How to Ensure Your Heat Doesn’t Burn Customers

There’s an old saying in business: “We’re only as valuable as our last mistake.”

It’s normally used when referring to client relationships; and as we well know in heat treatment, one mistake can ruin an entire batch of a client’s materials and destroy years of hard-earned loyalty.

If we don’t want to micromanage the folks operating our forges, what’s to keep them from eventually making a mistake that costs us a key customer — or worse — the possibility of future business with similar clients?

Surprisingly, we do have control over this issue, although not many heat treatment leaders practice it consciously. There is, in fact, a way to prevent the type of customer-costing mistakes heat treatment leaders are concerned with and raise our performance while we’re doing it.

To discover how heat treatment facilities could prevent the mistakes that cost them customer relationships, I went looking for the teams that worked in hot environments where errors were so costly, folks fixed potential problems long before they turned into mistakes. One team I found doing this extraordinarily well were wild-land firefighters.

These men and women are tasked with inserting themselves behind active forest fires that sometimes stretch thousands of acres, containing the fires, and getting out safely. A mistake in that environment wouldn’t just cause damage — it would cost lives.

Here’s how they ensured mistakes wouldn’t ruin their results:

1. Never sidestep a problem— Many business leaders believe solving any problem is a win — and in the short term, they’re right. However, each challenge a team faces pulls them away from their objective while they take time to solve it. If someone else comes across the problem next time, they have to solve it all over again.

What wildland firefighters have learned to do is not only solve problems as they encounter them, but to change how they accomplish their jobs so they never face that exact challenge again. They’ve learned that inside an active forest fire is not the time to relearn how to solve problems. When we’re in the middle of operating our largest forge, we don’t have the time to problem-solve, either.

2. Catalogue mistakes— As part of the training course every wild-land firefighting recruit goes through, each person is tested not just on the right thing to do, but on what to avoid doing. Candidates watch hours of documentary footage on mistakes their predecessors made that caused injury and loss of life.

Every person in your facility brings years of experience and hard lessons learned. They can be one of your most valuable resources in learning how to avoid major mistakes and how to fix them before your heat treatment processing and the client relationship is affected.

3. Regularly share lessons— Every forest fire is a learning environment for people tasked with controlling them, just as every time we treat our customers’ products can be a learning experience for our operators. While senior leaders may bring decades of experience to the table, top performers understand that any solution that works is worth investigating - because it might save someone’s life.

It’s vital to regularly sit your shifts and individual operators down and go over what challenges they’ve recently encountered and how they solved them. As a leader, decide whether what you hear is worth sharing across your organization so innovation becomes routine.

Mistakes won’t burn client relationships if we contain them while they’re small.

Written by:  Shawn Rhodes, nationally-syndicated columnist and professional keynote speaker (keynoting MTI’s 2022 Spring National Meeting).