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1. COVID became a potential threat in January, more pronounced in Ohio towards the end of February time frame. I had been with Wilson for about 2 months at the time and had no loyalty to the company, I decided to stay and ride out the virus.
2. We implemented a disaster playbook created by @WilsonCompanies that set revenue points for when we had to make cuts to overhead and staffing. The severity of revenue drop dictated how much needed to be cut and from where. It was unknown how badly we would be effected.
3.Throughout the first quarter (an already slow period) we experienced revenue drops that placed us into the 3rd of 4 benchmarks. This was the deciding factor for my long term plan at Wilson.
The president announced that all of leadership would be taking a 15% pay cut and he would be dropping his salary to $0. Any president willing to stick himself in the same line as his management will forever have my trust and loyalty.
4. Through the entire process we were forced to layoff a multitude of staff, force negotiations on vendors, become frugal to a new level, and eliminate all non-essential spending. This trend continued coming out of the initial quarantine revenue drop.
5. We also made a strategic decision to shut down our new construction division, which was 70k on average of our monthly revenue. Routinely high AR and subpar GP were deciding factors to exit.
We dropped the sales position, pivoted techs to a new install model, and in turn created a greatly successful serviced based sales model. From that point moving forward revenues began to trend upward, but now with gross profits following suit.
7. Lessons learned: -Mass layoffs are probably the hardest thing to do as a manager. However, it forced a valuable lesson of having to evaluate revenue generating employees purely based on performance.
To this day a year later, all revenue producing employees are evaluated on performance and it has exponentially increased our revenue potentials.
- An engaged management team is the only way to effect change quickly
-Overhead is always too high. You would be amazed at the amount of waste accumulated inside of overhead.
- Continuously question every expense, no matter how small. Strategic expenses must be justified.
