It was a particularly hard week at the factory this week. So I thought I would get some of it out of my head and maybe look back at it in the future and see it in a different perspective.

Maybe, if I can find the time, I will do it regularly and maybe someone else will find it interesting.

I’m a 62 year old white guy and I’ve been trying to grow my business since I bought it in 2002. We mix powders and liquids and pack them for our customers who are mostly in the Agrochemical sector. At this time of year we are very busy because the sun comes out and farmers need stuff that our customers sell. Nobody carries stock if they can help it.

Our customers are mostly small businesses but some of them are selling the stuff that we make for them to big businesses and some of those are very big and pretty uncompromising when it comes to delivery. So delivery is important.

We have about thirty people working in the office and factory including a brilliant young chemist and his assistant who has just left school.

So why was this week so hard? Well firstly there was a lot to do. Our average week has 25 jobs in the plan and we manage to do about 95% of them. This week we had over 40 jobs and we managed to do 26 of them! You have to imagine me standing in a room with 40 people all shouting for their product at once. Meanwhile we started the week with one of the four shop-floor supervisors missing and finished with only one left.

In a small business every absent employee is a problem, which is one of the reasons I don’t take holidays, but the mechanical genius who handles our engineering went on holiday and then got sick. Our guy who runs the team who look after all the material movements and vehicle loadings and unloadings had some sort of altercation with a dog and went to hospital. Our recently appointed processing supervisor was called to the bedside of his dying father-in-law.

Against this background one of our customers is annoyed we have not finished the ten tonnes of a product that he needs us to re-label and re-pack so he can deliver it to his customer before it is too late for the crop. The customer overlooks the fact that his several changes of mind about exactly what we should do with the pack has delayed our start by a week. And we got the job finished and dispatched by noon on Friday.

Another customer has been calling two or three times per day about his re-labelling job which must be completed by the end of the week (or miss the crop deadline) while at the same telling me that he expects to make £1000 per pallet from the deal which will probably won’t make us much more than £100.

A powder blending job finished on Wednesday and the customer supplies his label details on Thursday by email requesting a photograph of the labelled product for his customer by return and dispatch to the customer on Friday. I compromise my standards over the details of his label which don’t comply with the new CLP labeling regulations because I’ve no time to teach the client his own business.

We complete the production and dispatch of a liquid product that a customer in Italy has been screaming for, including our design of the the new CLP compliant labels.

A granule repacking job for another client completed and shipped but as a result of inexperience by our sales staff this job had taken rather too long to finalise the packaging specification so is late and I needed to make a last minute design decision for the production of the pack label. I hope that the customer doesn’t have reason to disagree with my decision. The pack looks good so he probably won’t.

A liquid repacking job finished and is shipped to the customer’s customer and we hope it will not miss the crop deadline. A pity that the customer did not supply all of the labels that he should have done so we had to print more ourselves. A pity that we managed to lose two of the special bottles that we bought for the job and so I had to compromise my standards again by using a couple of bottles of a lower specification. It is unlikely to make a practical difference as the product should be used by the end of next week!

Thursday was a particularly stressful day because we were due to load a shipping container for the Philippines with 15 x 1000 litre IBCs of an unusually dense liquid that we have made for the customer. The loading was due to take place at 10:00 but the absence of the supervisor with the dog and fist problem meant that the labeling and final preparation of the IBCs was last minute. For reasons of economy the customer uses a 20 foot container for this shipment and this means that we need to load with a ramp. To do this we use the assistance of a helpful neighbour who carries the 15 IBCs to his site and loads to the container under our supervision. The bad news is that shortly after arriving at the neighbour’s site his trailer collapsed and one of the 15 IBCs is lying on its side with a crumpled undercarriage and a slow leakage of product onto the bed of the collapsed trailer. The thick dense liquid is an environmental hazard. Three hours later we had pumped the contents to a new IBC, topped up with a small amount of spare material, cleared up the spillage and completed the container loading, waving goodbye to the patient driver of the container.

That was the day that my wife agreed to transfer another large amount of our capital to support the business. She is not happy about this!

On Friday we completed the first of a small filling and packing job that involves assembling a refill pack of fragrance used in one of those machines that squirt perfume in public toilets. We understand that the particular pack is destined for a trial at Wimbledon so we hope that Andy Murray likes it. The customer has been very patient with our rather stumbling start of filling this product and I hope that we can work it up into a successful and profitable line. Certainly it will please the women on the packing line yesterday who were very keen to do more.

Friday also included a consultation with our local steel fabricator over the design and installation of a new platform and mixing vessel for making a lot more of the thick dense stuff to put into IBCs. Hence the need for more capital. We should have this new capacity installed by early June so we need to start the training of the process operators as soon as possible. In the absence of our bereaved process supervisor I made a start with a new guy for the 2000L mixing suite. At least this resulted in another batch made and we’re only 3 batches behind the plan!

One of the things that people in large companies and public services and especially government don’t seem to understand is the extent to which individual employees’ personal problems impact on the management and operation of small companies. The dramatic reduction in the supervision in the factory this week is an obvious example and the consequence in our ability to respond to the customer needs is equally obvious. Less evident is the potential for increased quality defects, hazards and injury. In this we appear to have been lucky, I say “appear” because although there have been no accidents or injuries to staff the quality issues may surface later. However a more obscure example arose yesterday when our excellent chemist brought to my attention a problem that he was dealing with concerning his young assistant.

Apparently on Thursday night this young guy had gone out for a drink with an associate from school. In the course of this drink the associate had spiked our lad’s drink with what he said was Diazepam. The result was that our technician had driven to work in an unfit state to drive or work. Our first concern was for the lad’s health and safety, that he should not be asked to undertake any work that would hazard his or others’ safety and that he should not drive home.

He was taken home but we won’t know whether or not he got any medical attention or reported the crime to the Police or even if he will return to work until Monday.

Well that’s the mind dump finished. Perhaps that is what a blog is for!