25Seven

Fire Trucks & Collaboration

Everyone in the Seven Cycles Collaborative has specific reasons for participating—some personal, some professional, and all of them worthwhile.  One of the reasons I’m participating in the Colab is to improve my teambuilding and collaborative work.  Hmmm, maybe it’s not so strange that the project is called the “Collaborative”—and not the “Steel-Lugged-Bike” project.

A Metaphorical Story

I’m not a story teller and I usually don’t like metaphors.  So, here’s a metaphorical story.  And it actually relates to the Collaborative.

Keefe Technical School Visit: Art at Seven Cycles

Last week Seven Cycles had a visit from students of the Keefe Technical School--a vocational high school near Seven.  Three teachers brought fourteen junior-year students to learn about Seven Cycles.  The school sounds interesting.  From their website:

“Beginning in Grade 10, students alternate between a full week of academics and a full week of career and technical education. By alternating vocational and academic weeks, students receive intensive training in both areas.”

The teacher—Joel Crisafulli—is the students’ art instructor.  Basically, one week out of every two, the students intensively study art and graphic design. 

Joel had two primary interests in having the students visit Seven:

Employee Biographies

We have an amazing crew at Seven Cycles.  I know, probably every company says that about their employees.  Well, it is true at Seven—and now we have more proof.  We just completed our employee bios.  I posted examples of them all on my office wall the other day.

We actually have two types of bios:  short ones that go inside the booklet that comes with every frame, and long bios for our website.  We are going to post the online bios soon, within the next couple weeks, because we’re still finishing them up—that’s why we call them ‘long’.

Tenure at Seven

There’s an old joke that Matt O’Keefe once told me:

A visitor, getting a tour of a factory, asks, “How many people work here?"
The manager responds, “About half.”

That joke still makes me laugh today.  I’m not sure why I find it so funny since I don’t feel that way about Seven Cycles at all.  Pretty much everyone at Seven works their rear ends off.  This past week was no exception.  We had an important request from one of our distributors that required we increase production output by over 30% from our average production steady state this season.  The production team rallied—and even folks in the office helped cover some extra bases.  A 30% change in throughput in a 5-day period is really difficult—in most production settings it would be pretty near impossible; regardless, the team pulled together and we actually exceeded the goal!

Please, A Visa

Seven is coming up on its 2-year anniversary of hiring our first employee on a work visa.  So, it seemed apropriate to repost the initial installment--from September 2006--in a seemingly never ending visa story.  Here it is in it's entirety.  I will post a follow up soon--once our latest round of visa craziness subsides.

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Worthwhile Path or Easy Road

Recently a Japanese frame builder contacted Seven, interested in the possibility of apprenticing with us to learn about our company and our unique approach to frame building.  Understandably, we were interested in talking and mutually learning from him.  He flew from his home in Japan to Seven where we spent a few days working together to determine if it might make sense to bring him on as an apprentice; we quickly found that we liked him and he liked us. 

Understandably, his English is not perfect.  However, because of our manufacturing system, our visual controls, and our really dedicated and skilled production team, he was able to quickly grasp our basic frame building techniques so he was machining and fabricating some frame elements within a couple days.  As I have found again and again, good communication goes well beyond words--thankfully, since I have so much trouble with words.

All appeared to be good; everyone seemed enthusiastic about the opportunity to work with our new potential hire.  We even had a couple people offer him a place to stay in order to ease him into East Coast life--no easy feat.  We all believed it would be a great experience for everyone involved.  He would learn from us and we would learn from him.  If nothing else, the cultural immersion and understanding for us all seemed like it would be worthwhile.

Right?  Wrong.

Auction Action

Yesterday evening we had an auction at Seven Cycles--just for Seven employees.  We've done this before because we seem to accumulate bike parts that some people might call detritus and others might call cycling gold.

For the event we pulled together bike parts from old demo bikes, test bikes, prototypes, and samples; then we start the bidding...  some pizza, beer, and chips and salsa go a long way to get the bidding rolling.