Author: Patrick Harrington, Operations Manager
Well, the shift from working at a large corporate to an SME continues to prove a huge eye-opener.
When things went wrong at the Bank there was always a department to sort things out- a Lloyds equivalent of Mr Benn appeared “as if by magic” and the problem was solved! This occurred with minimal impact on my time, and I was able to crack on with the day job.
Yet, as I write this, we are only at mid-morning on Wednesday and already the following has happened this week:
- Two more of our vans have had faults reported and are in the garage- that is now a total of five currently off the road for various reasons.
- Our phone/internet provider has decided to remove the named contact from their files – they are now refusing to speak with us about our intermittent online reception.
- An engineer we were due to meet on site decided to turn up an hour early and then left before we arrived at the allotted time.
- An outbreak of chickenpox has caused havoc with childcare arrangements which in turn affects where our engineers can be.
On the face of it none of the above are disastrous (unlike when we ran out of tea bags this morning and I had to hotfoot it to Tesco!), but all take time and resources to resolve. We are too few for any of us to walk past these problems and we all need to muck in accordingly.
I am not complaining- I love the job and what it entails. I simply thought this entry would likely resonate with our fellow SMEs and open the eyes of others to the challenges faced when running businesses of this size. Let’s see what the rest of the week brings!
