GA 254 | Discovering Lean with Ryan and Louise Tierney

In the past, machines always break or people are always late. Our orders. Some will go out late, but it was a shift in our mind to aim for. Aim for the. Aim for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll be among the stars.

A few months ago, my cell phone started to ring. But it wasn't the normal ringtone. It was that FaceTime ringtone, which was a little odd since I rarely get FaceTime calls. Even more odd was that this call was coming early in the morning and I was still in bed. And yes, I normally turned my phone to airplane mode, but I'd forgotten this time. Anyhow, when I looked at the phone, I saw that it was my good friend, Paul Akers. I quickly texted Paul back and told him that I would call him back once I was, you know, better prepared to FaceTime. A few minutes later, I FaceTimed him back and said, what's happening, Paul? I think those were the last words I spoke during this call since Paul started to run around this factory he was visiting went on and on about how amazing they were and how we had to visit them. Well, this company's name is Seeding Matters, and as it turns out, they're located in Limvaddy, Northern Ireland. Well, needless to say, we did in fact visit the good folks of Seeding Matters late last year and shot an entire Gemba Academy live episode. Carlos, from our videography team is currently putting the finishing touches on this episode, and we hope to release it soon. But today I want to share the audio portion from a discussion I had with one of the founders of Seating Matters, Ryan Tierney. Now, during this segment, you'll begin to understand how they got started with Lean, as well as why they got started. Now, after Ryan's interview, I also want to share a short audio portion of a conversation I had with Ryan's sister, Louise. Now, not only do Ryan and Louise have incredibly cool accents, I think you'll find their stories to be uplifting and inspiring. Show notes for this particular episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 2, 5, 4. You can also check out Gemba Academy's Lean Learning system over@gembacademy.com with a fully functional trial. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show.

All right, so we are here with Ryan again.

Ryan, good to see you, Ron.

So, all right, let's. Let's dive in to your journey with Lean. Yeah, and I just want to begin, I guess, at the start with.

Why?

Why?

Yeah, why? Why did you. Why did you look into this or I know maybe you were influenced by some folks, but why? That's what I want to know first.

So the real why behind it is we've been doing lean for two and a half years. So two and a half years, I went home. This is a true story. I went home one evening totally frustrated. Orders were going out late, people were leaving, people were turning up late. The factory was a mess. All the normal things that most businesses have. And I just said to myself, there has to be a better way. There has to be a better way. And there's bigger companies than Seating Matters running a factory. And there has to be an easier way to run a factory and to run a business. Because our father had just passed away and we really thought, are we going to keep living like this the rest of our lives? Why does work have to be a struggle? Why should you have to go to work every day and really struggle through every process and everything you do? And I came across. I discovered Lean one evening on YouTube. Just started reading up about it, watching videos, and something clicked in my mind. And I said, this is what I've been looking for. I've been looking for a system that can tie everything together. That's a people system. It's a. It's a process improvement system. It was just something for me that tied everything together. And it was a light bulb moment for me.

Do you remember the video? Was it Paul?

It was. Yeah, yeah. It was Paul Eggers. It was his FastCap tour video.

Okay.

And I actually sat up that night and I watched that video 20 times. I couldn't sleep. And I got up the next morning so excited to come in and tell everyone about what I'd just seen.

Now, up until that point, you had never heard the word lean?

I never actually. Seven years before that, I read a book, the Toyota Way. Yeah, okay. But I didn't connect in a way that I could apply it. I've read the book since, and I've learned a lot from it.

Matured a little bit. Perfect. Yeah.

Okay.

But the teachings of Paul and Two Second Lane took me from knowing nothing to getting it started.

Yeah, yeah. You came into work that morning. Lack of sleep, it sounds like. Probably.

Yeah, yeah.

What did you say?

I just gathered a few people together and I said, I found this thing online and you have to see this place. You have to see this company. It's called FastCap. It's unbelievable. Work is easy.

Yeah.

Like, this was foreign to us.

What was the reception?

They thought it was just another flavor of the month because I'm always coming up with ideas and new things. And you just thought, oh, this'll, that'll slide in a week's time.

Again, had you tried some other things to maybe improve the situation?

Yeah, I tried various things, but what I found was that I would actually do improvements. But a week later it'll be back to normal again. But it was me forcing these improvements, but I couldn't get a system that would engage the whole team. And Lean, for me, was my tool. It was my lifesaver to engage everyone and going the one direction.

