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Making It Okay for Your Employees to Ask for Help

By Al Levi |

Is it okay for your Employees to ask for help at your company?

You might say yes. But, I wonder if that’s true.

The reason I wonder if that’s true is because at my shop it wasn’t. We had a typical New York shop full of “know it all” mentalities. That meant it was dangerous to expose what you didn’t know because at the very least it was cause for your boss and co-workers to unleash a ton of ridicule.

The other reason I know that your staff is probably highly unwilling to show you what they don’t really know is because I, myself, the boss’s kid (as someone who had risen to be the 2ndbest Tech at our shop of 25 Techs) would spend time talking Customers out of repairs that I wasn’t fully confident I could do.

Yes, that’s right I, the boss’s kid, would do that.

Also, the reason I believe that your staff won’t show you what they can and can’t do is because they probably oversold what they actually can do when you first hired them. Now they’ve become overly protective at exposing these weaknesses they have to you or any other management team members at your company.

Here’s what I know. All your employees have holes in their knowledge, and until you make it safe for them to share what they do and don’t know you’re going to be at risk. There will be lost productivity, mistakes or worse things like insurance claims or a sting operation that makes the news and makes you look bad.

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A 5-Step Process to Gain Control at Your Contracting Business

By Al Levi |

If we met on an elevator ride, could you tell me in that short amount of time what key numbers you need to know to run your business effectively?

Probably not.

And that’s okay for today but not for the long-term health and prosperity of your business and you.

I, along with my brothers and dad, kind of ran our company without knowing the key numbers too. So, know that there’s no preaching here but rather a desire to share what we learned as we went along. Know that we had always believed if you worked incredibly hard and kept expenses down the money would follow.

The answer is sometimes it did and sometimes it didn’t. What I mean is the accountants would walk into our office in December and say, “You had a great year. Go buy yourself some tools and trucks and pay yourselves a bonus.” We liked that visit very much!

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Top Five List

By Al Levi |

Ever gone to a great seminar, workshop or group meeting and come away with a ton of great ideas and an even bigger to-do list than when you went?

Bet it happens all the time. Am I right?

And when you come home excited to share with the whole team at work all the fantastic new ideas you’ve learned about and want to put to work at your company, your employees just cringe.

Why?

They’re left out of the process is why. Plus, they know you. You get fired up about the latest and greatest thing and everything else is thrown in the “mental dumpster”. And off you go on the next rabbit chase.

The problem is another great idea will pop up that you feel is even more urgent in what I call the “entrepreneurial seizure” moment that flares up all too often in a bad way. Well, having made it part of my Planning Power! work with companies for 15 years, I have the company allow me to do private 1-to-1 conversations with their staff and the overwhelming response to this type of thing is they hate it and they hate you when you do this.

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5 Ways to Set Yourself Up for More Success in 2018

By Al Levi |

Ready for a new year? Well, whether you are or you’re not, it’s right around the corner.

Most of us are excited about the new year ahead. I think that’s the case because it’s a great time to push the reset button and leave behind what didn’t happen or what happened in a bad way and to look forward to having a brighter future.

That’s why we make New Year’s Resolutions…. right?

As someone who every year swore to eat better and get to the gym on a regular basis but quickly fell off the wagon, I can share that a New Year’s Resolution has no power unless you give it real power.

For your business, that means you need to do the following 5 things if you want to set yourself up for more success in 2018…

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Creating a Business to be Thankful For

By Al Levi |

“I hate my business!”

That’s what I hear periodically when I talk with Contractors. And to me that is sad. But, I get it.

For many, the business they started didn’t turn out the way they planned when they took that big leap and typically left a secure paying job as an employee to go for the brass ring as an owner. It seemed like it would be easier.

The most common complaints I hear are:

1. “This business is making me go broke. I have to keep putting in my own hard-earned savings, borrowed money or what I had hoped would be my retirement money to keep things going and nothing positive seems to happen.”

2. “I work all day and when I get home there’s more work to do. Things like billing, returning calls, putting together bids and a whole lot more than I realized. The day never ends.”

3. “I can’t do at 60 years of age what I did when I was 50 years old let alone what I did in my 20s, 30s and 40s. So, what do I do now?”

4. “I can’t stop working or there’s no business. Heaven forbid I get hurt or sick. It’s scary.”

5. “My employees are infuriating. They act like they’re the owner and I’m their employee.”

Yes, business can be hard. But, it doesn’t have to be.

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Handing It Off Without Losing Your Mind

By Al Levi |

“Why won’t people at my company take responsibility for getting things done?

Seriously, if I don’t do it myself, it’ll never get done. I don’t know what they do all day but they don’t spend time getting done what I want them to, especially when it comes to important projects.”

This is a standard complaint I get from frustrated owners. And I get it. But, these owners never seek to change their method so they keep getting the same result but only more frustrated as time goes on.

The definition of insanity: Doing the same things over and over expecting different results.

