The 6 Things I Learned in 23 Years as a Manufacturing Reliability Consultant

In 1999 I left a 19-year career at Eastman Kodak to start my own Manufacturing Reliability Consulting Company. Looking back 23 years I really had no idea what I was getting into, but I was confident that I had something to offer companies that other consultants didn’t.

Experience

In my last 4 years at Kodak, I had worked with a handful of consultants who came in to teach our people different tools and methods and I was kind of shocked to find out none of them had any experience actually doing hands on work in a manufacturing facility.

Over the next few years, I took what I learned from some of the consultants and two of my Professors from RIT and developed an RCM Methodology that was aimed at identifying failure modes and developing tasks to eliminate the failure or mitigate the effects of each failure. The pilots for this methodology were successful and as a result, I submitted a paper to present at an upcoming SMRP event. That presentation changed my life and gave me the confidence to walk into my boss’s office a few months later and give him two weeks’ notice.

Twenty-Three years later as I retire to enjoy a life surrounded by family, free of hotels, airports and eating alone in restaurants, I can share the things I learned working as a consultant.

1) Success and the attention that comes with it is not always a good thing.

I was lucky to have a major success with the first company I worked with. On top of this, they were willing to share our success in public agreeing to having a cover article in one of the larger trade magazines and present at two major conferences. The result was a line of new customers and invites from several other conferences to present my RCM Methodology. This was a great thing! I got to meet hundreds of new contacts and rub elbows with the most respected consultants in the business. I’ll forever be grateful for that first group I worked with, if it weren’t for them I would have been a flash in the pan and a year later I would have had to get a real job once again.

So, what was the bad thing?

I was so excited to be recognized I took for granted that everyone was looking out for my best interests. I got talked into spending some serious cash on half and full-page advertising that never amounted to a single job. I threw money at conference sponsorships and booth space that while it kept my company name front and center it did little to bring in customers.

If you want to stay front and center with the community you work in, publish something on LinkedIn every other week, comment on something every day and speak at events where the folks running the show are interested in what you have to present, not what you have to spend.

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