Today I attended a Jobs for Jersey forum at Montclair State.  My company was invited by the Manufacturing Network of NJBIA to which we belong.

There was a panel of dignitaries, which included 3 past governors, Brendan Byrne, Donald DiFrancesco, and Jim McGreevey.  Others on the panel: Dennis Bone (Pres of Verizon), Ralph LaRossa (Pres of PSE&G), and other academics and small business owners.  The panel discussion was intended to be a first step in providing solutions to NJ’s employment challenges.  Lt. Governor Kim Guadagno made the Closing Remarks.

A lot of good points were made covering many areas.  I think everyone agreed that anything government can do to streamline bureaucracy is a step in the right direction.  The “normal cost of doing business” in NJ is high and part of this is related to regulation delay.  This creates investment postponement or delay.

Some questions from the audience seemed to call for more financial support from the state for programs such as convention centers or sustainability programs.  In today’s climate, this is not realistic.  Better for you to build a business case and go forward on the merits. Someone on the panel pointed out that the current NJ regulations favor green, wind, and solar projects, and that it would be difficult to find anther state where the incentives are better. Another mentioned that many of the state-sponsored projects such as Liberty Science Center, while interesting and appealing, have not paid for themselves and continue to require state subsidies.

Governor Christie has decided not to move forward on the new tunnel project, mainly because any cost overruns would be born by the state.  And which major government project has not had significant cost overruns?  Now if they were using us for Project Management support, that would be different!  If we allow bridge and tunnels rates to rise during the peak hours, then most people would shift to off-peak hours.  Right now there are roughly 1.5 hour windows around each rush hour where the crossings are at capacity.  Go into the city in the middle of the day or the middle of the night and it is a breeze.  We can force this kind of shift at almost no cost, thus increasing total daytime usage significantly.  Yes, people don’t want the pain of paying to go outside normal business hours.  No pain, no gain, right? How about saving some/most of that increased revenue so any new capital project pays for itself beforehand?  A Port Authority Lay-Away plan!

But I digress.

Much like Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno’s speech I wrote about in July, she came on today again with excitement and positive.  She now has 10 months in office so she spoke on the changes in place already. One program I like which addresses the main issue above is the Red Tape Review Commission which has already started to reduce the time to get permits reviewed.  Note that they are not guaranteeing to approve permits, only to complete the permit review process a lot faster.  Some cases will be reviewed in 10% of the time it currently takes!  And it will cost the state less!  Now THAT’s progress!  What else are they doing?  You can see for yourself at NJ’s Priorities. Ms. Guadagno was a great speaker.

All in all a good session.  I came away feeling that NJ is waking up and realizing that they need thriving businesses in order to create jobs.  And now they are doing some good things to get them.

Tom Smith
Managing Director
Focused Solutions Group
http://www.fsgnj.com

New Jersey Waking Up?

by Tom Smith

NJ Lt. Governor Kim Guadagno spoke at a breakfast I attended on 6/15, sponsored by the  Association For Corporate Growth.  This was ACGNJ, www.acg.org/nj.

The topic was “Making New Jersey More Business Friendly”.  She spoke for about 30 minutes and took questions.  As you might expect, it was generally upbeat and positive.  It was mostly superficial, but the overall tone was good, and I think they are really thinking how they can help, especially without using taxpayer support (which I generally agree with).  After all the deficit is huge!

Of course, she spoke about the state’s 11 billion dollar budget deficit which they are fighting to close.  She stated that they feel the Number 1 thing they can do without spending tax dollars is to eliminate red tape.  Nice article from 6/8 about this at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/nyregion/09njbudget.html.  Christie feels they will have something close to what they need by the end of this month, and Ms. Guadagno supported that position.  As of this printing they have agreement on the cuts.

She mentioned Executive Order # 2 a number of times.  Christie signed it on 1/20/10.

Go to         http://nj.gov/infobank/circular/eocc2.pdf for the actual text version,  or go tohttp://nj.gov/infobank/circular/eoindex.htm for a listing of all executive orders.  EO#2 sets “Common sense principles of red tape”, and all cabinet members needed to buy into this before they were appointed.  She went over a few of the tenets but it is not a long read so you can check the link.

She mentioned they need to stem the flight of population exiting NJ, being about 250,000 since 2002.  This means decent jobs must be created to slow or reverse the trend.  So they have initiatedthe NJ Partnership for Action, funded privately by a number of large NJ companies such as Verizon and PSE&G among others (no taxpayer money), seehttp://www.state.nj.us/governor/news/news/552010/approved/20100412b.html for some points on the subject.

She noted that PA has 23 offices overseas.  NJ has had none.  NJ is establishing 2; one in Shanghai and one in London.  She noted that for every dollar spent on tourism, $3 to $6 goes back to the state’s economy.  She also noted that Christie is against drilling for oil or natural gas off our coasts and this decision was prior to the gulf oil crisis.

Ms. Guadagno provided us with her cell phone number, 609-575-8111, and asked anyone who needs her help is free to call her.  That was interesting!  She also asked us (business owners) to give her the contact information from our 5 favorite vendors  and 5 favorite customers that are outside the state and she would contact them to attempt to get them to move to NJ.

Her assistant stayed later and answered more questions.  Her name is Christina Genovese, Director of Business Affairs, Office of the Governor, PO Box 001, Trenton, NJ  08625-001, 609-575-2537, Cell: 609-575-5616, Fax: 609-777-0350, E:Christina.Genovese@gov.state.nj.us.  By mid afternoon, she had sent me a “thanks for speaking with me, and is there anything I can do” email.  Impressive!

It’s still too early to tell, and actions speak louder than words, but I like what Governor Christie is doing so far!  Let’s see if he can keep it up!

