Features
Driving change
How Brian E. Hall used clear communication to turn things around at Industrial Transport Inc.
By Mark Scott
Smart Business Cleveland | October 2008
Page 1 of 4
Brian E. Hall came to the realization that Industrial Transport
Inc. had reached a plateau. Client contracts had grown stale and
new business wasn’t coming in fast enough, meaning both were
failing to keep up with rising costs.
This left the company out of working capital.
“We ended up with a heavy mix of contracts under old rates that
were trying to support employees who were now making significantly more money,” says Brian E. Hall, the company’s chairman
and CEO. “Our costs had risen and our rates were flat.”
Hall knew things needed to change. The company, which manages freight yards and trailer switching at trucking terminals, needed to diversify its service offerings. At the same time, it needed to
narrow its focus. The end goal of this divergent predicament was
to help the company increase revenue.
While Hall had some ideas about what to do, he needed to formulate a plan that he could share with his 450 employees to get
them on board with what had to be done.
“If you equate it to taking a trip to California, you have to know
how many miles you are into the trip, when you’ll have to stop for
gas, what your fuel mileage is, how many miles you can drive
before you’re too tired and what time you’ll be there,” Hall says.
“Without the metrics along the way, you’ll have no idea.”
Hall set out to gather as much data as he could to get a clear idea
about what had put Industrial Transport in this difficult spot and
how to get out of it.
“There has to be a common set of metrics,” Hall says. “Those have
to be monitored both at my level but, more importantly, at the closest
level where the cost is being spent or the revenue is being derived.”
One problem area was the assignment of job responsibilities.
“In some cases, we were asking people to do things that were
maybe beyond their skill set,” Hall says. “They weren’t ready to
accept change.”
Hall and his team met with the company’s bank and with consultants and figured out which customers had the potential to
move the company forward again and which ones were dragging
it down.
“It’s not easy to walk away from a customer, but sometimes,
that’s what you need to do if you can’t get what you need in return
out of it,” Hall says. “At the end of the day, we’re in business to
make money. The things that naturally impact our ability to make
money, there is no magic to the process. It’s those things that take
away from making money or help us to make more money. You
measure those things that are related to the outcomes you want.”
With the key information in hand, it was time for Hall to deliver
the plan to his people and get busy turning around Industrial
Transport.
