Ideas on culture, people & experience.

Before my hysterectomy I tried hard to get the team together for our usual quarterly catch-up. We couldn’t make the timing work. So I did what a lot of owners do when they can’t get people in a room. I sent emails. A series of them. The standards. What we’d have…

This week I made a decision I didn’t want to make. I took a piece of work back from one of my team. Not because they were incompetent. I want to be clear about that, because it’s the whole point. It had nothing to do with their ability. Their life, right at that…

I rang my boss to tell him my daughter was sick. She couldn’t go to daycare and I couldn’t come in. He didn’t say no. He didn’t write me up. On paper, nothing happened. What happened was the tone. Stern. A clucking sound, like a disappointed parent. Then a sigh so big…

Most gyms run on hours nobody pays for. Set-up before the first class. Pack-down after the last one. The clean at the end of the night. Owners don’t put it in the roster because it’s “just part of the job”. I paid for those hours from the start, in the months I could…

The owner down the road was, at times, extremely late paying her staff. Sometimes she didn’t pay them on time at all. Her gym is closed now. I don’t think late pay is the only reason. But I know what it told her people, because some of them told me. What late pay says…

She came to us to try out the gym. She was one of a group of staff working for another owner who’d bought her business at the same time we bought ours. Same month, same market, and both businesses in the same shaky financial position. A level start. Her owner, under…

Three months after we sent the truck out, the customer rang. The motor had failed. Coolant in the sump, a dropped liner. That was odd. The liner had measured perfectly in spec. Liners don’t just drop. We put it down to bad luck. A month later he came into the workshop…