Tom Smith (www.fsgnj.com)

Note:  Tom is a director of NJTMA.  This article conveys his views and not necessarily the views of NJTMA.

I prefer to connect with people I actually know, so I will not accept invites to connect from people I don’t know. This is what LinkedIn recommends, and, not being an “open networker”, I agree with them. I feel that this increases the value of my network to my connections, again as LinkedIn suggests.

But I also realize that 5 “I don’t knows” will get the invitor’s account suspended, so I do as Eric suggests and archive the invite.

Even if I actually meet people at an event, and they send an invite request to me immediately, I politely send them a message saying I only connect with people I know well, that I just met them, and invite them to continue a dialog with me and accept other personal meetings. I keep those invites in my Inbox and this reminds me to decide when I am comfortable accepting the invite.

Notice none of this has to do with pictures of my connections. If I know them I don’t care if they have a picture or not. I do recommend pictures because I think people without pictures are hiding something. And I let my connections know how I feel.

I also don’t like when any of my connections hide their connections from me using their privacy settings. I ask them a few times to change their privacy settings to enable viewing their connection list and point out that their network is of no value unless I know who they are, and that it is not fair for me to show my connections to them if they are not reciprocating. If they do not open their network to me I drop them as a connection. My network is too valuable to me to be used like that!

After scanning my own response, it is obvious to me that your question sparked a flood of thoughts and emotion! Am I right? I am for my network!

Tom Smith - tom@fsgnj.com
Focused Solutions Group – www.fsgnj.com

As companies grow from the startup level, they go from a multi-disciplined culture to one where the individual tasks are too much for one person to handle.  Policies and procedures need to be created in order for the product’s quality to be sustained.  Those things in that multi-disciplined person’s head need to be documented.  This way, acceptable products can be made if that “expert” is not around.  Maybe they are moving to another area of the company where their expertise will help train the team with another product.  But it’s not enough to train people.  At some point the training feels like “sink or swim” to the new people.  So they prefer written documentation.  Then they can be sure they are doing the job correctly and there is lower stress.  I believe employees want to do the best job they can in order to ensure their own job security.  But they need the right training and tools.

If too many procedures are put in place too early, the small business chokes from the bureaucracy, and growth is slowed.  The challenge at this step is to install the right procedures and processes at the right step so as not to choke off the innovative drive from the people that have helped the company grow to this point.  That’s where we come in.

We analyze the company’s current business processes (even ad hoc ones), product designs, specifications, and customer requirements.  This is called business process mapping.  In LEAN design, we are looking for bottlenecks to streamline time from order to shipment.  The quality approach also wants to be sure that product quality is consistent and not compromised by short cuts. Our experience with many different kinds of manufacturing environments, at all sizes of companies from startup to multi-nationals, enables us to deeply understand the potential pitfalls at each step in the process.  By first determining where we are, we can create a plan to go where we want to go.  But the first pass of this overview analysis can only take a short time, like hours or a day or two.  We want the company to realize their existing process flows.  Raise your hand if you think your CEO is out of touch with what you are doing at the plant level!  Okay, maybe most of our readers are not plant level, but you know what we mean, right?  As companies grow, they develop these ad hoc processes, and management (almost) doesn’t care how things get done so long as they do.  They have a lot of things to worry about, and are assuming that their great multi-disciplined folks are taking care of their side of things.

One problem is that management processes scale better than production processes.  Huh?  When sales double, most of the time the products are the same.  There may be more quoting but the load on management is not increased very much.  Not so with production.  In many case a doubling of sales results in a need to double employees if you are doing the same thing the same way.  This is what we mean by scalable.  Think in terms of high growth, like doubling, tripling, increasing 10x, 100x, 1000x (orders of magnitude).  If you think you can use the same processes at 1x, and at 1000x just hire 1000 times the number of people, you are mistaken.  You’ll need to change the processes so that when you get to 1000x, you can do it with much less than 1000 times the number of people.  I’ve seen 90% gains (or more) in this kind of scaling.  A 90% gain in productivity would mean that 100 people are effectively doing 1000x the production that one person was doing.  Talk about growing pains!

If you were really going to get to 1000x, that one person needs to grow to 100 people (in this example).  Those 100 needs to be trained since that one person cannot possibly be expected to supervise all 1000.  In fact, that person can’t even train that many.  They need to train other key people as they are growing who will train others, and so on.  Now you get into a case of telephone, and if things are not written down, something will be “lost in translation”.  Not to mention you may really have language barriers to deal with.  Hopefully those on the fence now realize that you need to document things in order to grow.

The ISO9000 system can easily be summarized as “document what you do, and do what you document”.  Everyone knows many companies that are ISO9000 qualified.  The early adopters in the US did it because they were exporting to Europe so their customers demanded it.  Earlier than that Deming put forth his quality approach.  The six sigma approach is now being implemented.  Some companies are doing all of these.  The point is that no matter what system you wind up using, or developing on your own, it’s better than no system.  It creates some organized structure that enables you to grow.  Even if your customer does not require it, if you want to grow you will have growing pains and you will need to get organized.

Once management realizes that they need to grow and build structure, they have reached the first hurdle.  Acknowledging they have a problem.  At least now they can work on solving it.  But you don’t want to go too far too soon.  That’s why it is often best to bring in some outside help to enable proper planning of the next steps.  Office-side process, production-side processes, Quality, lead times, costs, inventory turnover, profit margins all need to be looked at so none of these will suffer, and ideally improve.  And significantly!  Much like a business plan it becomes a roadmap to 1000x, and beyond!

Contact us if you are in this pinch, on your way to it, or want to know how to prevent it.

Tom Smith          tom@fsgnj.com
Focused Solutions Group, www.fsgnj.com
Management and Technical Services for NJ Manufacturers