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Let us step back and consider your work responsibilities up to this point, what information you had and what you could directly control. You have worked for your company as one of several art handlers for several years. You were given specific jobs to perform and information to document. You proved that you were both responsible and accurate in your work. You have proved that you are a problem solver and you have exhibited leadership many times. You have received compliments from the company’s clients and you are liked and respected by your work associates. All of this was recognized by your management and they began to give you additional responsibilities. First, they promoted you and placed you in charge of small, then progressively larger crews. They then asked you to quote and manage projects. Up to this point, you have had all the information required to perform your duties or you had the ability to inspect and discover the information yourself. You budgeted your projects cost, labor and time and you worked and managed your crew directly. You have done well. You have known your objectives and controlled or managed your resources to come in at or under expectations. This has again been recognized and you were promoted to a service management position. You became the storage, operation or project manager. You had timetables, staff, and quotes to fill. Throughout your art-service career you have had knowledge of what was expected and control over the resources to perform your job. Again, this has been recognized and you have been judged on your leadership ability, your ability to produce under pressure and your ability to stay within the resources of your project. Until now, you have managed a specific area and reported directly to one person, your general manager.
You have worked for a large commercial art service company for several years and you have steadily been promoted up the internal chain of command. You now have the opportunity to become the general manager of your store. Depending on the size of your company this is a promotion with pitfalls which you should consider before accepting the position.
Before accepting the position of general manager there are questions you need to have answered. Ask yourself what do you know about the position based on what you overheard and observed while working with your former general manager? You know that the several various departments in your company reported to the previous general manager and this person reported to several people above them that you rarely had contact with. If you work for a privately-owned company this could be the owner and CFO in a larger company this could mean several vice presidents as well as the corporate ownership.
My advice to you is if you can be sure that you are in control of your company’s resources then you will succeed. That means if you know the costs of your store, what the store you are managing brings in and what it costs to run, then you can manage it. You need to know all salaries, all lease or rent costs, utilities, outstanding loans, material costs, you need to know your stores debit sheet the same way you would know your projects debit sheet when you were a project manager or what your budget was when you were an operations manager. Then you need to know what all your profits are on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. The problem with smaller companies is that profits are often used to pay off debts that have nothing to do with the running of your store. The problem with larger companies is that costs and profits are often shared between stores or used to pay off loans and you may never know where you stand exactly.
This is fine when you are being told your store is doing well. Let’s say you are the general manager and you have been tracking your trucks and storage and they are operating at maximum capacity. Your sales representatives are all billing higher than the numbers that are being requested by the corporate office even though you have no idea how they came up with this number. You know your operations staff is always occupied with primarily billable hours, but you have no idea how many corporate salaries are drawn from your stores gross. You will be doing well, knowing your staff is working at maximum capacity and bringing in the expected profits until that day you receive a call from one of your vice presidents telling you that your store isn’t doing well. That you need to somehow keep up the current production but reduce your payroll by 10%. You know you have an overworked staff of 25 that grosses about $40,000 per employee so 10% would save your company about $100,000 a year. You also know that your company has at least five upper managers that make over $150000 per year so you ask if it wouldn’t be better for the company to lose one vice president rather than lose 10% of your staff and risk both quality and production? You will be told no and you are now managing a company that is on a slippery slope. You now have unhappy employees, disgruntled former employees and clients that will hear rumors or notice a difference in service. Your staff is less motivated; your clients are suspicious, and your store’s profits start to slip.
You are left asking “what the hell happened?” What happened is that you agreed to manage a project for which you had incomplete information. Can you imagine managing a project when you didn’t know what the budget really was and from which funds could be either withdrawn without your knowledge or that funds from your budget could be used to fund other projects. If you were asked if you would manage a project like that when you were a project manager, you would have quickly said “no!” but you readily agreed to manage a company store under those conditions. Not all companies operate like this, but you don’t know how your company operates unless you ask. If they are transparent and fair with their finances, then I would advise you to take on the challenge. You have all the tools you need to succeed.
If they refuse to answer your questions or they tell you that you don’t need access to the information I would advise you to politely decline the offer. Tell them you’re happy doing what you’re doing and you do appreciate the offer. Then start making plans to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. Most companies have five good years then they drag it out another ten+ years by shuffling money, taking out loans, running their equipment into the ground and cutting staff. If they’re already at this stage when you speak to them, you know you have about two years or less to get out. You don’t want to be the person in charge of a mismanaged company trying to squeeze out the last few dollars before they lock the door.
Good luck!
Chuck Agro - Project Management For The Arts 