Michelle: I really enjoyed your stress article. Can you tell us what you’ve learned about coping with stress? Quality can be a stressful industry.

Patrick: I've been in quality for almost my entire career from one aspect to another. Quality touched everything that I've ever done. And over the last 14 years, I've been working for a company called GT Michelle Company, wonderful company.

But the explosive growth really affected me more than I expected it to. We went from eleven locations in 2011, or actually eight locations in 2011, to at the time that I departed the company, over 40 locations.

I departed the company in January. January 1st was my first day out here as a solo practitioner. And it affected my health in ways that I wasn't expecting.

The stress level of going from being a technician to being an executive-level officer in the company and having spent eight years straight in school, including four years in law school, the stress built up to the point that it was almost impossible for me to survive in the environment that I was in.

So I had to make a change, because I began to realize that the quality of my work was suffering. I was by myself, doing what I was doing. Requesting assistance, requesting help from people to provide me with support to do my job, and the support wasn't coming. So, I mean, it's a corporate world, so the company is growing, so they're wanting to put resources in other places.

So coming to a trend, one of the trends I've seen, and I'm sure everyone in quality can relate to this because everyone I speak to relates to this. The budget for quality is pennies in the jar. It's just pennies in a jar until everything goes wrong, and then there's a couple of quarters added to the jar. And then the company gets sued, and then it becomes millions, and quality gets blamed. That's one of the biggest trends that I've seen.

And people who work in quality management and quality assurance agree with me on this because they see it too.

This is one that I'm trying to bring to light, along with a lot of other people that are trying to bring this to light, that quality is not the enemy. Quality is your friend. Quality should not just be a cost center. It should actually be one of your profit centers. We should be looking at quality as a way to make money, marketing your quality program as a value add, not a value take.

So that's one of the trends that I see in quality. That's probably one of the bigger trends that I'm seeing across the industry is that quality suffers quite a bit because it's seen as a cost.

Because you always hear the cost of quality. Well, when you hear cost and you're an executive, that immediately turns you off. You don't want to be spending money on anything. You want to be making money and only making money. And, I get it. But quality, it defends your profits. It doesn't take your profits. And if the world will start looking and trending in that direction rather than in the opposite, things would be much better.