Blackstone Valley Execs Talk Tough Decisions
Laying off employees, adapting to customers that want their orders right away and focusing on quality are becoming more necessary as the economy continues to slide, said a panel of local business presidents at a Blackstone Valley Chamber of Commerce breakfast this morning.
The panel, David Glispin, president of Sunshine Sign in North Grafton; Tony Brookhouse, president of Koopman Lumber Co., which has three locations around the valley; Bill Smith, president of W.B. Smith Financial Services of Grafton and Rick Mongeau, president of Lampin Corp. of Uxbridge, all encouraged the about 70 attendees at the Pleasant Valley Country Club in Sutton to remain positive and look for opportunities while making difficult decisions.
Brookhouse said Koopman has gone from 129 employees in 2006 to 96 today. "We're working harder than ever, because we have to do more jobs," he said. Wherever possible, the company has adopted Wal-Mart's "vendor managed inventory" approach.
"We get Georgia Pacific and others to put the materials on our site and we don't get charged for it until we sell it," Brookhouse said. "We try to look for innovative things."
On the sales side, though, customers are clinging to their money as long as possible, said Mongeau. "Customers are desperately holding onto their cash, so they wait to the last possible minute to make an order, and they want it now," he said. It's up to Lampin, or any other company, to accommodate those customers, he said. "We need to make sure we keep our edge and not drop the ball in these times. We will have competition that will fail, and we'll have opportunities."
Lampin was the only company represented on the panel that has not laid off employees recently.
"Either you're going to do the socialistic thing and keep everybody and cut their pay 5 or 10 percent, or you're going to do the Jack Welch thing and cut the bottom 10 percent" of employees, Smith said.
Glispin described laying off employees as equally "gut wrenching" as having an employee get hurt on the job. Both Sunshine Sign and Koopman try to help laid off employees find other work. Brookhouse said his company carries 100 percent of employee health care benefits for three months after termination.
Even though Lampin hasn't laid off employees, it has cut employee hours. Mongeau said cuts of any kind are less painful when companies develop a clear plan ahead of time. "I am investigating what we would do down the road, because you have to be prepared for it," he said.
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