Equipment Te better you maintain your equipment, the better it will operate and last. Downtime for repairs can be very costly. Employees will also take better care of clean, well-maintained equipment. Tey may not care as much about taking care of dirty or poorly maintained equipment and that takes the equipment on a downward spiral. Properly register any warranties to assure coverage should a problem come up while the equipment is under warranty. Keep complete records on all maintenance carried out on each piece of equipment. Tere may be certain requirements to keep a warranty in effect. If you can’t show what you’ve done, it could be much harder, or even impossible, to prove that a warranty is still in force. Read, and then file, all manuals and warranties in an easily accessible location. Make sure that you and your employees are following all use, safety and maintenance procedures. Weigh the cost/benefit ratio of an extended warranty or protection. Take into consideration whether a plan would provide a loaner to cover downtime in case of a breakdown. Factor that into your analysis.
When you prepare budgets, include what you can afford for needed new equipment and maintenance of all equipment. Also budget for replacement costs and service agreements. Weigh the cost/benefits of ownership verses leasing of each piece of equipment that has that option.
Operational Systems Information systems face four different types of threats. Te first is natural and political disasters, such as floods, fire, tornados or hurricanes, earthquakes, and war or terroristic attacks. Most of these can be insured against, but make sure you have a plan in place to recover data so it is just temporarily lost. Te second type of threat is software errors and equipment malfunctions. Tis would include hardware failures, power outages, and undetected data transmission errors. Another threat is unintentional acts. Tese are the most common of all four threats and result from human errors. Te last threat is the least common and is referred to as intentional acts, which take the form of sabotage, computer fraud, or embezzlement.
Make sure that all operational systems are properly installed. Obtain adequate surge protection and virus protection. Schedule regular backups to avoid loss of data or expensive re-entry of data due to a breakdown or other loss of data. Depending on frequency of data entry, backups could be scheduled as frequently as hourly, extended to daily, or backup some data just on those days that a program is used. Develop a disaster recovery plan and make sure it is being followed. Such a plan does no good if employees that work with anything covered by the plan are not aware of it or don’t do their part to make sure it is followed correctly.
Personnel Having the right personnel is important to everything else in this article. If they don’t care enough about you and your business, they are not going to take care of your assets. If they are dishonest or unethical, any operational system is subject to misuse. Even a great system can easily be sabotaged by a bad employee. Even with the best employees make sure that you have good controls in place so you’ll know if something or someone is going wrong. Good verification also reduces the temptations for doing wrong. As Ronald Reagan said, “Trust, but verify.”
To keep the best employees, treat them as the important people that they are. Pay competitively. Provide competitive benefits. Treat them as you would like to be treated. Make sure they are properly trained to use whatever other assets they might need to employ in completing their duties. Make sure that all needed safety equipment is in place and properly used.
Treat all your assets as if the profitability and survival of your company depends upon them. It does!
Mike Campion is a celebrated speaker, entrepreneur and author of I’m a Freaking Genius, Why is This Business So Hard?. A small business expert, Mike has built several multi-million dollar businesses, the most recent achieving $4.3 million in sales in the first 18 months. As the host of the “Conversations with a Genius” podcast, Mike imparts his business wisdom on his listeners. For more information about bringing in Mike Campion for your next event, please visit
www.MikeCampion.com.
Steve Trusty is co-editor of Turf News 14 TPI Turf News May/June 2017
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