Firefighting  refers to the time that is spent dealing with complaints, mistakes, rework, staff problems and all of the other issues that take you and/or your staff away from your key role.  It happens because services are not delivered properly, products are not delivered as the client expects or staff do not perform as they are supposed to.  The cost to your business is enormous.

We often ask staff how much time they spend fighting fires at the expense of doing the job for which they are paid.  The answers used to surprise us, but now we are no longer surprised when workers at any level in a business tell us that they spend forty to ninety percent of their time firefighting. 

Top management is often unaware of this happening and so, have no idea of how much this downtime is costing the company. Imagine you have six managers on $100,000 plus per annum and they spend on average 50% of their time firefighting. That's $300,000 per annum that is spent on activities that should be unnecessary.  Your company may not be as large as this but imagine what having your staff spending 50% of their time firefighting is costing you.

Most business have no idea how much this is costing them as they do not measure this downtime or extra consumables used. Nevertheless, the cost is huge but there is a solution.