About us
Act I: 1998-2017
It all started with a push. Our largest customer approached their entire supply chain and said, “you’re doing lean now.” We went into survival mode. What is lean? What will this do to our bottom line? What if we say no? This was all very scary for us!
We decided to hire some consultants to teach us about this “lean stuff.” They taught us the 7 wastes, helped us find low-hanging fruit, and took us on study trips to Japan to visit Toyota and other companies that have applied the Toyota Production System. When our customer came out to audit us, they were unable to identify any waste to remove.
By the third trip to Japan, out of frustration that we kept backsliding, we decided to “just copy Toyota.” Whatever Toyota did, we now did. Toyota has andon lights, so we started using green, yellow, and red solo cups. Toyota uses pull signals to communicate work, now we use pull signals. Toyota has tours, so we developed our own teaching tours!
2017
1998
During this phase, we experienced:
Higher quality + lower cost
Greater innovation
A struggle to implement in our workplace
Daily “bit” improvement
More joy
Pushback + skepticism
By offering our free tours, we learned the following:
We were growing faster than our guests by teaching
These principles are true, in every single situation
With top support, this is repeatable across all industries
Our story is valuable and should be shared to those who want to grow with us
Act II: 2017 - 2019
In 2017, we decided to invest more energy and effort into our tours and created TruthBitPull LLC, our consulting firm, and started charging for our tours. This is when we started our 8-hour Field Days and 3-day Boot Camp options. Teams from Starbucks, Nordstrom, and others started sending teams from all parts of their organization to learn with us. We continued to work with them long after their tours were over so that we could guide them through their own transformation.
2017
2019
Some of the fruit we experienced:
Lives being impacted
Burdens being lifted
Career paths being rerouted
Teams applying these principles
Flow being applied in many settings
Higher conviction around these principles
Tears of joy & grief being shared
Less “No Show” tours and higher engagement
Act III: 2020 - Present
In 2020, COVID-19 became an obstacle to continue to tell our story and “Shine Our Light.” However, thanks to our partners at Starbucks, we decided to try offering Waste Tours virtually. Since then, we have been offering virtual tours, which have been so beneficial that we decided to continue even though we are able to meet for in-person tours again. In fact, we doubled down. In the Spring of 2021, we created kaaspass, our virtual subscription to all of our exclusive virtual experiences so that we can “Shine Our Light” more broadly.
In addition to what we learned previously, we also: