Here is another story for the record books.

The Lesson - be open to new ideas and change. Spending thousands to save pennies never works. Listen, Think, Learn and Act.

These stories both good and bad should send up success or warning signs for you to learn from experience.

A company calls me in to help streamline their business. They had heard about what was done for Eckerd and wanted the same result. Needless to say I walked into one of the most confused, messed up companies I had ever seen (next to the government of course).

They had a similar process to Eckerd - Repackage and Resell products under FDA watch.

• They were about 13% the size of the Eckerd operation.
• Eckerd had 28 people when i finished  they had 110 currently so they were doing 13% of the volume with 400% of the people.
• Eckerd did $300+ million and shipped 125,000 products per week - they did $40 million and shipped substantially less.
• Eckerd had zero inventory shrink and spoilage.
• They were bleeding cash
• They had waste, spoilage, expired products.
• They may have been packaging the spoilage illegally and risked huge fines.
• They operated out of 4 facilities next to each other, Eckerd had 1. Since they had no visibility they were blind to what they needed on the shelves.
• They could spend hours looking for product to fulfill an order (which warehouse, which shelves - where is it) and Eckerd would spend seconds.
• They moved all the information between departments and accounting with a multitude of spreadsheets.They re-entered data and made a bunch of mistakes.
• I could go on and on here but they were or are an FDA dream visit account.. Everything you could do wrong they probably were.
• The family was weaving companies in and out of the structure and taking millions out the back door.

So i put a plan together with a price that was more than fair. Cleaning up a mess like this is a ton or work. Their CEO wanted to pay me 5% on the dollar and said well i know enough now on how to do this so i will just go offshore and get it done.

They had the opportunity with a contract to fix the ship and license the tools to keep the process clean and fast. The whole process had to be redone. My fees were mostly backend so their out of pocket was very low up front for the value received. Probably a 10-20 to 1 return and eventually a 50-100 to 1 return. So they were making money that would to directly to the bottom line working with me.

Needless to say they are on the verge of collapse today and nothing has changed.  They may have gone bust and most people have lost their jobs.

None of this was necessary - sometimes companies want to cut corners and in this case they were tripping over thousand dollar bills to save pennies.

With my solution they could have cleaned up the flow and had the other employees working on new initiatives and projects.

This same CEO blamed the issue on the recession and their ability to not get more money instead of his failure to fix the ship.