obviously time is money, so it’s big.
Barter Buff,Monika Seibers, Owner
5.2 [210-0631.mov]
This is probably the most exciting part of what Tim offers. It allows us as we grow our company to bring on other people who, in turn can do the little things that an owner of the company doesn’t want to be doing because they get more and more busy. One of the things that he really helped us with is one of the first positions that we brought on was a broker or somebody who does customer service. What he had helped us do is work through some of the problems that we’ve had with our customer service and he’s training us now to put together manuals, information that we can pass on to the employees so that they can follow something that we’ve already prepared and that we’ve already gone through. Like every company, you have successes and failures, so we want to get our successes down so that the people that come after us can go somewhere to find what to do with every situation. So by putting together information that we can just hand to a new employee, it’s enabled us to fire ourselves from that particular job.
Barter Buff,Tony Seibers, Owner
5.3 [210-0740.mov]
He fired me from my sales job which I had with Garbett Homes for over ten years. They brought me in to be manager of Lean Operations and work with Tim. That was completely different from what I was doing before. So that was just the start of it. Now I go around changing lots of peoples job descriptions, for the better. Most people ask me to do it, that’s the interesting thing. What I try to do is eliminate the waste and as soon as people start seeing what I’m capable of doing and the pain I’m able to eliminate in their jobs, then they start asking me to do things. That’s been good. And that’s been really effective in gaining credibility with people. Of course it’s with the support of the owners of the company, but when people start seeing that “I don’t have to deal with this pain”, then they want you to fix it.
Garbett Homes,Jeff Garbett, Process Improvement Manger
5.4 [210—0693.mov]
Many things Tim has fired me from. Like we said before, usually you’re happy when you’re fired from something with Tim Ward. One of the things that was most important to be fired from was on our shop floor. One process of manufacturing plastics, we used to buy the sheets of plastics, bring it in house and actually cut it up into smaller pieces and those pieces would go to the machine shop. That was a really big constraint for our company and we didn’t realize it. We were able to outsource the plastics and have them cut cheaper than we were able to buy the raw sheet stock to begin with and that was a great thing to be fired from. Then there was a long list… a big board that we used to track all of that process in. We would write on the board what dates we requested plastics to be cut on the table saw and pretty soon, the list grew longer and longer and longer until we had to add another list. So getting rid of the list entirely by outsourcing was just a fabulous change. It saved us money across the board with employees, safety hazards, you name it.
Pool Cover Specialists,Tony Ryan, VP Operations
5.5 [210-0627.mov]
{Microphone & video systems test} [Tim] has fired me from several… several things: fired me from reinventing my process every time I start with a new client; fired me from having to rewrite all of my email communications because many of them are now stored in a central location that I can easily access. What else has he fired me from? Oh Yes… how about hunting down content for websites. Yes, that’s been huge savings. {Chasing the client to have them actually deliver the promised content.}
SitesbySara.com,Sara Lambrinos, Owner
6 What would you say to a person or company considering doing business with MaCS?
6.1 [210-0643.mov]
You don’t know what you don’t know. And if you sit down and talk with Tim for a few minutes about the frustrations that you have with your business and realize that there are things that you don’t know were causing problems and that he can help with that and it doesn’t take more then 5 or 10 minutes and can completely change the direction of your business, and could mean the difference between being successful and failing. I think it is worth the 5 or 10 minutes to talk with Tim.
Barter Buff,Monika Seibers, Owner
6.2 [210-0741.mov]
It’s going to be hard. It’s going to be unpleasant. It’s difficult to change and that’s what Tim is all about is eliminating waste and that requires change. It requires a different way thinking… a different way of looking at things. It requires commitment. I think vision is one of the most important things because not always is it quick, not always is it the way business is normally done. But usually you see the improvements and you feel the pain leaving as you’re working pretty rapidly. But it’s always difficult to change. And that’s what you find is, I think, the biggest obstacle: people’s desire to keep doing the same thing that they’ve always done.
