Larry Janesky's 8th HVA: Maintain Installed Job Quality

You don’t want to grow a “broken business.”

Do you get customer complaints on a large percentage of your jobs?

Do your installation crews require lots of supervision or repeat visits to get things right?

If you have these problems, they will multiply as you grow.

Let’s say you do 100 jobs. And 15 of these jobs have issues where you, as the owner, have to get involved. That's 15%.

What would happen if you doubled the amount of jobs you do?

Would you maintain 15% and have 30 issues? Probably not.

What happens is that as you doubled, your crews would be working faster. And/or your crews would be training new people. So, a crew with a 15% issue rate, would be creating less experienced copies of themselves.

And what happens when we make a copy of a copy? The second copy has a lower quality.

Rather than maintaining a 15% issue rate, your rate of issues – complaints and problems – increase as a faster rate. 

What can happen is that complaints and repeat visits to correct jobs begin to affect your reputation and prevent you from growing further.

You Must Provide Great Quality

In the School of Entrepreneurship, the programs “Wow! Foreman” and “The BOBR System: Best Outcome, Best Reporting,” teach how to create and maintain high quality. 

Train your teams often. Steer your team’s attention to job quality. When people call with an issue with work you have already done, respond quickly and protect your reputation.

Set up department or company-wide initiatives based around job quality. Celebrate successes and group-learn from mistakes. Set expectations and support your teams.

Answer the following questions to get a benchmark of how you are doing.

• Do you get customer complaints about quality?
• Are your installers/technicians trained? How often?
• What mechanisms do you have in place to ensure quality?

Answer these questions and you'll know if you have a quality problem and why you have it. Then train your team and track issues to improve.

You can also join the School of Entrepreneurship to learn more. Start with a Free Trial here.