Gale Force Surfing
I chose Gale Force Surfing as the case study that most resonates with me from a professional
perspective. The reason is because of the ages of the leadership compares closely to my age and
also that I went through a similar situation, in which my company has seasonal months as well. I
believe that Tim brought up a good point in the wasted money on interest and that it could be put to
better use in order to gain more money for the company in profit. This is common for a lot of
companies in the seasonal type of sales. Take for example Target. Target is a billion dollar per year
brand. Their sales in November through January are extremely higher than compared to the other
months due to the holidays so they hire additional employees, mostly only for those short few
months. Does this cause confusion between the employees? No, not at all as they adjust
accordingly. I believe the true can be for Pop's company. They can even be short staff throughout
the year and hire extra help in the high months and keep lesser of an employee rate in the
nonseason months.
Gale Force Surfing is in a particular situation that many businesses end up in. There have been many
solutions to this problem. None of them have favored the employee. The result have been in three
categories. The first is the increase in margins and profits with a loss of employee production and
satisfaction. The solution was to release/ fire 70% of the workforce keeping mainly crew leaders and
newer lower paid employees. The workload was picked up by contractors. The contractors did not
require full time status, benefits, bonuses, leave time, etc.
The second solution was to outsource much of the production process. Again a large part of the main
production crew was released. Two crew leaders/ heads were sent to train the foreign processes. The
cost of import tariff and taxes were minimal compared to the savings in production costs.
The third option was to shift the production to a larger scale and shut the production line down
completely. This resulted an increase in initial costs but after a one year stocking up period. The
company released the entire production workforce, sold all the equipment and made a small investment
a remote warehouse where the product was stored and shipped as needed over the following three
years. Also during that time, the company heads worked on creating a better production line in a lower
cost market. The company outsourced the shipping to a major delivery company further reducing costs.
The proved to be a faulty decision because the company was not able to secure a more favorable
location. The company sold the remainder of the product and officially shut down. The former
employees were told the company was doing well and needed more staff. They were also given only 30
days notice of employment termination.
One of the missing aspects was the automation process and a discussion with the employees to find out
more about what they, the production line employees, were willing to do, work with, changes, and
resignation options.