Staying Alive

The struggles of a business trying to survive.

So things have been going smoothly recently. Sales have been good, production has been keeping pace, errors have almost disappeared, my new hires are working out. And then I find this e-mail in my in-box:

i seen a [let’s call it Company C] truck in a porn shop parking lot near rte 173 and rte 41 in wadsworth il. i went to there website and they mention that they deliver for your company. i just thought i would warn you about the people that may be representing you in the field and you are welcoming into your place. this porn shop is known for men meeting strange men and men dressed as women among other things. also the parking area is unsafe for the equipment and load so if your furniture was on that truck i hope it made it to its destination with no problems.

Gee, thanks, stranger. (Sigh.) What am I supposed to do with this?

This certainly is not an e-mail I would have written, but on the other hand I don’t live across the street from a porn shop. I’m presuming that the writer has an unwelcome neighbor that may have arrived after he or she moved in; this seems to me to be the only reason that one would keep track of the shop’s customers. I suspect that by writing to the clients of the people this person sees patronizing the shop, he or she hopes to cut into its business and eventually drive it under. And I’m not entirely unsympathetic. Maybe if I lived there I’d do the same thing.

On the other hand, I’ve done business with Company C for many years and found it to be a trustworthy partner. We used it to deliver our furniture back in the years when we were doing a lot of residential work. Company C specializes in what is called blanket-wrapped shipping. The drivers came to our shop, wrapped our goods in moving blankets, drove the pieces to my clients around the country, and then unwrapped and installed them in the clients’ homes. The advantage to us was that we didn’t have to do any elaborate crating in the shop, and there was no pallet to unload and unpack at the client end. We saw the same drivers over and over again and got to know them well.

They generally owned their own trucks and got the trailers from Company C. They spent a lot of time on the road. The drivers would make circuits of the whole country which could take four to six weeks. They weren’t cheap, but they did care about what they were doing. My clients would give the drivers glowing reviews; I can’t recall a single complaint. The only downside of this model was that it was slow. Sometimes it took four weeks or more for our work to reach the West Coast. Since our final payment was tied to delivery, this could lead to cash flow problems. I don’t do much business with Company C any more, but that’s because we needed to move our tables faster and cheaper for commercial clients, and we developed a bullet proof packing method and now ship by common carrier, with our tables packed on a pallet. I would hire Company C again for the right type of job, but we aren’t doing much business with them right now.

I decided that I was not going to forward this e-mail to my contacts at Company C. It would have been easy to do, but I refrained. Company C is large and I have no idea whether the division I patronized was in charge of that truck. Also, I don’t like to play Big Brother to my own employees, so why should I involve myself with another company’s problems?

A more worrisome situation would be if it were my own company’s truck that had been spotted. We do have a truck, and it does go on trips, but they are almost never more than a single day. When we do send our guys overnight, we don’t pay them for every hour they are away from home. Yes, I cover the meals and hotel bills, but they aren’t on the clock the whole time. So how diligent should I be in supervising every minute they are away? There are reasons to object to porn shops, so I wouldn’t be thrilled to hear that my truck had been spotted at one, but there is other behavior that can cause a problem. Should I forbid my people from getting a beer or two with dinner?

Small-business owners can choose how militant they want to be regarding their employee’s behavior. Big business seems to be quite puritanical these days: drug tests, smoking bans, weight-loss programs — all of these make sense from a cost standpoint but they are also quite intrusive. With a smaller company, I don’t have either the desire or the resources to monitor my employees’ private lives. We do have policies about showing up at work drunk or high — I have only had to enforce them once, and in that case I didn’t hesitate to fire the offender on the spot. But should I concern myself with what they do on Friday and Saturday nights? Personally, I don’t believe it’s any of my business as long as everyone shows up ready to work Monday through Friday.

How about the rest of you? Do you have problems with your employees’ off-hour habits? What do you do about them?

Paul Downs founded Paul Downs Cabinetmakers in 1986. It is based outside of Philadelphia.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=38a76bfc51e0cbfe8b495e74c6898475