JobsOhio Welcome Assessment – Open Ended Questions

I hope to gain confidence and knowledge as a business owner in order to help my business continue to grow. I'm hoping to learn to be a better leader to meet the needs of my team.

I need help in defining my role as a business owner and helping me know what is best in regards to the decisions I make. I became the sole business owner after my husband passed away. I am still floundering in this role.

Colonial was founded in 1975. My late husband and I purchased it in Jan 2018 so I am a fairly new business owner with much to learn.

To learn how to become a better leader and to improve my time management and problem-solving skills.

To increase the company revenue and to be in a Brick and Motor location.

I am enthusiastic about learning new processes and am excited to explore new opportunities in leading a creative team.

Our company is looking to shift focus and diversify to be more profitable. How do we maintain our reputation and company culture as we make tough decisions.

We would like to diversify by adding a e commerce site for many of the products that we can sell. I and the company will need to learn new skills, ie: running an e commerce site as well as selling to new clients. Stepping out of our comfort zone to find new clients.

To achieve the knowledge of running a business and build a net work of like minded individuals.

Team empowerment, small business education and networking.

Delegate responsibilities to "departments" to enable more growth.

Four straight years of growth, so keeping up with systems that grow with demand has been challenging. Good core team that can lead, just need empowered to.

1) Find and fill in any gaps in my own leadership
2) Learn as much as I can about Professional Management as a system
3) Figure out how to integrate Professional Management with various management practices already in place at my business that are currently working well
4) Meet 1-2 (or more) great peers that I can stay in touch with after the year is over and keep learning with

1) Building my leadership team to run the business nearly independently of me. I want to reduce my hours worked to be less than 20 hr/week while continuing to grow and improve the business.
2) Solve a nagging labor productivity problem in the manufacturing side of the business that I've been dealing with for several years
3) Grow our EBITDA to $1M/yr

I am soon to be 66 years old and founded this company in 1991. I was a member of Vistage from 2011-2015 and benefitted greatly from that experience. We self-implemented EOS (Traction) about ten years ago. I'm currently engaging a business coach who is helping me work through something he calls "half-retire" (Jim Muehlhausen). I've been focused on building the leadership team of Replex and working myself out of a job since engaging Jim, which is over a year ago. Jim calls it playing "Owner Jenga". I fired my Plant Manager in April and promoted someone else into that key position. I just hired a well-experienced production engineer who starts with Replex on September 23. I'm in the process of executing price increases right now. We just got funded with a USDA grant to help pay for a 600kW solar array on the roof of Replex. I get calls regularly by PE firms and brokers wanting to buy my business, which I generally rebuff, with one exception I can tell you about in person. We have a Deming consultant working with us as we are implementing 5S, PDSA's and soon will be implementing SMED on the shop floor. There are only 2 companies in the USA that do what we do: us and one other. There are 2 competitors in Canada, about 8 competitors in Europe and an unknown larger number in China/Asia. We ship about 20-25% of our sales outside the USA each month, into about 13 countries on three continents regularly.

HR development

We are in an ownership transition

As a bootstrap woman business owner, accessing business knowledge from experienced successful business owners is paramount.

To make it thru with a business.
This has been the DARKEST 2 years of my 25 years in business, We have had a strong AMAZON presence and two years ago the TAP slowed to a trickle suddenly. In 23 years we had never gone backwards, I thought it was a hiccup, I was wrong. We are missing 1.2 million in AMAZON sales but have the expenses for a 2.2 million dollar business. All of our other platforms have stayed pretty level. Attempting a pivot plan at this point.

We are attempting to transition into a brand that we created on our journey, how to efficiently make that happen with clear goals etc.... My business is truly a bootstrap, started with my art driving sales, evolving into web sites and tools, then into manufacturing of art materials, which birthed a cork and canvas style business that we were setting up to franchise, THEN COVID, so we pivoted that into a boutique and used our manufacturing equipment to make personalized gifts and swag type items, with our lower sales from amazon we closed the boutique (didn't have cash for the slow 1st, 2nd quarters) (3rd and 4th quarters were it's gravy season) we created a showroom room and are working with schools on fundraisers, local business for swag etc. Hopefully this isn't TMI :0)

If I am being honest I am not really sure - I think being surrounded by other small business owners and networking as well as having an opportunity to speak openly about my business and get feedback from others in similar situations.

To better prepare for the future - Becoming the owner of this business in 2022 I see many areas where my business maybe didn't adapt to over the years. I am hoping to make the right investments for my business to strengthen and grow it.

We are a small player in a large industry with a strong existing customer base. We have had problems acquiring new customers over the years as the business was not in " Growth" mode. As the business has now changed hands we are trying to find the best method to maintain growth in our industry.

We’ve been in business almost 11 years now. We are doing well, but I believe we can always do better. My wife and business partner, Letha, normally does the business networking/training and I am the one in the business doing the day to day operations and management. I think I could benefit from some hands on business training as we are entrepreneurs and really just made this stuff up. I look forward to learning more about team culture and financials.

We are always looking to grow. My focus is g increasing revenue and continuing to be innovative and community minded.

improve my ability to lead the company. build something sustainable and resilient.

move from managing employees to coaching, inspiring, and encouraging.
to reduce mundane and tedious tasks and allow opportunity for employees to work on problems rather than work to compensate for problems

We acquired this business in 2019 but it was founded in 1988.
initial changes that needed to be made were clear and we have implemented those.
There was excitement and buy in, as we hit the ground running, invested in new equipment, and brought in new work.
There was a sense of collaboration as employees with tenure and experience worked with us (the new owners) to improve the shop.
There were lots of "low hanging fruit" and easy improvements, but after 5+ years we have hit a rut and any remaining issues we now "own" by creating or ignoring them. it feels like the honeymoon phase has ended, and we are all learning to deal with each other again.