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Does Everyone Get to Stay Your Customer?… NO!

By Al Levi |

“I’m sorry, Mr. Jones… I think, given the circumstances, another company could serve you better,” I said calmly, even though I was actually pretty ticked off at the way he had spoken to my best CSR, my Dispatcher and my most experienced Tech. I invited him again to go hire (and likely abuse) my competition.

Why not just take his money? Because Mr. Jones was not my customer. He was among the five percent of customers who were causing 90 percent of our problems and we were on a mission to move them out. And he was destroying our company’s culture and I wasn’t going to let that happen.

After all, I had always told my staff, “You’re my #1 customer and I know that how I treat you is how I hope you’ll treat our customers. So, know that my family is committing to treating you with the respect you deserve.”

Well, if I meant it… and I did… there comes a time I had to fire a customer to prove that I’d be willing to put my money where my mouth was and stick up for the team.

Here are four customer behaviors and one situation you shouldn’t tolerate and how you can handle them.

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Finally, All the Great Techs You Ever Wanted

By Al Levi |

It was 2 a.m. and I was standing in my office at our family’s plumbing, heating, cooling and now electrical business on Long Island talking to my brother, Richie. In a company of more than 25 Techs, we—the owners—were the ones still there, working late into the night—I mean morning—to fix some issues other people had created.

Richie said, “That guy was the best Tech at their shop? Really? He’s barely mediocre compared to our guys. And can you believe how much money we had to overpay him to come work here?”

To which I replied, in an exhausted and aggravated tone, “I’m sick of it. I’m sick of Techs telling us how great they are in interviews when we hire them or taking the word of others about how great this Tech is.”

It was very frustrating and it went on for years! The good news is we were eventually able to solve it and I’m about to tell you how you can, too.

To fix this problem once and for all you’ll need to learn and implement the five main components of Staffing Power:

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Your Employees Need to Know the “Why” because It’s More than Just the Money

By Al Levi |

The purpose, or what I call the “Why” for what your employees do at work, is becoming more important to them than just collecting a paycheck.

I know this to be so because I witnessed this when I was a contractor and now as a consultant to contractors. This long-time trend has become the norm. And I think it’s not just a good thing… I think it’s a great thing.

This may seem scary to you. Or, you may be in disbelief that this could be true. A quick review of articles and blogs online will validate what I’m saying here.

And if you’re an owner or manager who is over 50 years of age, you probably grew up in the trades with being told, “This is what I want done”. There was no discussion. You were just expected to do it because your boss told you to.

But having worked with consulting clients over the last few years, all I see are Millennials and now even some of the Generation Z arriving at work.  This movement is in full swing, so doing things because “I told you so” is long gone. In general, they’re not going to engage their heart and soul into anything at work until they know the “Why” they’re doing something.

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Personality Profiling – Tendencies vs. Absolute Truths

By Al Levi |

As part of Staffing Power, I advise my clients to make sure that Personality Profiling be a part of the hiring process.

To be clear, I don’t like the term “Personality Profiling” because it feels, to me, manipulative. Profiling is just a very bad word unto itself.  That’s why I prefer the term Motivational Mapping.

Motivational Mapping is seeking to know how the new hire interacts in the world or at least how they view things. That promotes better communication because if you know the words they want to hear they’re more likely to be more motivated.

This switch of terms to Motivational Mapping isn’t meant to be a game of semantics. It’s more about recognizing that the term fits better because it’s about the things that motivate us. That’s different because we’re all wired differently. All of which I think is a really a good thing as we don’t want to live in a world of clones.

That said, we all have tendencies. And recognizing those tendencies early on will help set up the potential new hires to better succeed at your company. It can also reveal if a new hire is a good fit for your company. That’s why you want to pay attention to what the Motivational Mapping is revealing.

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Bad Employee or Bad Fit for Your Company?

By Al Levi |

Is there such a thing as a bad employee?

Yes, there is.

Is there such a thing as an employee who’s just a bad fit at your company?

Yes, there is.

How do you know if you have a bad employee or just a bad fit for your company?

Ah… that’s a little trickier! Good news is I’ve got some things to share with you that I think will help you make a better decision for yourself.

But I must let you know that until you have a systematic way of doing business at your company, your employees are at risk which puts you and your company at risk.

