Al Writes

Creating Trucks that Work

By Al Levi | October 24, 2022October 20, 2022

The last thing you need to be doing in these uncertain times is to stock your trucks too heavily. You don’t need to be paying for excess inventory, for things that get damaged, or go out of warranty sitting on a shelf.

Just as bad, however, are trucks that aren’t stocked well enough to give your Techs a good chance to make an immediate sale and do the work. Always needing to chase parts is a waste of time which damages billable hour efficiency and can lead to lost sales.

My Service Manager at my company told me, “You can’t sell from an empty wagon.”

I replied, “What?”

He said, “If you don’t have it onboard, you’re unlikely to stop and go hunting for it.”

The goal should be for your Techs to pull up to 80% of the homes you serve with a truck that has the stock that will give them an 80% chance that they’ll have what they need to get the job done today.

The Trend of Contractors Not Providing 24/7/365 Services to Customers

By Al Levi | October 4, 2022October 11, 2022

“We’re a 24/7/365 business because we made a promise to our customers to treat them like family, and that means we’re there when they need us,” my dad said to my brothers and me as young boys.

We ran calls with my dad as little boys in the middle of the night. We loved it!! My dad not so much as he had finally gotten to bed after an exhausting day of work.

As we grew up and took our place working in our family’s plumbing, heating, cooling and electrical business, that message was always at the forefront of our culture.

One illustration… my brothers and I were at my dad’s 70th birthday party. The Tech on one of the late shifts reached out to me that he was stuck and couldn’t get the heat working at one of the nursing homes we served. Keep in mind that heat isn’t a nice idea but a life critical thing, especially in this case. So, my brother and I told my dad we were headed out to go help and he just smiled.

It’s a cultural thing.

Creating an Effective Referral Network

By Al Levi | September 6, 2022August 30, 2022

I was waiting to meet my new client, the owner of a Chicago plumbing company. And I just happened to be standing in the CSR area on a freezing cold day. This is what I overheard one of them saying: “I’m sorry, we don’t do heating work, just call XYZ Company.”

Know that when I was doing 1-1 consulting work I’d make it a point to be as “invisible” as I could so I could look and listen to better observe what was really going on.

Anyway, I got to meet my new client in his office and I said, “Just curious. I overheard your CSRs fielding calls from what I presume were your customers as well as prospective customers. When asked about doing heating work as today is super cold outside, they recommended XYZ Company. Do they also do plumbing?”

His face became filled with horror and anger. The company they were suggesting also did plumbing! The CSR had just unwittingly put his competition in their customer’s basement.

I explained how to better handle this situations moving forward.

Lessons Learned from Two Years as a Contractor in a COVID World

By Al Levi | August 1, 2022August 1, 2022

When COVID first hit in March of 2020, many of my 1-1 contractor clients had to adjust the way they worked—and fast.

The good news is that because they had operating manuals and staffing programs in place, it was just a matter of some tweaking of procedures and training which enabled their businesses to continue on pretty well, especially compared to their competitors who were lacking systems to lean on.

Yes, even though it was far from business as usual they actually continued to grow their business in those crazy times and they were able to switch to remote work as seamlessly as possible.

Reasons to Change Your Company Name and Some Tips to Do it Right (Part 2)

By Al Levi | July 5, 2022July 5, 2022

As I had promised at the end of Part 1, I’m going to share a sample of the letter you should send to customers announcing your company name change plus a bunch of great tips for executing the name change the right way. This is the also the same letter you will need to reformat a little to do an email blast to your customers.

Remember I said that all the great marketing knowledge I learned from my marketing guru, Leo, is still working great for my 1-1 clients to this day, and I’m going to share more of it with you here!

Here’s a sample of a letter I wrote for a client of mine who was changing the company name to end some confusion in his market and to launch his rebrand as well as some additional tips for doing a name change the right way.

Reasons to Change Your Company Name and Some Tips to Do it Right (Part 1)

By Al Levi | June 7, 2022June 30, 2022

What makes me an expert on when and how to change your company name and/or rebrand?

My family business was originally in just fuel oil heating (think propane heating), and my dad and my uncle were always doing acquisitions because urban renewal had chased our customers out of our service area. When they acquired a new company, they thought people wanted to do business with a company name they were familiar with.

Well, skip many years ahead and my brothers and I are at work alongside my dad (as my uncle had passed away). Anyway, one cold day in February, I went to a Super Bowl party, and I heard a couple of people getting into a heated argument, so naturally I got closer so I could hear what a couple of fellow New Yorkers were arguing about.

One of them said to the other, “I have the best heating company there is.”