Garbett Homes,Jeff Garbett, Process Improvement Manager
6.3 210-0635.mov]
The main reason that anyone goes into business is to make money. If you’re not making money, you might as well not be working. The thing that we found is that when you put money into Tim’s program, that he teaches you systems and ways to better put together procedures to create the flow that you need and then you will find you’re making money.
For us, what we’ve found is that investing in Tim’s program has not only helped us to make money now, but the expectation of what it can make us later, in the future to keep things growing and growing and making money. So we really appreciate the systems that he’s taught us and the different programs that he’s helped us to really define what we’re doing so that we’re not wasting our time, we’re actually making money. My recommendation to any business who is questioning weather or not they need this kind of consulting is that without Tim’s help, you may find that you’re actually moving backwards instead of forward and again, that’s why we’re all in business is to go forward and make money.
Barter Buff,Tony Seibers, Owner
6.4
Tim comes in with a whole ‘nuther way of looking at the business that, when you’re in the middle of it, you just can’t see. Tim was able to focus my attention on the methods we were trying weren’t working and then on how to fix it.
Debbie Jacketta, Owner & President, Jacketta Sweeping
6.5 [210-0694.mov]
You better do it quickly. Do it as quick as possible, do it as fast a possible. You may not see the benefits immediately, but it’s hard to foresee the benefits you’re going to achieve. Without Tim Ward’s services, you may not even know that you have the problems you have until you look deeply into them or step back and look at them in a different light, so do it quickly, rapidly and quit wasting time.
Pool Cover Specialist,Tony Ryan, VP Operations
7 How effective have you been with implementing strategic improvement with MaCS vs. by yourself?
7.1 [210-0695.mov]
I would say we have been only about 30% as effective without the service. We used the service for many years and then we took it on ourselves and it’s easier to get complacent without the service ahead of you… people keeping goals in front of you and constantly looking for change. It’s easy to fall backwards, as I feel like some of my divisions have. We’re still gaining efficiencies daily and maybe I’m just an overachiever, but without Tim Ward’s services, I feel like we’ve only done about 30% as good in implementation.
Pool Cover Specialist,Tony Ryan, VP Operations
8 What other benefits have you received in using MaCS service?
8.1
I can see light at the end of the tunnel. I can see that critical systems are beginning to fall into place.
Debbie Jacketta, Owner & President, Jacketta Sweeping
8.2 [210-0697.mov]
One of the biggest benefits that we have received as a company and I have received personally, is my ability to manage my people. It’s amazing how the Kanban Pull [visual inventory and production trigger] system that we have in place has managed our company and actually manages most of my shops, especially my machine shop. We have a very sophisticated Kanban Pull system and all the products and [component] bins basically return back to the machine shop for replenishment, thus the bins basically manage most of my divisions. The bins are coming out of my parts store, they get deposited directly into a kitting cell and get replenished, therefore, they’re kind of the work order or the management of that division. Any other bins that are depleted throughout the organization, basically just get replenished, they go back to their origin. Everything just kind of operates around the bins. The most incredible thing is that our company has been growing about 20% every year in business. We still have yet to implement an electronic inventory system to the level we would like to, but the Kanban Pull System and visual inventory has pretty much run the business without the electronic inventories in place and we’re still moving forward.
Pool Cover Specialist,Tony Ryan, VP Operations
9 What is bigger and by how much: the cost of MaCS services or the cost of NOT having MaCS services?
9.1 [210-0742.mov]
I don’t know what we’re paying Tim, we’ve probably saved a few thousand dollars here and there, but what I see happening in the future and hopefully within a year, I’m estimating, on the conservative end, of having saved Garbett Homes $10,000-$20,000 per home just in cost, that’s not with reduction of building, that’s actual cost savings, so profit margin. If you add that up, it gets to millions of dollars very quickly and I have a hard time imagining that we’re paying Tim that much. So the cost of not doing lean is usually weather you continue your business or not. That’s when lean steps in.
