Wallets, money and… Math, soaping and…

Wallets, money and…Measuring character

Honesty is kind of a slippery slope. It goes like this: You hand a guy your wallet to hold. If he’s a number one, he never even looks inside. Give it to a number two and he’ll go through it looking at every item – but returns it exactly as received.

A three? He looks at everything and takes a few bucks before returning it. A number four? When you return to retrieve it, he says. “What wallet”?

While we generally don’t think of honesty in those stark terms, the fact is the difference between a completely honorable person, and the miscreant can be a pretty short distance.

In business character and truth are personified by the customer who pays on time and even when he’s a bit late he’s good to his word about writing that check before the week’s end.

In the case of our associates it’s simply doing what they say they will. It’s delivering products on time, responding to that emergency in a timely fashion, making that difficult collections call and most of all honoring their word.

In the end, honesty is an accurate indicator of character and character is pretty much everything when it comes to the people we can trust.

Next up: Expect what you inspect.

Math, soaping and…Their relationship

Other than mathematicians and rocket scientists, pretty much nobody has reason to use the algebra we learned in high school and especially to solve for x! But using math to address and sell the benefits of our offerings is another matter.

Whether it’s creating a warewashing cost estimate of per rack or month, a proposal to that on premise laundry for costs per load, or even the labor costs to maintain a terrazzo foyer at an 80% or 90% appearance level, they all require math.

Likewise we use it evaluate (or should anyway) to measure the actual profitability of that high service account that – while high volume, consumes an inordinate amount of your time.

And finally at its most basic level, we even use it when we’re discussing use cost versus cost per gallon or pound. Yep, like it or not basic mathematics is core to success in the business even if we never solve for X.