Leadership Power

What’s Finally Going to Fix Things at Your Company?

Well, let’s start with what won’t fix things at your company.

Putting out a daily fire without focusing on fire prevention is just wrong. Because that fire is bound to break out again tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow until the day you finally lock the front door of your company and say “Goodbye!”

What is going to fix things?

Becoming proactive about running your company instead of letting the company run you. That starts with putting the right tools in place to make running your company day-to-day way saner and way more sustainable.

The biggest and best tool is to document what it takes to run your company, without you having to ride your white stallion to the rescue from sun up to sundown.

That’s why I’m advocating you dedicate a portion of your week—no matter how crazy that week is—to creating a series of documents designed to keep fires from starting in the first place.

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Everything in business is Important!

Not everything in business is Urgent. Thank heavens!

The trouble starts when all your focus is on fighting fires—dealing only with Urgent items—leaving no time to focus on any Important-But-Not-Urgent items.

When you’re firefighting day after day, how will you ever work on the importance of Fire Prevention?

Answer: You won’t!

This is the daily struggle we face as business owners, and even moreso as Contractors.

All of it feels like it’s urgent. This is especially true when there’s an unhappy customer yelling at you and threatening to post their unhappiness online to everyone on planet Earth.

Breathe.

Now, you and I both know that if everything is urgent, there’s no way to prioritize and maximize your and your staff’s day. You must develop the ability to separate the Important-But-Not-Urgent things that are going on at your company today, just like they did yesterday, that are likely to continue that way until the final moment you put the key in your office door.

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Working with consulting clients, I create the Operating Manuals early on to help them immediately minimize the daily chaos in their businesses. For fast-growing shops, it allows them to keep growing in a smarter way.

All good stuff.

But, I let them discover “The Secret Bonus” of these operating manuals, which is that they boost sales. Most owners realize this right away, because the best shops closely track sales data.

Here are the top 7 reasons why having operating manuals in place boosts sales:

The CSR Manual trains the CSRs to put Techs in front of the right customer. This frees the Tech up from wasting valuable productivity time explaining pricing and payment policies. This is learned in weekly meetings using the CSR Manual for phone role-playing.

“Déjà vu All Over Again” is a famous quote by the late, great Yogi Berra. I’ve lived this scenario, and I’m betting you have, too. I’m talking about callbacks–the bane of the contracting industry.

I worked in my family plumbing, heating and cooling business (today they also do electrical), so I know first-hand how demoralizing and damaging callbacks can be.

Here’s why:

1. Your customers have to needlessly take off extra time from their paying jobs to be there for your Techs again and again.

2. Callbacks rob your ability to do new service and install work because you have to redo a repair for no money.

3. They ruin your good reputation, especially today, when unhappy customers go online and tell the world.

Yikes!

February may be when Valentine’s Day is, but too often there’s not a lot of love sent towards contractors in general, especially when a local news station sets up a sting operation targeting your industry!

Now a sting operation set up by a TV news station sounds like a good idea, but it’s not often fair.

Yes, there are still too many unscrupulous contractors out there who take advantage of the unsuspecting customer. But too often, the way these shows set up the problem the contractor is asked to uncover is equally unscrupulous.

For instance, the show will take a furnace that may be 25 years old or more and rig up a problem. The problem is the unit is statistically reaching the end of its useful lifetime and very unlikely to be as efficient and green as anything that’s been manufactured in the last 10 years. In that case the tech is obligated to offer both a repair and a replace option. Unless…

I grew up in my family’s plumbing, heating, and cooling company and among my earliest memories are my Dad getting calls in the middle of the night from people with heating emergencies—a homeowner whose furnace had quit or a bakery where they needed the steam from the boilers for their baking. When this happened, rather than leave me at the house, he’d take me with him.

I remember it being fun to go on those calls. The bakers liked me and would feed me bagels, cookies, and cake while my dad toiled to get their boilers up and running. Not so much fun for my Dad, or me, later, when it was my turn to do it!