Production: The Value of Job Quality

What’s the payoff?

We’ve been talking about the journey that a lead takes on its way through the various functions of your business. Marketing generates leads off the strength of your Great Brand, your Appointment Center turns those leads into sales appointments, your salespeople turn those appointments into work to be installed.

This is the ‘Work’ that most people think of when they think about a home improvement, home service contractor. The Work is what our customers care about most, the stuff they’re willing to pay you for with their hard-earned money. This is the Production function of your business. The business end of your business.

A while back in our ongoing conversation, we set an aspiration for Production to ‘Install More and Better’. So, how do we go about making said improvement a reality?

Let’s establish two broad categories:

1) Job Quality

2) Production Rates

We talked about Production Rates in a prior entry. For now, let’s start out with a sketch of what we mean by Job Quality: If you get customer complaints on a high percentage of your jobs or if your crews require lots of supervision to get things right, it will affect your reputation and hinder your business growth. And when you do grow, those problems will only multiply. You don’t want to grow a broken business.

What do I mean by ‘Broken Business’? If you have one production crew out on the road that’s making mistakes and needs a lot of supervision, what if you add another crew to your business? What’s going to prevent your second (or third crew) from having the same issues that your first has? That will cost you time, money, and reputation. Let’s not do it that way.

To grow an even more successful home improvement business, we’re going to want crews that can be sent out to jobsites without the owner’s personal supervision. That scales. But how do we accomplish this goal?

What if you could train and equip your crews so that they need less supervision and you get fewer complaints? What if the processes you teach one crew can easily be taught to any crew – standardized and scalable to handle any volume of leads turned into jobs sold? What if there was a way to reduce employee turnover so you’re not always replacing those experienced people that know what they’re doing?

These aren’t hypotheticals. This is what Contractor Nation dealers have done, using approaches employed across our networks. To add more quality crews to your Production Department you need strategy and processes, like those outlined in the School of Entrepreneurship exercises Wow! Foreman and The BOBR System:

(Please, check out our SOE program or a Member Program if you’re interested in learning more about these tools and others likes them.)

We’ll be talking more about how to improve the Production function of your business down the road, so stay tuned.

See you soon.