Another anecdotal story about Owner thinking.

Running around, like chickens sans a head, two partners had started a company. They were spending 12-14 hours a day just to get a few orders out the door. They had a bunch of employees and One employee did nothing but try and keep track of the orders. And they were just barley scraping by making about $20,000 a month. If a customer had a problem, they didn’t get help and became a lost customer.

Step in the web guy/ savior / accidental implementer of Owner Thinking. The partners originally contacted him for just a little help with some simple functionality for customers to be able to submit requests for work to their website.

The Web Designer/programmer also did another thing that most technical people don’t do. He went to the company and worked in their facility for a few days to see what their processes were.
He presented them with a plan to be create a work flow system using the web. It took a couple of months but he built a system that would receive the request for an order. and then track it through the production process. He also created a queue to handle problems.
All of the production was done on a computer. A customer, from any where in the world, would send a picture that the to company to convert into a program that would be used by embroidery machines to stitch the picture onto fabric.

The second key to success and was the owners had been paying the employees per design to produce the artwork. This is a key to getting the employees to think like owners.
The employees realized the more work they did the more money they made. They also realized if the design came back, because of quality issues, they would have to fix it for free. Because of this they did things right the first time. They were thinking and acting just like the owner would. This coupled with the new work flow system ignited a firestorm of new business.

In just 6 short months they had gone from $20,000 a month to over $90,000. The owners were no long involved in the production and could focus on promoting their business. They had also reduced the amount of production employees by more than half. I think it was from 10 people to 4 people.

One of the other effects was that this company started being able to compete with China for orders. They were doing the work faster, better and at less of a cost to the customer.

How can this be? Because the employees were free to think like owners.

You pay an employee an hourly wage or a salary to create a slave. You give a person the freedom to create, innovate and control their own destiny you create a loyal patriot. A patriot that will work extremely hard for that freedom.