Yesterday was “haul the fleet” day at Community Boating in Boston. Seventy 15-foot sailboats. Our season ended on October 31; during the last week, the maintenance team had de-masted all the boats.  Yesterday was the day to pull the boats out of the water.   Lucky us – ‘though the day started with wind and rain, by 11:00 am, we had a beautiful, sunny October day (yes, I know it’s  November).

The haul-out procedure is fairly simple. One group of volunteers pulls the boats out of the slip and leads them about 50 yards down the dock to a volunteer with a high volume to remove accumulated rainwater from the boats. Once the boats are pumped out, a smaller group of volunteers pushes the boats, one by one, across a short channel. A third group of volunteers pull the boats, one by one, up a ramp onto four wheeled carts.  Our maintenance team inspects the boats and logs the needed maintenance. A fourth group of volunteers pushes the carts down the dock and flips the boats over so that they are bottoms up, ready to be power washed.

We had about 60 volunteers show up yesterday morning. We divided into crews and began to work. After about 30 minutes, it became clear that the volunteers pulling the boats to the pumping station could work faster than the guy with the pump and that the guy with the pump could work faster than the crews who were hauling the boats, pushing them down the dock, and flipping them over. At one point we had about a third of the fleet, 20 boats, tied up in bunches at the end of the dock, waiting to be pushed across the channel and hauled.

We discussed redeploying people so that we had more capacity and speed on the “haul” side and the answer came back, “it wouldn’t matter, we have only so many carts, and it wouldn’t matter if we had more people. We can only go so fast as the number of carts allows”

If boats waiting to be hauled were our ideas for a client (and, of course, we’d have a LOT of ideas) and the “haul-cart-and-flip” crowd were our client, there would be no point in our pushing more boats across the channel if there were not enough client capacity to haul them in and push them into the organization. If we kept pushing boats across, our client would conclude that we didn’t really understand them and that we were just interested in pushing.

Nick Miller is President of Clarity Advantage based in Concord, MA. He assists banks and credit unions to generate more and more profitable relationships, faster, with business clients, their owners, and their employees through better sales strategies and execution. Additional articles on Clarity’s web site.