What Can Your Plant Do to Weather a Pandemic with Greg Crowley

<p><strong>Connect with Greg:</strong></p><p>Email: greg.crowley@rmgfelm.com </p><p>Website: https://www.rmgfelm.com/</p><p><strong>Lisa Ryan</strong>: Hey it's Lisa, Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network podcast. I'm excited to introduce you to today's guest Greg Crowley. Greg is President of Rockford manufacturing. Greg, welcome to the show.</p><p><strong>Greg Crowley</strong>: Thank you for having me.&nbsp;</p><p><strong>Lisa Ryan</strong>: So share with us a little bit about your background. What led you to where you're at now with Rockford.</p><p><strong>Greg Crowley</strong>: So Rockford manufacturing group is a small OEM with 40 to 50 people depending on the business level. I spent most of my career as an aerospace mechanical engineer with an MBA education. Four years ago, I switched to the wire fastener industry and took an opportunity to run a small company. So I'm originally from eastern Canada and have been in the States since 1997.</p><p><strong>Lisa Ryan</strong>: Nice. So what with all of this craziness has been going on for the past year. What is it that's working as far as your people your processes, some of the good things that have that are going on or have happened?</p><p><strong>Greg Crowley</strong>: Yep, it's, it's good to focus on the good things because there's so much downside these days with covid. On the positive side, we won a PPP loan, which helped us over the last maybe six, eight months. Our machinery is expensive, so people only want to buy it if they have to. But with this market what's working well is we had to downsize about 20% and that that was a little painful, but we did it only once. And since then, we've been keeping everybody in the building busy. We did reduce. So we didn't want to reduce more than that because when the market recovers. We did move to a 36-hour workweek, and all the salary people took a 10% pay cut, so that's helping us at least stay out of the red until business picks up. So the fact that we're keeping everybody busy is good. Nobody's looking for