Tell me about a difficult problem you solved.

My parents own a hardware store, and I've worked there every summer since I was 16. Two summers ago my dad told me the store had made a profit three years in a row and still couldn't pay its suppliers on time every winter. He thought the answer was a bigger credit line. I asked him for a month to find out where the cash was going first. The hard part was that the store's records couldn't answer the question. Sales ran through the register, but stock was counted by hand once a year. So I spent a lot of time putting the data together myself. What I found was that about 300 products hadn't sold a single unit in a year. Most were seasonal items my dad reordered every fall out of habit. I proposed two changes, and he agreed to both. He marked down the dead stock, and I set up a simple reorder rule. That winter the store paid every supplier on time. It taught me a lot about problem solving.

My parents own a hardware store, and I've worked there every summer since I was 16. Two summers ago my dad told me the store had made a profit three years in a row and still couldn't pay its suppliers on time every winter. He thought the answer was a bigger credit line. I asked him for a month to find out where the cash was going first. The hard part was that the store's records couldn't answer the question. Sales ran through the register, but stock was counted by hand once a year. So I built the missing data myself. I spent two weeks matching 18 months of supplier invoices against register sales for about 2,100 products, one category at a time. What I found was that about 300 products hadn't sold a single unit in a year. They were sitting on the shelves at a cost of $46,000. Most were seasonal items my dad reordered every fall out of habit. I had to decide how to tell him, because the ordering was his. I showed him the three worst categories and asked what he saw. He got there before I finished. I proposed two changes, and he agreed to both. He marked down the dead stock, and I set up a simple reorder rule. Nothing gets reordered unless it sold in the last twelve months. By spring he had cleared $31,000 of that stock. That winter the store paid every supplier on time without borrowing. What I took from it is that when the data doesn't exist, a rough version I build myself beats another month of opinions.