“I don’t have time.”
How often do you seek someone’s attention only to hear that phrase? How often do you use that phrase with others?
In the seafood industry, where staff layers have been cut back and where margins are razor-thin, it’s customary to be extremely busy. Some may even feel a sense of importance because they don’t have room in their schedules.
But are you keeping busy with the right things?
Recall the Eisenhower Matrix, which organizes work based on urgency and importance:
|
|
Urgent |
Not Urgent |
|
Not Important |
Are you too busy here… |
|
|
Important |
|
…to have time for what’s
here? |
Wouldn’t it be nice to receive the gift of time? To free up
your schedule to focus on more important things, and things you don’t get
around to enough in your daily activities?
Negotiating seafood transactions is pretty important, and urgent, so this usually receives a lot of attention, rightly so.
But after the transaction is negotiated, what happens next? Hiding right behind the negotiation lies a host of necessary tasks which eat up valuable time. Think about all the different teams both inside and outside your company who need to be informed of the details of the transaction – logistics services, inspection services, operations, accounting, and more.
Dealboard believes you can gain back valuable time by rethinking how you connect the place where you negotiate transactions with the rest of your business. Any time you re-type something into another system or pick up the phone to recite information to someone else, you’re consuming your own time on tasks which, though urgent, aren’t the most important. To make matters worse, if you are anything less than absolutely perfect every time you do this, you might make a simple mistake and introduce an error which costs you and others even more valuable time to correct.
Give yourself and your team the gift of time by improving and automating your operations. Negotiate transactions using a platform which can automatically and flawlessly transmit the transaction details to the systems, departments and third parties who need to spring into action to fulfill it.
You deserve the gift of time.
Everything which used to be reliable and stable in
seafood has changed… so what's next?
Professor Thomas Gilovich of Cornell University wrote an engaging book some decades ago titled How We Know What Isn’t So. It’s about our human propensity to form beliefs which were never true.
That’s a bit different from what’s happening in the seafood
industry right now, where quite a bit used to be true, but isn’t
so any longer. Nearly everything traditionally reliable about the seafood
supply chain has now changed.
These aren’t misperceptions. Truths we used to rely on have
been thrown overboard.
Case in point:
What Used To Be So… |
…What
We Now Know |
|
Our labor
force would turn over, but was generally stable and returned year after year |
We face constant worker shortages in plants and in ports |
|
China’s processing
industry was an insatiable source of raw material demand |
China’s Zero-COVID policies idle processing facilities, killing
demand |
|
Fuel and
transportation costs would fluctuate but over the long term were fairly
predictable and inflation was a non-issue |
Fuel costs are almost 50% higher than a year ago, influencing
transportation and other costs of doing business |
|
Growing openness
between nations increased economic interdependency |
War drove international sanctions, closing the Russian market
to outside seafood |
Is there a war on the global seafood supply chain? Probably
not. Does it feel like there’s a war on the global seafood supply chain?
From inside the industry, facing this volatility and the invalidation of our
prior means of operating, it can absolutely seem that way.
Seafood companies need to rethink processing. We need to
seek new markets to replace the old ones which are now closed. We need new
trading partners who are open for business. We care about the location of trading
partners more than ever before because of port and transportation cost issues.
Essentially, seafood companies need a new way to do
business. And given that change seems to be the one thing which is consistent, the
new way of doing business needs to enable our businesses to become more nimble
than they are today – the best thing we can do is prepare our businesses to
withstand future volatility.
Are you ready?
