IIn 1892 Hyman Freedman, an award winner of the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, began a company that created cushion seats for horse drawn buggies. Today, after over 100 years, Freedman Seating manufactures seating for small and large busses, heavy-duty transit vehicles, vans, commercial vehicles and more. In fact, if you have ridden on public transportation, you have probably sat on one of their seats! Freedman Seating is still a family-owned business, with Craig Freedman running the company. Understanding that only with change can a company survive, Craig realized that his company was beginning to face many challenges that it was not prepared for, including:
- Wasting time and dollars hiring new people because of constant turnover
- A lack of standardized procedures for the employees to follow
- Making sure everyone was doing their job correctly
- Stiff competition from overseas
- Difficulty in getting employee commitment
- Understanding the next items to change for the continuing survival of Freedman Seating
In 2006, Craig started the Cycle-of-Success program by attending a workshop that showed why small businesses struggle today. Starting with the COSi Problem Identification Team, and including Employee Surveys and the Profit Performance Review, Craig Freedman and employees from every department came the employees became very creative in identifying the actual problems within the Company. In fact, they found over 140 costly problems within the company. Some problems included:
- Employees not following the established operating procedures.
- Employees making production mistakes
- No process to identify new improvements
- Lack of customer focus
Once they completed the Problem Identification Team, they started actually solving their problems using the Cycle-of-Success methodology. One year later, Freedman and Company has achieved record top and bottom-line growth.
Craig said, “The Cycle-of- Success Institute was the key to our growth. It was important to make the Cycle-of-Success a part of our culture. We have learned to work together, and COSi helped us solve 30 key problems this year, generating a lot more money. We believed for a long time that the problems would just go away, but working with COSi we took action and resolved many issues. We then learned to develop a new culture; we were given the tools for continuous development. Upon our one-year graduation, we realized that COSI did transform our company”. |