Yes, yes. Okay, so talk about those early days. Once you guys decided to give it a go, how did you approach it?

So we started very, very small and very, very simple. I got three or four people in the company to explained it to them in a way that I understood at that time. And they liked the idea. They hadn't got the passion I had, but I kept going because I knew there was something here and that this was our key to success. And three or four people really took onto it, which was good. So once I focused on them, four or five people, then we brought more people and more people. But at the start, I tried to do lean without doing the morning meeting. And for me, the morning meeting was when it all changed.

Talk about your morning meeting a little bit.

Yeah. So our morning meeting has transformed from very, very simple and basic to. Now, you were at our morning meeting today and I feel like you enjoyed it. Yes, definitely. At the start it was me standing up saying, did we make any defects yesterday? And no one would speak, just silence because people didn't want to say that they done something wrong. When I asked for, was there any improvements done yesterday? Again, silence. And it was awkward at the start, but I just kept going and kept persisting. And eventually some people started talking, other people says, well, I actually made an improvement yesterday. Then we would celebrate that. And slowly but surely, it just kept going and going and going until what we have today.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. So I don't know from a tactical perspective, Lean tactics, did you start with 5s? 3s, like, what were some of those early activities, some early successes?

We started with 3s.

Yep, yep.

We just kept everything so simple. We 3s'd every morning with every person. Sometimes at the start we felt like it was a waste of time until we got to the understanding that it is helping the overall picture. Because before Lean, I think we were short term thinkers. But now, since understanding Lean and the principles of Toyota, what we are now are long term thinkers. So we're Thinking long term, we're not thinking about next week or next month. We're thinking about what's the direction of this company, how can we serve our customers better in a year's time or five years time.

Yeah.

So we're benefiting. Benefiting from the improvements we're making now. Maybe in three, six, 12 months time.

Yeah.

We're not trying to get quick wins.

Talk a little bit about some of, you know, obviously you're very successful. You're doing great work now. But as with any journey, there's got to be some struggles, some might call it mistakes. Can you speak to that a little bit? Like, what have you. What have you learned along the way? I'm sure you don't want. I don't want. I'm not big on regrets or anything like that, but just share a little bit of that side of the journey.

Well, we've had all the challenges. We would never say that we had a perfect lean journey, and I don't think there is such a thing. One of our biggest challenges, One of my biggest challenges at the start was engaging everyone to try and get to be involved. And it's still a challenge until today. I'm not afraid to admit it, that we have, I would say, 90% engagement, but there are still those people that maybe they're just new or they're hard to change out of their old ways, but in general, we have. We're about 90% of the way there in terms of engagement. But one of my biggest challenges was getting people. Chuck from in the Ditch talks about people giving themselves over too lean.

Yeah.

So some people resisted and they resisted and they resist it, and eventually they say, okay, I get it. I know what we're trying to do. We've had a few revelations in the past month of people that have been here for years and resisting and. But I like it. I liked it the old way. And finally give themselves over. We talk about giving themselves over to lean.

Yeah. What about you? Talk about your leadership style. I had an opportunity to meet your lovely mom yesterday, and she was maybe sharing some interesting insight into, you know, her son and how he's possibly changed as a leader of people. Can you talk about that?

Well, for me, lean has transformed my whole life, not just in the factory. It's evident in the factory because it's visual and you can see. You can see when you walk in that we've been applying lean principles, but I've also applied lean principles to my life. Like, not even a year ago, I was a lot heavier. So I've lost a stone. I've lost 14 pounds in weight and working out three mornings a week. Great. I'm eating healthier. So in general, I'm applying lean principles to my life. Even in terms of doing something like this today. Two and a half years ago, I wouldn't have felt confident to speak in front of people or I think that was one of my biggest challenges at the meetings at the start was I was trying to re lean without the meetings because I didn't feel confident standing in front of 20 or 30 people holding meeting.

Even though you're the boss.

Yeah, yeah. So for me, it was when I could overcome that confidence thing, then I can. I feel like I can do anything now.

Yeah, yeah. Behind us you have some nice artifacts, some posters and whatnot. Over here I was reading before we started rolling, welcome to paradise. It sounds very familiar to something I've seen in the US of A. Tell us about what does this paradise mean to us? Seeding matters.

