How I try to run the company
I picked most of this up from operators, maintenance techs and two or three patient bosses. I wrote it down so the people I work with can point at it when I don’t live up to it.
Go and see
The monthly report tells me what happened. The floor tells me why. I try to walk one of our plants every day I’m not traveling, and once a month I go in for the shift change at eleven at night, because the night crew sees a different plant than I do at ten in the morning.
I also visit customers. One Monday morning in April at a distributor’s yard taught me more about fill rates than a year of dashboards.
Safety comes up first
Every meeting at Cordell starts with the same question: did anyone get hurt or nearly get hurt? That includes the fifteen-minute huddles at the machines and the board meetings. Anyone in the building can stop a line if something looks wrong. Nobody has to explain themselves afterward, and I’ve thanked people at all-hands meetings for doing it.
We track near misses reported, hazards fixed within a week and supervisor safety walks. We stopped paying bonuses tied to injury counts in 2016. Those bonuses mostly taught people not to report.
Keep the dull work on schedule
Preventive maintenance done when it’s due, changeovers done the same way every time, tooling labeled, floors dry. A plant that does those things has time left over for real problems. A plant that doesn’t spends its days putting out fires and calling it hard work. I have run both kinds.
Give customers bad news early
Our distributors hear about a price increase thirty days ahead, with the index number behind it. When a lead time slips, our customer service people call them before their contractors do. When rod prices fall, our adjustment falls on the same schedule and nobody has to ask for it. Two distributors called the first time that happened to check whether we’d made a billing error.
Pay for skill and train our own
A nail plant needs people who can set up a header, keep a drawing line running and rebuild a gearbox at two in the morning. We pay above the local rate for skilled trades and run our own four-year maintenance apprenticeship. Thirty-four people have finished it since 2017. Eleven of our nineteen supervisors started as operators.
Show everyone the numbers
Every employee sees the monthly plant scorecard and a simplified profit and loss statement. When a quarter goes badly I explain it myself at the all-hands meetings, on all three shifts. People make better calls when they know how the business works, and they take bad news better from me than from a rumor in the break room.
Spend through the down years
Housing goes up and down, and steel moves faster than housing. In 2021 we decided to pay for a four-year capital program out of cash flow and kept spending through the 2023 slowdown. Some months that was uncomfortable. The new machines were running when demand came back.
No one improves themselves out of a job
Since 2021 the new machines have taken over work that used to need about forty operators. None of them was laid off. Most moved into maintenance or onto the new collating line in Jackson. The promise has cost us some savings in the short run. In return we got about 1,100 small improvements from the floor last year, most of which I never would have thought of.