The other replied, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. I have the best heating company!”

I asked them both which company they used, and they told me the names. I gulped. Both were using me, but they had no idea we were all one company! Worse, there were four other companies we also owned that were in the same situation!

If I Gave You a $100,000 – What Should You Do?

By Al Levi | May 9, 2022May 10, 2022

Let’s say I gave you $100,000 to grow your business. You go to dinner to celebrate your great windfall and then the next morning you’re at your desk, admiring the check.

Here’s my question: Would you know what to do with it, first, second, and third for the greatest impact? $100,000 sounds like a lot of money especially if you’re the typical contracting company which is at $2 million a year or less, and sometimes way less. But it’s also an amount that can disappear remarkably quickly unless you have a plan and use the money to execute that plan.

The other thing I know is that some problems aren’t really money problems. The problem is some people would only have fallen deeper down the hole if they had gotten a hundred thousand dollars.

Why?

They were lacking Planning Power, which means a plan on which projects to work on. They didn’t have systems like Operating Power (today it’s my Signature Operating Manuals System program) so they threw people at the problem hoping they’d magically make everything work right.

If I did give you 100,000 dollars, you would need systems to help you know how to spend money on the right things in the right way.

Harder to Get Great or to Stay Great?

By Al Levi | April 5, 2022March 31, 2022

The original location of my family’s plumbing, heating, cooling and electrical company was in Rockaway, Queens. My dad, Irving, and my uncle, Morty, started it out of my grandfather’s gas station.

When my two older brothers and I showed up full-time in the business, it was in the 1970s, and crime in the area was rampant. Why did we stay there so long? Inertia.

Well, the decision to move came down and my brothers and I knew we had one chance to get this right, and so when we finally found a place that would be more centrally located to where our client base had moved from the wreckage of where we had been. We also heeded the great advice from our industry guru and great friend, Dan Holohan, when he suggested we use our building to showcase what we do and make it a destination other companies wanted to visit.

The place was spotless and bright and the envy of the industry. I stood in the doorway with Dan admiring our great work when he said, “Al, remember it’s easy to be great one day. The trick is to continue to stay great, day after day.”

Ouch!

What Dan meant was that I had to make maintaining that high standard a priority or it would deteriorate over time. And if it did, I’d have to have a way to get myself back on track, and that way for me was leveraging my systems and checklists. I’ve always remembered this conversation and have seen it play out over and over with my clients during the past 20 years.

Mastering the Dispatcher Role from Beginning to End

By Al Levi | March 1, 2022February 25, 2022

One of the questions I get asked all the time by clients and customers is, “Why can’t my CSR also be the Dispatcher?”

Answer: They can and often do especially if you’re a small company. But if I ask more questions, usually I discover they’re struggling to be really good with one or the other. Maybe even struggling just to be okay.

The reason for this is that being a customer service rep and being able to do dispatching are two totally different skills sets, and the best people to fill each of those roles have different personalities. In fact, every time I’ve separated the CSR and Dispatcher roles, clients always report there is more money and more profit coming in.

Why is that?

Here’s why…

Systems Freed Me Up to Help My Daughter

By Al Levi | February 1, 2022February 1, 2022

Every winter, my daughter, Pam, her husband and my grand dogs come to visit my wife and me in Phoenix. Now I’d like to think it’s because she misses us… and… she does, but it does help that she lives on the east coast where it gets just a LITTLE colder than here.

While she and her husband are RVing across the great USA (she wasn’t new to the club as she’s been RVing for years now), they still have to work. Her work is at a summer camp in the Poconos in Pennsylvania. For those who don’t live in the northeast, there are summer camps that kids go to for 7 weeks! That’s right 7 weeks!

So, when I say to people when they ask what she does and I tell them she’s a camp director at a summer camp, the next thing they ask is, “What does she do the rest of the year?” I reply, “She works full time, and she has navigated the globe to find staff.”

Hmmm… finding staff… sound familiar to you?

Anyway, when she was here in January 2021, she was working from my home and said that she’s never had so much of a problem recruiting and hiring people like college kids, staff for the kitchen, people for the pool and lake and more.

My wife, Natalie, Pam and her husband were at the dinner table one night, and she looked at us across the table and said solemnly: “If I call you, will you come and help?” To which I said, “You want me to come and be a camp counselor again for the first time in 50 years?” She replied, “Yes… Possibly.”

Two weeks into the start of camp, I hadn’t heard anything from Pam, that is until I got “the” phone call. It was Pam. She said, “I don’t want your advice. I don’t want your opinion. I want you on an airplane to come here to help me and I need you… now.”