Paradise. Yeah. So we have two philosophies that we feel accelerated early in journey. One of them is we do lean turret. Every single week, we invite companies to come and see what we're doing. And there's various benefits to that. It makes our people believe what they're doing. It engages our people. It keeps the standard up because we know visitors coming. And the other thing we do is we expose our people and ourselves to world class lean companies. And we've made a decision to expose ourselves to a lean company once a month, every month. Me, Martin, Jonathan Decci. Somebody in our factory will go and learn from another company. So we made a decision in earlier in the year to go and visit in the Ditch towing products in Idaho.

Yes.

And they are unbelievable, as you know.

Yes.

So we love learning from people that are much better than us. And Chuck sat down with us and he said what we decided to do, I think it was 17 years ago, was we decided to create paradise. And in paradise, everything works. In paradise, everyone shows up in time. In paradise, our orders go out in time. In paradise, our machines never break. And for us, this was just a transformation in our minds. We've never heard somebody speaking like this before because we felt that in the past, machines always break or people are always late or orders. Some will go out late. But it was a shift in our mind to aim for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll be among the stars. But we never realized that it was possible to have all these things. So when we came back from in the Ditch towing products, we got Everybody in our company around in a big circle. And we said, okay, we're going to create our version of Sitting Mothers paradise, and we're going to start right now. Now, what are some of the things.

That you guys came up with? You don't have to go through them all, but can you think of a few?

So in paradise, we would have a fun workplace where everyone is happy at work. And we're working towards that all the time. We do fun activities every month. We do fun activity at our meeting every morning. So it really engages the team and it creates a brilliant culture. Another big one for us was that our goal is to have zero bad debt. Because before, companies always say, like, oh, you're always going to have bad debt, and there's always customers who pay late. But we're challenging everything. Like, why is that true? Why does that have to be. So we have challenged that and we have actually reduced that by a huge amount of. Which has helped. Helped everything.

Yeah. Notice there's music going. People seem to be just kind of relaxed but working hard that seem to be enjoying themselves. I guess it's intentional, the music, and that's right.

Yeah. So we got that from FastCap. So we're picking up all these ideas from different companies all over the world. One of the things we've seen at FastCap was that everything was so calm and so relaxed. And actually, the first day we went there, we were like, could they not go faster? Or what's happening here? Everything seems too relaxed. But then the more we understood it and learned what they were doing, when we seen three or four people talking in a group together, we would feel they're not working. But now we understand that they were probably talking about an improvement or improving the process. So our aim here is to have everything nice and clean, calm and steady, or everything going, going out in time. Not too fast, not too slow. Just a nice, nice rhythm.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm dying to get out to the Gimba to see. See some of your lean improvements in action.

Yeah.

Shall we go?

Yeah. Perfect. All right.

All right.

So I'm here with Luis. Luis, thank you for taking time to visit with us.

Thank you.

What do you make of all this lean stuff?

Well, I just think lean makes sense. Yeah. I just think it. It's just a way of life. Now that it's introduced to us, it just makes everything so easy. You don't even realize you're making improvements. Sometimes it's just. It's just there. It's just really simple.

Yeah. So what did you make of it when you first heard about it? I don't know, was it Ryan or Martin? Someone told you about it?

Yeah, when we first heard about it, I think Ryan had found a few YouTube videos, maybe Paul Akers or something like that. And I just watched a few videos and thought, yeah, that looks.

So you were open to it from the beginning?

I sort of was skeptical. Some people can't be skeptical. I sort of. It was sort of just gradually introduced to me. So it wasn't just thrown down your throat, it was thrown down on us. And it wasn't thrown down on any of us either. So it was just sort of introduced really gradually. And we done one thing. So the first thing we actually done was colour code our production sheets, because that's something that we had find in one of the videos. So it was just one thing and then it led to another thing and then we got two screens and then we got a third screen and then we made the whole thing. So it wasn't really. I wasn't really skeptical because I didn't really realize I was doing it at the start.

Kind of like frog in the water, right? No, that's great. Great. Last question. What's it like working with your brothers and seeing them kind of lead the company? And that must be make you proud, you know, you're big brothers, you know.

Yeah, I like working them. I really love working with them. We always talk about chairs. Doesn't matter if it's Christmas dinner or whatever. We talk about chairs all the time. But it makes it so much easier to work. It's a relaxed environment and if there's anything wrong, no one's afraid to say it's not just me as well. I think Sick Matters treats each other like a family, so everyone's very close and everyone's able to talk to each other about it. Nothing's hid from anyone and everything's really open and relax. Yeah.

Fantastic. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much, Ron.

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