Garbett Homes,Jeff Garbett, Project Improvement Manager
9.2
I estimate the cost of not working with Tim Ward of Manufacturing Consulting Services, Inc. as something larger than 100 times the cost of this service. It’s so big, I’m still trying to comprehend it.
Debbie Jacketta, Owner & President, Jacketta Sweeping
9.3 [210-0698.mov]
That’s a double sided question and a hard one to answer because it’s hard to weigh cost on a lot of the things that we’ve been able to achieve. Some of the biggest ones: floor space. It’s hard to put a number on floor space. But I can say that without the service, without the changes we have made, we would have been out of our facility, grown out of our facility, five years ago. Currently we’ve had many people tour, even competitors tour our plant that have much larger facilities and can not believe that we can put out just as much product as they do in the smallest facilities that we own. That means our inventories are lower and everything is running through a lot faster and more efficiently, which has also led us to way better quality [and] through-put. We also beat everybody in our through-put and customer deliveries. So, it’s been fantastic.
Pool Cover Specialist,Tony Ryan, VP Operations
10 Would you do business with MaCS again? Why?
10.1 [210-0743.mov]
Absolutely! Because for me, especially, having been immersed in lean, it’s all about constant improvement. You start becoming rabid about getting better, doing things differently, looking at things in a different way and wanting to improve in all aspects. The tricky thing about that is that as you start improving, it shows you how much opportunity there is, so yes, absolutely. Tim helps me to see things faster than I would on my own, he helps me skip and run instead of walk and stumble.
Garbett Homes,Jeff Garbett, Process Improvement Manager
10.2
YES! I’ll probably be a life-long customer because in the time we have worked together, I have seen improvement in our processes, quality & timeliness.
Debbie Jacketta, Owner & President, Jacketta Sweeping
10.3 [210-0701.mov]
Absolutely! In fact, in the future, my goal is to do some more implementation with Tim Ward and to start integrating into the electronics side because his services are very valuable. You can’t put a dollar amount on them. It’s hard to rate or foresee where your company is going to go because the paths are endless.
I never really believed in lean concepts, I was asked by the ownership group I worked for to pursue them because our competitors were. And I have to say that I was a “concrete head.” I was the one guy that was like, “O.K., I’ll do this because my boss said so,” with some disbelief. After about two months of understanding the concept and reading my own individual books with Tim’s training, I’ll never go back. I can’t believe the difference it’s made in our manufacturing facilities, I never dreamed the things we’d be able to accomplish. It’s a fantastic service, I highly recommend you use it.
Pool Cover Specialist,Tony Ryan, VP Operations
11 By how much have any of the following metrics changed by working with MaCS?
11.1 How much has profitability changed by working with MaCS? (% or $ amounts)
11.2 How much have costs changed by working with MaCS? (% or $ amounts)
11.3 How much have delivery timeliness and reliability changed by working with MaCS?
11.3.1 [210-0703.mov]
Dramatically is an understatement. Before Tim Ward’s services and before we saw the changes of lean manufacturing, in one division, it was taking us over five hours to make one cover. In some circumstances, to make 20 covers, it would take us a day and a half. We can currently do 30 covers per shift which has dramatically changed our through-put. Because of the way we are working on orders now, we can produce and ship within two days, which is common to our marketplace normally 2-3 weeks. Our product is totally customized. Every piece is custom made from separate divisions and we still, even with an increase in business, hit the 2-3 day ship time.
Pool Cover Specialist,Tony Ryan, VP Operations
11.4 How much has Volume Flexibility (changes in how quickly you can increase/decrease the quantity of what you do) changed by working with MaCS?
11.4.1 [210-0704.mov]
Dramatically. In one division when we started, we could only make 8 systems per day. That quickly went to 12, quickly to 14 and the current record is 60, in the same division, with actually less people in the same shift. The through-put has been incredible. The quality has increased dramatically. It has come with some investment, but it is dramatic. Instead of having a couple of employees working that division the entire day, those two employees can go in there and knock out the current daily orders within hours. And then those individuals then move to different divisions to help in areas that may need the help more. Most of my divisions work that [way] now in that we have a team of roving employees that are not just trained in one division, they are trained in multiple divisions and they can just move from one job to another depending on what my customer’s needs are. {So, essentially, you can “Go to where ‘flow’ has slowed.”} Absolutely! And then we have an incredible vision of that. We do “Pull to Order” and we work off of date stamping. If one division catches up, the employees can move to the division that is still trying to catch up. And with less people, we can get more done.
