The right answer isn't always
the conventional one.
We were awarded a food service subcontract and had 10 days to staff it. Not 10 days to start recruiting. Ten days from contract award to 110 people working full time.
We heard about a mass layoff at the docks in Mississippi. People who needed work. We needed workers. So we found lodging at negotiated rates, secured daily bulk transportation, ran 110 people through ServSafe certification, and coordinated mobilization and demobilization across multiple states. In 10 days.
Those workers averaged three dollars more per hour than they made at the docks. The contract was filled. Then we did it again. And again.
None of it was possible by trying to do it alone. Every major call was made as a team, with high quality people who could be trusted to carry their part of it. That's not a footnote. That's the whole model. The answer to a hard problem is almost never one person. It's the right people, pointed at the same thing, willing to figure it out.
The answer is usually
already there.
We were brought on by our VC partner to clean up a local transmission business with about 30 employees. A few minutes into a conversation with the accounting clerk, the kind of person most visitors walk right past, she mentioned they had 71 active landlines.
Seventy-one.
Nobody had flagged it. It wasn't on anyone's agenda. It came up because someone finally asked how her day was going. Twenty minutes later the lines were identified and mapped. A few phone calls and the unnecessary ones were cut. Five hundred dollars a month back in the business, gone in an afternoon.
The answer was already there. It always is.