Here’s the sad fact. You’ve trained your staff that if they don’t do what you want the way you want you’ll lose your mind and take the project back. And that is training them to NOT take responsibility or action because you’ll never be pleased with what they do anyway.

When you’re done complaining privately or publicly or both, you take back these projects and things that need to get done at your company so you remain overloaded. Am I right?

I know why you stopped delegating anything to anyone and it’s because you’ve been trained by your staff that it’s a waste of time and money to do so.

This used to happen to me at my company. Keep in mind we had grown to 70 employees and still no one was able to help me get things done. I blamed them. But, the problem was actually me.

Yes, me.

I never took the time to delegate anything to anyone properly because I was in too big of a rush and I assumed they were too. So, I dumped it on them vs. delegating it to them.

What’s the difference?

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The Danger of Trying to Do It All

By Al Levi |

“Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.” That was told to me by a very smart contractor who had reached the end of his career and was lamenting how he had wasted so many business opportunities.

What he was speaking to is what he felt he learned all too late and that is…just because you, the owner or manager, CAN do something it doesn’t mean you SHOULD or that you’re the right one to be doing it.

It’s a fact that most of us owners and managers started as Techs and it was our ability to do pretty much any tough job they could throw at us that helped us rise through the ranks. It’s also what enabled us to believe we could succeed when we chose to open our own business.

Unfortunately, your ability to do everything is a double-edge sword. In fact, this skillset and mind set may well be what stymies the growth of your business. Because if you’re always the best choice to do it all then you better figure out how to clone yourself. The reason is you’re going to run out of both time and energy and then opportunities will be squandered.

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Grow Your Own

By Al Levi |

Yes, Grow Your Own!

No, I’m not talking about what’s now legal in Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington in varying degrees.

I’m talking about Grow Your Own: Developing Great Employees that are homegrown vs. store bought.

Trying to pirate away staff from your competitors by only hiring “experienced” staff to work at your company is a stop gap approach which is neither effective for growing your company or even maintaining it.

The real path forward is to grow your own great employees by committing to hiring willing people and providing them with all the skills training they’ll need. This approach puts an end to the insanity of hiring spoiled talent and trying to rewire them. I know. I tried for years.

Hiring willing people and providing the skills training applies not just to Technicians. It applies to all the positions at your company.

What are the many positions at your company today? My guess is you don’t really know because you’ve never formalized it.

How do I know?

I know because in my consulting career I’ve rarely arrived at a client, no matter how big a company they were, that had the type of Organizational Chart (aka Org Chart) that defined all the boxes it takes to run their company. At best, some of them had a vague idea in their head about who does what. Yes, I said in their head because it was just assumed everyone would know.

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Back to School: Not Just for Kids

By Al Levi |

Ah, the temperatures are dropping as we head into the fall (full disclaimer: it’s still hot where I live in Phoenix). Kids are headed back to school. You might be drifting into thoughts of watching the leaves change color depending on where you live. And maybe you have thoughts of going apple picking, drinking cider or indulging in one of the 1 million pumpkin concoctions there are these days.

Hang on.

The change of the season also means it’s time for you to get back to school too. As contractors, we can never stop learning. There’s always more to know about the technology that’s changing at breakneck speed all around. You’ve got to stay up or you’ll be left in the dust. This also applies to sharpening your business skills all the time by relentlessly pursuing more education and then getting down to the most important thing…getting things implemented.

The type of back to school I’m referring to is committing to having super effective in-house training — the type of training that separates you from your competition. This training focuses on honing three types of skills a Service Tech must have, which means you’re always working to get better. This is what increases their mastery and ultimately puts more profit on your balance sheet:

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Distance Learning Works…. Really!

By Al Levi |

I’ll admit it. I was skeptical that distance learning could be a real learning experience for service contractors. I grew up when distance learning meant taking correspondence courses through the mail! (I’m dating myself, I know.)

Today, the availability of increasingly powerful web-based applications such as GoToMeeting, Join.Me, Zoom, etc., has enabled distance learning to evolve into a highly effective way to transmit knowledge to contractors farther and faster than ever before.

For the service contractor, connecting with a teacher or trainer remotely has a lot of advantages over traditional in-person training. You can learn from the comfort of your own office, rather than having to leave your business. You get exposure to students from other parts of the country or even the world whose insights and input you never would have heard otherwise. Distance learning provides you with the leverage that comes with being a part of a group where you can reach out and help each other. And learning can continue on “after hours” as opposed to only when you’re in the class in person

Distance learning can also be done on your own. Some of us want to go at our own pace. We intuitively know ourselves, and what that optimal pace of learning is. Content and tutorials can be stored in the cloud in applications such as Dropbox or loaded up on a Google Drive so that you can access it at your leisure. (In our case, there isn’t much leisure so it’s when your long day is finally done.) You can read an assignment or watch a video over and over until the content sinks in.

There are a few downsides…

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