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Service industry business expert Brian Harding draws upon his many years of experience to share insights, strategies, tactics, and ideas to help business owners in service industries (like contractors, home and auto repair services, IT providers, CPAs, and B2B businesses) overcome challenges in their businesses. Brian takes on a wide range of topics small business owners face with growth, delegating, customers, employees, and processes, as well as the internal struggles and fears small business owners must overcome to build the business and lifestyle they dream of.
Brian Harding 0:04
When people come to me with frustrations that their team just won't get on board with vital in reasonable goals, or relatively simple expectations, there are generally two conversations a follow both lead to similar action plans, and luckily, they're both easy to fix.
Narrator 0:20
Running a service business can be hard. It is not unusual for business owners in industries like contracting home repair, auto repair business to business services, like janitorial it and accounting and many others to feel overwhelmed by all the priorities facing them at any given time. Between addressing the needs of the customers managing the employees, figuring out the financials and getting processes in place, feeling like you're making significant progress on your business journey can be difficult. Welcome to service industry success Hosted By Brian Harding. Each week, Brian will look at real world strategies for building the business you are dreaming off while also sharing tactics to get through some of the most frustrating parts of business ownership with a lot more ease. Let's get started.
Brian Harding 1:11
Hey, everybody, first of all, let me just apologize for my voice. It was my turn to get COVID Apparently, so that has wreaked havoc on my voice for sure. My main goal today is to get through this podcast without coughing. That's my main priority today. So let's get into to the number one reason your goals aren't being met. As I mentioned the opener, there's two conversations I generally have when someone comes to me lamenting that their team just won't get on board with something. The first thing I'll ask is, if I were to ask the employees who are not getting on board, what is the goal? Do you think their answer would be the same as yours? Over half the time? The answer I get is no. Which I appreciate their honesty. That's That's fantastic. So the solution from here is pretty straightforward. We must develop and teach or explain the goal and what it takes to region. For those who tell me their team can recite the goal, I'll ask what is the goal. And almost always the goal is something like provide superior customer service, get safety under control, maintain or increase profitability, increase efficiency, improve performance. Those are the kinds of goals I regularly hear about those great goals. Because, by far the most common answer today we're going to use the providing superior customer service is our kind of template or example. After they've stated the goal and are having an issue with and I'll ask how many people are on your team. And they'll come you know if it's five or 12 or 27, or whatever. Then I'll ask if we ask he asked each person on your team to define superior customer service? How many different answers do you think we would get? And almost always the answer I get is somewhere between 75 and 100% of the headcount they gave me so if they said they had 20 people in the company, the answer would almost always be somewhere between 15 and 20 different definitions or answers they would anticipate us getting if we were to ask, you know, did it kind of a poll of their team or just asked Hey, what's your definition of customer service in this example. So the issue is if we have 15 to 20 different definitions in a team of 20 people. The issue is we don't have an agreed upon goal or agreed upon path to success. So step one to solving that particular problem is to establish a goal that everyone agrees upon upon and can't explain, then we must develop and teach what it will take to reach the goal, just like in the in the first example.