Pool Cover Specialist,Tony Ryan, VP Operations
11.5 How much has mix flexibility (changes in how quickly you can change the product/service mix of what you do) changed by working with MaCS?
11.5.1 [210-0705.mov]
It’s helped dramatically with the mix of products we push through the shop, but the one thing it has done for us is taught us how to design our product correctly so that we can sell it to different people with less cost. To make that more visual for you, what we’ve done is, we private label to three different manufacturers and sell worldwide. We sell a similar product. What we have done is we’ve just changed colors of the systems, we’ve changed labeling, we’ve changed simple things. Before we were manufacturing different systems entirely for the different private label clients. Now what we do is we design one system, we simply anodize it a different color, we add about $3 worth of different stickers to that product and we can change within minutes of manufacturing our own product or private label products. So it has dramatically helped the through-put for those product lines.
Pool Cover Specialist,Tony Ryan, VP Operations
11.6 How much has inventory changed by working with MaCS?
11.6.1 [210-0702.mov]
I don’t know if you have enough “tape” to even begin. The first one that sticks out in my mind is shop floor space and through-put. For one division alone, we used half of one of my division’s floor space to create some motors, which is probably a 100 by 100 foot room. That same manufacturing is being done a heck of a lot more efficiently in a space that is probably 3 foot by 9 foot. Which is dramatic!
If you would have seen the inventory lurking around the shop floor at the time when we consulted Tim, as I look back at the video, I’m astounded at how much inventory we had in process, one process or another and it was still in process. Now we have a very smooth flow, I can basically call 24 or 48 or 72 motors to my company per day. They’d be assembled in one area, they’d be completed entirely in that same shift and the next morning we can have another 24-48 show up, which has allowed us to reclaim floor space. And that’s just in one of my four divisions.
The other things that has dramatically changed is my order turn time. I have been able to go up my upstream manufacturers and work with my upstream manufacturers and, in most cases, teach them to become lean which turns around to bigger, quicker through-put for me, which is fantastic. For example in one market [the vendor for the 2nd highest annual cost commodity] we have a 6-7 week lead time. In my top 15% [of items ordered], they allow me to take that product in two weeks. That change alone is definitely due to lean, is unheard of to any of my competitors and has definitely dropped my inventory by 70%… 70% of our number 2 item as far as dollars in our corporation. So that has been fantastic.
Through-put from fabrics for our cover shop: we have basically doubled through-put with half the people, which allowed us to shrink our lead times to our customers. Our current rate is [that] we ship from 2 to 3 days from point of order. In most cases, if one of our customers wants to cancel an order, they have to pay a restock fee because the order is already done and ready to ship. We gain a lot of business from our competitors because they are currently 2-3 weeks out on their orders and we’re still holding a 2 to 3 day turn time and our business increased about 30% this year.Human Resources Capabilities
Pool Cover Specialist,Tony Ryan, VP Operations
11.7 How much has operational replicability (to additional locations) changed by working with MaCS?
11.7.1 [210-0707.mov]
Tim Ward’s services has helped a ton in that area. We were able to open another plant in an Eastern division and we were able to set that up and have the same standards apply at both plants very quickly because we were able to replicate the procedures we already had in base. We learned to produce in certain ways in theUtahdivision. We were able to transfer those ideals directly to theIndianadivision as well as Kanban [inventory and production-triggering] systems. We were able [to] just pull those across the board, implement the same Kanban Card, Reorder Points and basically run that division from theUtahplant as far as all ordering still takes place at theUtahlocation. We are able to manufacture in that division. So it’s helped dramatically because it saved the learning curve for the second division because we already had standards and procedures in place that were pretty easy to pull across the board and implement in [our] next division.
