Small Things Matter in Business
The fish business was losing money and it seemed there was nothing I could do to stop the bleeding. The production which had increased and was to be a source of joy was now a source of worry and sadness. Generally, as production increases, economies of scale should begin to kick in to reduce overheads and increase revenue. Sadly, this was not the case for me. I had identified what part of the process was causing the losses but the root cause still remained a mystery. I knew I was using more gas (LPG) than normal but the reason for this was unknown. I also knew that one of the burners that was affected by an earlier fire was not burning the way it ought to. Being the engineer that I am, I took it out to check for any damage but found none. I triple checked all the valves, hoses and connectors for any sign of leakage, but there was none also.
This “mystery” lingered on for months and if I didn’t know better, I would have said that some spiritual force was against me. The financial losses were adding extra pressure.
Things came to a head when I had a large order of fish to dry. A process that would take slightly more than a cylinder of gas to complete had consumed more than a cylinder and had not gone halfway! I then estimated that if I continued, I would use 3 cylinders and might still not complete the process. This was in addition to the fact that I might miss the deadline for the delivery.
I knew I had to sort this out quickly so I reached out to a more experienced engineering colleague who came to assess the situation with me. After a lot of inspections, we swapped burner valves and found out that one valve opening was smaller than the other by about 0.3mm and this was restricting proper gas flow for effective combustion! To give you an idea of how small this is, the bore diameter in the picture above is 1.5mm so a difference of about a quarter of what you can see was costing me thousands of Naira as well as a lot of man hours! A process of less than 10 seconds rectified this problem and everything was back to normal.
This incident got me thinking about a lot of things including how “small” things we might take for granted in business are costing us money and we don’t even realize it. The true effect of those “small” losses you overlook will become greater as you increase production or as your company grows and it might be more difficult/expensive to rectify them then. Also, the root cause of some of our challenges might not always be very big or significant things. It might be a 0.3mm issue so we must be very thorough when searching for solutions.
As an entrepreneur, never be afraid or feel too big to reach out for help. If you are struggling with a particular issue in business, the chances are that someone out there has solved what you are struggling with. Reaching out can be done physically or virtually (online sources).Two good heads as they say is better than one!
What “small” problem are you overlooking that you should sort out right away?
