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30 The PCB Magazine • March 2016 ing for all employees run from 5:1 to as high as 33:1. Where in your company will you get higher returns on investment than a commit- ment to this type of training? When you grow your people, you grow the company. Third New Agreement: Be a Systems Thinker As we discussed earlier, more than 90% of the results we produce in the workplace are a function of the systems in which people work, not the efforts of the people. Profitability is a result, not a process. Profitability, as a result, is a function of the systems in which the business is operated, including supply chain management and outreach to customers and potential cus- tomers. Everything is connected. Sadly, most leaders and managers who are responsible for improving profitability are not aware of the powerful role that systems play in determining profit or loss levels. Instead, in efforts to boost profitability, leaders may look at cutting costs by mandating reduc- tion of full-time employees, cutting benefits or services, or hollowing out the organization in some other way. These are short-term so- lutions at best and hasten the demise of the company at worst. Instead, fix the 20% of the systems that will give you 80% of the returns (profitability). A Systems-Based Approach to Turnaround Early in my career, as owner of my own PCB company, I made a very poor hire and turned day-to-day operations of my company over to a new COO who turned out to be incompetent. By the time I realized the mistake, my $10 mil- lion per-year business had become a $7 million business with a significant negative net worth. When I took over to try to save the company, we were losing over $300,000 per month. I quickly realized that if we were to any chance of saving the company, we had to take a systems-based approach to the turnaround. It took only 3–4 months to get the compa- ny back to break-even and we remained profit- able enough to both begin growing the busi- ness again and pay off a huge debt load that adversely affected operations and financial performance for almost three years. There is no doubt in my mind that if we had tried to take the usual (non-systems-based) approach to this turnaround, the company would not have survived. Literally, the rapid move from a loss position to one of profitability was the dynamic that spurred this remarkable turnaround. Figure 9: systems thinking means thinking differently—beyond the box that's already there. the four new agreements to explode profitability