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“The Transformation” – From a Farmer to a Manufacturer
 You
know what it’s like when you can’t see the forest for
the trees? You’re trying to find a way to transform your business
to uncover much larger profits but you don’t know how to do
it.
The Tanimura and Antle families had been business partners for 50
years. The Tanimuras raised the crop and the Antles processed the
finished product. In recent times, Rick Antle was being “surprised”
on a regular basis by every new inspection of the financials. “Just
when I think I know what my costs are – something changes.
We work incredibly hard to increase the margins but it never seems
to get to the bottom line.” Regardless of the effort he put
in, he was feeling trapped by his own business.
His immediate suspicions were that there were problems with the
IT systems currently in place, but he clearly wasn’t technical
enough to assess the situation – he viewed the business simply
as a “lettuce grower”. After just a few days of evaluating
the business, Rick’s suspicions were confirmed. The entire
system was a “kludge” – a bunch of disparate parts
loosely patched together that required costly maintenance and did
not provide the answers to serve the business correctly. The right
infrastructure had not been in place from the start and it was slowly
seeping the life out of Tanimura & Antle.
Of course, a new system was badly needed. But before the company
should go through a major implementation, there was something else.
Why couldn’t they break through to the next level? Could information
technology actually be used to create competitive advantage? Well,
not if you had a collection of tier-3 systems with a mediocre support
structure as its foundation. No information technology consulting
companies were willing to serve a $150M lettuce growing company
in Salinas.
However, what if you were no longer just a “lettuce grower”?
What if you were a “manufacturer”? This new concept
seemed better, more enabling. It felt so much more important, so
much more enabling. Nobody had ever said, “We are a manufacturer
whose finished good is lettuce.” The light bulbs went on for
Rick and a new corporate identity was born. The business immediately
elevated its own self-confidence and self-worth, all with a bit
of re-branding and thinking in a completely different way.
Now that we were dealing with a manufacturer, it was much easier
to find excellent packaged systems that could be implemented with
acceptable risk. Moreover, Tanimura & Antle used their newfound
confidence to help do whatever it took to implement this new manufacturing
system. Rick’s vision was pointed in a new direction and was
enabled through the new technology. Their new product – prepared
salad in air-tight plastic bags was then sold to Costco. Costco
would never even have considered them before they had this new system.
Thus, I helped them discover the mantra that luck equals opportunity
plus preparation. Profits quickly followed and the business has
grown by leaps and bounds since that first day I visited the lettuce
growers out in Salinas. Sometimes it can be about finding elegant,
proven solutions in one industry and applying them to another.
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