The only fair way for an employee to be judged good or bad is to have things documented in writing that helps your employees fill the box or boxes on your Org Chart. More than that, you also need to have the associated orientation process that gets them up to speed and provides the metrics they will be judged on. This coupled with never-ending training is the only way to give an employee the ability to step up and be a good-to-great employee at your company.

Tough news here…

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A Better Way to Say Goodbye to Low Performers

By Al Levi |

Years ago, when I first entered the family business as the last brother in to what was then a 3rd generation service contracting business—now a 4th generation plumbing, heating, cooling and now electrical contracting business—my dad said to me, “You can no longer hire anyone until you prove you can fire someone the right way. Face it. You like hiring people. And who doesn’t? But you need to do both.”

Well, I didn’t like that message much, but I knew he was right. As an empathetic person I am able to put myself in another person’s shoes and see things from their perspective. And I could only imagine how bad it felt to get fired!

Our service contracting company was and still is a NYC Union Shop. When it came to employee relations that was both good and bad news. The good: there was formal process for disciplining and terminating employment. The bad: we were not consistently following the steps. (In our defense, they were not all that clear!)

The first few times I fired a bad employee they were genuinely surprised. Naturally, they wanted to unload their frustrations but I just wanted to get it over with so usually I cut them off. It went so badly a few times I’m lucky I didn’t get shot!

Something had to change. We had to figure out a “right” way to say goodbye to a bad employee. The answer was to create our own formal process, which we called “The Steps of Discipline.”

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The Right Way to Say Goodbye to a Bad Employee

By Al Levi |

Is firing people tough to do? You bet!

To help, I’m going to share advice that I learned along the way from working at my own plumbing, heating, cooling and now electrical business. It’s also what I’ve been sharing for over 17 years now working with my 1-to-1 clients, in my book, my seminars and in my workshops.

THAT SAID….Disclaimer, I’m not a labor lawyer nor do I play one on TV.

You are well served to have a great Human Resources company to reach out to or a Labor Lawyer to help you navigate these turbulent waters. Things are different in different states and even among local governments so you don’t want to wing it.

So, why pay attention to what I’m going to share? The reason is I’m sharing my real world experience with you so you’re better educated on what to potentially do next.

Years ago, when I first entered the family business as the last brother in to what was then a 3rd generation business (now, it’s a 4th generation business), my dad said to me, “You can no longer hire anyone until you prove you can fire someone the right way. Face it. You like hiring people. And who doesn’t? But you need to do both.”

Well, I didn’t like the message, but the message was received. What I realized is…

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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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Attitude vs. Behavior: What’s the Difference?

By Al Levi |

“That Tech has a bad attitude.”

“I don’t like the attitude of our bookkeeper!”

“What’s wrong with the attitude of our dispatcher?”

Bad attitudes are everywhere, it would appear.

Based on…what?

In most cases, nothing, other than your opinion, that is. An opinion, by the way, that that colored by your attitude toward others! In fact, my new favorite saying is, “I see what I believe” not the old (and incorrect) saying, “I’ll believe it when I’ll see it.”

As owners and bosses, we’re quick to judge. It’s what we do. We compare people to some fictional version of how we think we were when we did their work. The part we leave out is that our vision of ourselves, especially as times goes by, is akin to the fish growing larger every time the fish story is told!

No, you couldn’t put a water heater in by yourself in one hour. Nor could you install a new heating system by yourself in two hours. You didn’t carry that giant hot tub up four flights of stairs by yourself and install it in an hour, either. And when you were up to your elbows in grunge on a job, or a customer groused at you, you may have come back to the office a little grumpy, too!

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What if I Train Them and They Leave?

By Al Levi |

Resistance—I get a lot as an industry consultant but when it comes to convincing a contractor client of the importance of training, resistance is something I can bank on.

I listen politely as they recount a bad experience or two they have had because they invested in someone who then left the company and went work for someone else—usually a competitor.

After a few minutes of this, I interrupt them and address the elephant in the room: “So, what you’re asking yourself is, ‘What if I train them and they leave?’”

“Yes.”

My reply, the only one that makes any sense, is, “What if you don’t train them and they stay?”

The next thing I typically hear from the owner is, “Darn it. I know you’re right and I hate it.”

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