Pool Cover Specialist,Tony Ryan, VP Operations
11.8 How much has business cycle survivability changed by working with MaCS?
11.8.1 [210-0700.mov]
I would say go down the lean path, because it’s made us more efficient and kept cost down so much. Our industry went in the tanker with the downturn economy. In fact, pool building was off the mark by over 80% and many companies went out of business during this period of time. Our company not only survived, but we also grew, both in market share and business because of our ability to offer products cheaper and quicker.
Both of my competitors were actually bought out by other entities and they’re still in the business market, but no longer independent.
So, I would say it drastically helped. Without it, we would have never survived because we were able to do things with less people, we were able to trim down the workforce and produce just as much product. If we had been in the same situation four years ago or five years ago, before we started implementing Tim Ward’s services, we would have definitely suffered and probably been either bought out or went out of business ourselves.
Pool Cover Specialist,Tony Ryan, VP Operations
11.9 How much has “hassle factor” (preventable executive and senior management interruption rate) changed by working with MaCS?
11.9.1 [210-0633.mov]
As the saying goes, time is money, so as a boss, especially if you
have employees, when you don’t have a good system together that allows for them to figure out the problem on their own, they tend to come to you and interrupt you in the processes that you’re doing. By having Tim’s system and the procedures that he helps you to put together it enables us not to get interrupted so that we can focus on what we do best, the employees can focus on what they do and in a lot of ways, it also helps your clients because if you have a system that allows them to answer their questions on their own, it enables us to not have to be interrupted through the training. Tim really emphasizes ways of training your clients on how they can better use the products and services that we offer on their own, so it’s benefitted us extremely.
Barter Buff,Tony Seibers, Owner
11.9.2 [210-0634.mov]
As the saying goes, time is money and any time you’re wasting time, you’re not making money. When you have employees or customers that you could have trained to do things on their own, you have a better chance of working on the things that are more important and not wasting time, so yes, Tim’s program has definitely helped us put together procedures and programs so that the employees can find answers on their own so they don’t have to come to us. And he has helped us put together some systems where we have worked with clients and they can obtain information on their own and so it frees up our time to do the things we need to do.
Barter Buff,Tony Seibers, Owner
12 Is there anything else you would like to say?
12.1 We had our 2nd best year in 43 years in business in 2011 & I hope to never do that again in the way we did it. Based on what I’ve seen so far, I anticipate being able to do it again with much less pain.
Debbie Jacketta, Owner & President, Jacketta Sweeping
12.2 I have knownTim Wardfor more than eight years and worked with him extensively on two separate client engagements. He is very knowledgeable and perceptive and a tremendous asset to any business needing to improve its processes and profitability.
Carter Summers, CPA,CMA
12.3 If you like consultants that pat you on the back and tell you how wonderful you are, don’t hireTim Ward. However, if you want to solve problems and move your business forward, Tim is the consultant you should use.
Carter Summers, CPA,CMA
12.4 Tim Ward is the only consultant I’ve ever paid an unsolicited bonus…he earned it!
Carter Summers, CPA,CMA
12.5 The fact is, as business owners and managers we are usually a big part of the very problems we need to solve. The truth is we are so close to them, we can’t see them. It takes an independent, knowledgeable outsider like Time Ward to help not only see the problem but make the changes needed to fix them.
Carter Summers, CPA,CMA
12.6 You can learn and do lean management on your own, but you will do it much better and at much less cost by using the services of a passionate pro likeTim Ward.
Carter Summers, CPA,CMA
12.7 Lean management is not a quick fix fad, it is a principle based methodology for improving any business, but it requires insight, patience and real work to make happen. If you haven’t been diligently working using the lean principles for at least five years, then you will benefit greatly by coaching from someone likeTim Ward, who has made lean management the focus of his entire career.
Carter Summers, CPA,CMA
12.8 Tim Ward is an expert in applying lean management concepts and tools to the chaotic world of business.
Carter Summers, CPA,CMA