How I Found 2 Second Lean
In the fall of 2018, I first heard of 2 Second Lean from an engineer at Cambridge Engineering during an awards ceremony in St. Louis, MO. The company my mother created, TrippNT, was there to accept the Small Manufacturer award of the year. We were about to receive the second most prestigious award, and I was trading pleasantries with an engineer from a company I’d never heard of. He kept talking about what a great company he worked for. I nodded, smiling and listening while in my mind, I was thinking, “Yeah buddy, our company is pretty sweet also. We have a corporate chef, do all kinds of activities on and off the clock with our employees, and by the way, we are here to pick up one of the best awards they're giving out. I get that you guys have a great company and all, but wait till you figure out who we are!”
Within three months of me standing in that hotel conference room listening to the guy from Cambridge Engineering, so much of what I thought I knew that was good about TrippNT would change.
In 1991 I joined the US Army. I was on a tank for three years directly after high school. I enjoyed the service but I had my heart set on going to college and exited after my first tour. While I was in the Army, my mother, a chemist, had started a new business with my dad in the basement of their house. Dad had worked for McDonnell Douglas, the aerospace manufacturer in Long Beach, CA for many years. He also had experience as a construction worker and was pretty handy with most tools. Mom had seen a need for more organization in the lab and with her mind, his hands and both of their hearts, TrippNT was born.
They worked hard building the business over the next few years after I returned from the Army. I went to school at night and worked at waterproofing basements during the day. I would frequently spend weekends at my parent's place and chat about how their business was and look over the fifteen or so products they made and sold. The company continued to grow over the next several years. Shortly thereafter, I joined the Kansas City Fire Department while becoming TrippNT’s first part-time employee in 1996.
None of us knew much of anything when it came to running a manufacturing business. Luckily, for the next decade or so there were not too many challenges in the production aspect of the business while my parents were active and involved daily. There were only a handful of employees in the shop, and keeping a handle on quality and productivity still seemed manageable. It wasn’t until 2010 that we started actively looking for solutions to our production problems.
By then, TrippNT had about twenty-five employees. Over the years we had significantly added more products. Further, we offered choices in those products, more sizes, more shapes, more colors. We also added more complex products. We were now building laboratory and medical carts. We went from bills of materials that with one or two items on them to products with dozens. Things were getting complicated and we were starting to hit a brick wall with production. For seventeen years we’d managed this business with no formal education or knowledge of manufacturing and now we were starting to struggle. Our manufacturing processes were beginning to restrict our growth. The fact that we had always experienced so much success in the past while growing the business was starting to work against us. It took me two years to figure out that I didn’t have the needed skills to overcome this hurdle, and that I would need help.
In South Kansas City I visited a company called Labconco and was introduced to something called Lean. I was taking a tour of their manufacturing space and the Director of Engineering told me about the improvements that were made in the welding area, and how all of the welders had participated in the process. I’ve always admired Labconco’s culture and openness to new ideas. If they were doing Lean, I thought this was something to look into for TrippNT. We started by reading books about 5S and Lean manufacturing, that ultimately lead us to a local community college and our first Kaizen events.
2014 was a landmark year for us. It was the first time we actually shut down the shop for two days and did a Kaizen event. Everyone got involved and made some incredible improvements. We were led by an Industrial engineer found at the community college. It seemed as though we were on our way to becoming more efficient, productive, engaged, and profitable! Then, reality set in. The whirlwind of the business took back over. Consumers were demanding, lead times were creeping out again, and customer service issues were rising. Even though we had seen such an amazing spike in efficiency and morale, our Kaizen events were the first thing to be cut when we didn’t have the “time”. We never did another Kaizen event of that magnitude again. It just seemed the expense and the effort were always too great. Not to mention that after the events were actually over everyone in the organization would move on to their real jobs and disengage entirely from any sort of process improvements. Even I, myself, felt the huge effort it would take to ignite another Kaizen event single-handedly. It was just too much to sustain.
The next few years were frustrating. Business continued to grow but it was taking the brute strength of some very committed employees to hold all the pieces together and the reality was, that we knew we could do better. We just didn’t know how.
Fast forward to September 2018, we are receiving the Best Small Manufacturing company from the Missouri Association of Manufacturers. Life seemed good. I’m having a drink before the event with a guy who starts talking about a book that made a big difference in the company he worked for. Honestly, I didn’t really pay attention to what he was saying. It seemed that I was always being sold to and this time didn’t seem any different. To be polite, I did write the name of the book down but didn’t actually read it until three months later. After reading the book I thought that something was there, but I didn’t know what. For several weeks I continued to think of the possibilities about what Paul was saying, and things started to make more sense.
I had an upcoming trip about three hours away, so I decided to download the audio version and listened to it on the drive there and back. That’s when I started to understand just how simple this whole concept of 2 Second Lean was. Hearing the energy and passion in Paul’s voice just tied the entire thing together. I can only speak for myself, but when I finished listening to 2 Second Lean on that road trip I had such an overwhelming feeling of peace inside. I had spent the last eight years pushing, pulling, arguing, fighting, and scratching my head, not knowing how to get to a place that TrippNT was headed and now, after that six-hour drive I knew exactly what needed to happen. I understood it clearly. I had the confidence I needed to explain it to anyone at work. It was beautifully simple, and now it was time to start improving.
We officially started modeling 2 Second Lean on January 9th, 2019. We read the book together as a company five pages at a time. Everyone in the organization participated. Without getting into all of the gritty details I can tell you that the most significant change that has happened to me is that going to work is absolutely fun every single day. We have been following Paul’s model now for almost two years. Our company has made over two thousand improvements and over nine hundred improvement videos. Improving something every day becomes embedded in our culture more and more every day. The community of people that I have been part of is nothing short of amazing. The support, kindness and generosity of the community that Paul Akers has assembled is unbelievable. In 2019 and early 2020 we visited Vibco, Cambridge Engineering, FastCap, Xylem Design, Warrensburg Collision, Fireblast, and Phenix Technology Inc. Each of the owners of these companies was extraordinarily generous with their knowledge and time. At the beginning of our 2 Second Lean journey it took time for us to form a cohesive team function, but there was always someone to reach out to and ask questions along the way. I can not thank these companies enough for their support and encouragement.
The result? The culture of TrippNT, as great as it was before, has improved. To say that this has been life-changing is an understatement. Every day is a new day. Every day presents so many opportunities. Because Paul Akers was able to boil down his message in such a simple and easy-to-understand way our company is an exciting place to be and every person who works here knows that their tomorrow is guaranteed to be better because they improved something today.
Sebastian McLeod