Determining Our Outcome by Our Income

Make no mistake: you are being targeted for termination by "the Competitor." Your best weapon is the revenue you generate through insourcing.

By Rustin Myers

There is a scene from that old sci-fi classic "The Terminator" where Kyle Reese (the soldier protector from the future) is trying to convince the terrified Sarah Conner (mother of humanity's future deliverer) of the terrible danger she is in. Kyle yells to Sarah, "Listen. And understand. That Terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."

Though these words were used to describe the relentless fictional mechanical killer from the future called the Terminator, they could just as easily have been used to describe a very real danger every in-plant department faces today. It comes not from the future but from a past as old as free enterprise itself. It's called "the Competitor."

And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until your shop is dead.

The Plot Against You

The dictionary tells us that "competition" is a "rivalry between two or more businesses striving for the same customer or market." The customer or market in question is your company. Believe it or not, there are people out there right now, in a world not far from your office door, that are holding meetings, running spreadsheets, planning strategies and preparing to make outrageous claims about you to take your company's printing from you and make it their own.

The Competitor wants to make your business their business and your customers their customers. They are as relentless as the Terminator.

Arm Yourself—With Revenue

In today's competitive climate, the in-plant manager must have a well-thought-out survival strategy to protect his or her business from the Competitor. This strategy must result in the department becoming a competitor itself.

The one weapon that can slay the Competitor is the hard dollar revenue generated by a competitive in-plant for its company. To help the in-plant succeed in the struggle, the manager must have, as part of his or her arsenal, the ability to insource revenue streams.

As you develop your capital outlays for the coming years, think not only of how it will benefit your parent organization, but also how this equipment will allow you to insource more revenue-generating work.

Going back to the dictionary for clarification, the word "strategy" is defined as "a carefully devised plan of action to achieve a goal, or the art of developing or carrying out such a plan." Do you have such a plan? We all know the old adage: "Those who fail to plan, plan to fail."

Imagine for a moment this scenario: The Competitor contacts your upper management. He pulls out glossy folders and hypnotic spread sheets. In addition, the Competitor reaches into his bag of phrases and throws down such gems as "in-time workflow," "dynamic synergy" and "core paradigms." The Competitor coup d'état is to show that savings is a battle ground that he can beat you on.

Perhaps this seems a bit of a silly scenario. But silly or not it has worked successfully far too many times. This can be a tough argument to stand up to—if you are even lucky enough to be invited to participate in it.

Now let's try that same scenario with a different twist. The Competitor contacts your upper management. As before, he pulls out glossy folders, hypnotic spread sheets and, last but not least, the throw-down bag of phrases. Once again he drones on about all the mystical money he can save your organization. But when your shop is a competitive in-plant generating hard revenue dollars, that must be taken into account. The Competitor's saving edge (if he really has one) will result in revenue loss.

Every profit-making company or organization is focused on saving its customers dollars through the services it provides. The benefit of a competitive in-plant is not only from services and savings but also from (drum roll please) hard dollar revenues.

Economic times demand that we become competitive in-plants; that we hit the Competitor head on—and on his home turf. If the traditional in-plant is to survive it must move out of the service-only shadows and establish itself as a source of hard revenue dollars.

As managers we owe it to our companies and to our colleges to face the challenges of the Competitor—before it's asta la vista, baby.