THE WOODWORKING INDUSTRY’S PLAN B
Get on Board with Outsourcing BY JOE KNOBBE, CABINET MAKERS ASSOCIATION
When I started in the woodworking business in the late ’70s, it was with a company that made everything. We laid up our own particleboard with cabinet liner for cabinet boxes, ripped and planed our own faceframe stock, and manufactured all our own doors. In fact, we were once awarded a project that required a profiled molding for a mitered cabinet door. To make the doors, we bought an old moulder and ground our own knives. This was for one single kitchen project. I learned a few lessons from this company. Turns out that while they were chock full of talented
craftsmen, they were also in continual financial difficulties and they eventually had to close their doors. Many years later upon reflection of what caused this business to fail, I always came back to the same thing: failure to focus on sales and lack of outsourcing. In this business, one of the main constraints is a lack of time—time to focus on running your business, increasing sales and measuring your ability to focus on doing what you do best. It’s easy to lose sight of profitability when you’re building a business and, quite often, pride gets in the way. It is not uncommon to think that you and your company can do it better, faster and cheaper than the competition. It is often what drives us daily. But I’ve learned that it’s important to take off those rose-colored glasses and realize that there are numerous ways to do it better, faster and cheaper, and still leave work at a decent hour to spend time with your loved ones. It’s called outsourcing. Years ago, we realized that during the course of a year, we were buying hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of custom profiled molding (base, casing, crown, etc.) from a supplier that we had a very good relationship with. Then we thought, “Maybe we should stop buying from them and make our own.” CONTINUED ON PAGE 34 ›
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