Take the Plunge

When you were a kid there was probably some swimming hole with a cliff that all the kool kidz jumped off. You went up to the edge and looked over and the more you looked the scarier it got. Eventually you either chickened out or took the plunge.

There was a plant that made a commodity consumer product. They made under their own brand name as well as for store brands and had about 800 SKUs.

Marketing wanted a way to break out of the pack and decided that they would make to order as small as 4 cases and guarantee 48-hour shipment.

This was a pretty dramatic change in the business model. It would be especially dramatic for the plant that had to meet the 48-hour turnaround. They were just not set up to do it.

There are two ways to approach a change like this:

The first way, that most people would think of as the better way, is to plan. Corporate discusses the idea with the plant. The plant discusses it internally to see how to comply and decides it can’t be done, that they need a substantial amount of time to implement, that they need additional machinery and so on.

Maybe, a year later they start taking steps to reduce the dispatch time to a week or so on orders of 24 cases or more. Smaller orders take longer.

This company didn’t do that. Once they came up with the idea, they more or less told the plant: “As of next Monday you will make to order, in lots as small as 4 cases and ship in 48 hours after receipt of order.

As you can imagine, it was a mess initially. In the end, they got things under control and were making the new schedule.

The result? Their market share increased by 8% in less than a year.

The moral of the story is, once you make a decision, don’t overthink or overmanage it. Just do it. Take the plunge.

The pain and risk of the decision can be overshadowed by the lost opportunity of delay.