When a Marine is calling for close air support to hit a target and friendly forces are near the target area, the last element will be the words, “Danger close”. Those two words will indicate to the pilot that friendly forces may be injured or killed if the bomb doesn’t hit the target. Small business owners need to understand their “Danger close” decisions. What decisions can potentially cause catastrophic failure for your company?
Know When You Are “Danger Close”
Single Point of Failure
Several years ago I was managing a team in a Ecommerce fulfillment center. When the fulfillment center was running near max capacity we were pushing about 50,000 units a day through our facility. I asked myself a question, Where are we “Danger close”? It was quickly apparent that we were “Danger Close” in personnel. We only had one employee on our facility maintenance team that knew how our conveyor system operated. There was no way our facility could process 50,000 units without the conveyor system being fully operational. We had recently had some turnover on the facility maintenance team which left us with one person and thus a single point of failure. After noticing this “Danger Close” situation, we quickly hired more competent employees and focused on them getting trained so that we would not be in a single point of failure situation. You need to constantly ask yourself where your company is “Danger close”. Once you identify these areas put a plan in place to fix it.