Victoria Schneider Temple knows quite a bit about adapting. The chairman and CEO of family-owned The Schneider Corp., was reading her grandmother’s minutes — and noticed how the engineering solutions company adapted to scrape through some economic downturns.
“Back in the early days, they sold fishing maps and chopped wood to keep the doors open,” she says. “Now we find other ways — technology and such — to adapt. Everything is changing so rapidly. … It basically all comes down to your ability to adapt and your willingness to accept change.”
Temple is proud to note that accepting change as a way to foster longevity is a strong point of the 50-year-old company that tallied $14.7 million in revenue last year.
Smart Business talked with Temple about how an ability to adapt is critical to company longevity.
Q. How can your outlook help a company get through financial challenges?
A. Even though we’ve had a contraction in our business, I have never seen it as negative. It’s an opportunity for you to go back and ask questions about how you can do things better. I do think there are going to be companies that are not going to survive the trying economic times, there are some that will and then there are going to be companies that will survive, but they are going to have no clue why; they won’t have adapted like they should have when the economy turned around.
Q. So the unfortunate ones may have not asked the right questions of themselves?
A. I think you have to be able to be honest with what works and what doesn’t work. If you are a leader, you need to have periods of introspection about what works and what doesn’t work personally and professionally. A leadership staff has to spend time introspecting and having hard conversations about what’s working and what’s not. I also think you have to have the courage to understand that if you have made a wrong decision, or you’ve made a bad choice, you just turn around and make a different choice. You can’t be afraid to make mistakes.
Q. How do you decide what does work and what doesn’t work?
A. You have to look at the finances of it. When you are putting any type of business together, whether you are investing in new technology or investing in a new person, you have to look at what you are trying to get out of that. You need to put together a business plan, you need to have milestones, you need to know if you are hitting those milestones. If you are not hitting those milestones, you need to know why and you need to make decisions — is this worth the risk of going forward if you are not meeting your milestones? Or is it just something that you just have to decide, ‘Hey — I made a mistake, and we need to go in a different direction.’
I think a lot of it is really just about putting a plan together and sticking to the plan, and if you aren’t going to stick to the plan, you have to have very clear reasons why you’re not. A lot of that is just holding your leadership accountable.
Q. What goes into determining milestones?
A: In a challenging environment like this, you need to look at things quarterly. So if you are going to invest in something, like a specific piece of equipment or if you make a new hire to sell a new service, at what stage is your break-even point? At what point is it acceptable? And how fast can you become profitable in a specific area?
So when you keep longevity in the back of your mind, you know that there are hard decisions that have to be made along the way. What makes it worthwhile is knowing that the longevity of the company and the survival of the company for employees is the most important thing.
How to reach: The Schneider Corp., (317) 826-7100 or www.schneidercorp.com