So again, we're going to use providing superior customer service as an example. This is not to say it's the most important, it's just the most common one I get. So we're gonna use that as our example today. And it is very important. Unlike any goal, the way to achieve is by establishing and reaching SMART objectives, which are like the building blocks of the goal. providing superior customer service can't be the goal you hold people accountable to per se, especially if you haven't clearly defined and agreed upon the goal as a team. You hold them accountable to reach the measurable objectives, you'll establish hopefully with their help, which, when performed correctly, collectively achieve the goal of providing great customer service. For example, if you want to teach your son to be a better tackler in football, you wouldn't just shout at your son to be a better tackler. Hopefully, you wouldn't just shout that was a terrible tackle. That was a good tackle. You would identify and break down the individual parts of the tackling process. Now I haven't played football in 25 years let's say it's been a while so I'm sure the metrics in the in the in the individual parts of the tackling process taught now are different than I played football but from what I remember, hear this kind of six basic things. that we're taught, keep your feet moving, keep your eye on the on the runners hips, stay square with the runner, put your helmet where the ball is stay low, and extend your legs to the tackle. Those are the kinds of six steps that were if he broke down a tackle how, what the components were. That's what they were. Each of those actions can be objectively witnessed and measured. You either do it or don't do it, or you do it well or don't do it well, or wherever. And if they're all done correctly, we can anticipate a proper tackle taking place. That would be the the outcome, we would pretty confidently expect to happen if all six of those things happen. Well, we need to the same thing as it relates to providing superior customer service, we need to break it down into smart objectives. Now what do I mean when I say SMART objectives? Some of you many of you probably have heard this. So we review. But just in case, and for anybody who hasn't heard the term smart objective, or smart goals are smart actions before, SMART is an acronym for specific. So specifically, you know, we're going to increase revenue by 3%, rather than we're going to just increase revenue. Measurable. This is not where we say, all know what it looks like, or I'll know when it's better all no one, it's okay, we're going to measure results, we're gonna and oftentimes publish results attainable, if your team knows they can't achieve it, they're not even gonna try. So it's got to be something attainable. It's got to be relevant. This is not the place to wedge in another issue you're really passionate about, but really has nothing to do with a specific goal at hand, and time bound. If there's no deadline, or timeframe, then there's no urgency. If there's no urgency, the objective will not be consistently met, period. So SMART is an acronym for those things Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and time bound. Those are almost always the goals we should be or I'm sorry, objectives we should be using. And then let me just pause there, this is a critical thing I think it's important for us to do is to not confuse terms like goals and objectives. You know, 1520 years ago, they were called SMART goals. And now we've evolved a little bit where we talk about a goal being the overarching thing like providing great customer service. And the objective objectives are the things that we break that down, these the individual characteristics or objectives, we have to meet to reach the overarching goal of good customer service. So it's important to have different vernacular for what each of these things are, you may not, you may choose to use different words in those, you may not like the word goal for the overarching thing and objective for the measurable, you know, broken down pieces of it, you might come up with something else, that's fine. If you if you're confident with how you're doing that, I would just recommend having different language for those two different
items, you know, the goal is not the same as the objectives. So whatever you call it, just I would recommend having a differentiate differentiating between those two, when you're going to measure and when you're not. So, again, we're gonna use customer service our example today. And I'm gonna go through a very broad way, I'm not going to really get into details on this, because we're, you know, we only have so much time. But what exactly is good customer service? What are the individual aspects of that. So, again, without getting way in the weeds on this, I would say that there's probably five or six basic components for people in service industries, like contractors, auto repair shops, home service providers, you know, the folks I'm always talking to, there's probably five or six basic components of superior or good customer service for service providers. And I wouldn't put these in your order. And I'm not going to get into detail on every one of them. Again, we're limited on time here. But first one is, people want to know what's going on, our customers want to know what's going on. So my companies before I can be SMART objective to address this was to establish there's three points of contact on every service call, when we're on the way when we arrived, and or when we diagnose the problem. Sometimes those are different, sometimes they were the same. And when we are finished or finished for the day. So the objective we held our team accountable to achieve was making sure these three points of contact happened on every call. That was one component of that was communication portion of the overall superior customer service goal. We held him accountable to making those three points of contact. Number two customers want to feel like they got value or they got a fair deal. The way to accomplish this in in again, for most service providers is explain everything upfront and give the pricing upfront to the degree possible. Obviously, some industries that's more attainable than others. But why do plumbers and lawyers have such bad reputations about pricing? Because historically, they would just do the work and then they would just hand the customer and built in the customer didn't really approve the amount. They just got a bill they had to pay and they didn't like how that fields. Now, plumbers largely have figured this out over the last 20 years, and have made major adjustments in how they handle pricing. Almost all of them now give flat rate pricing up front, which, you know, addresses this major concern customers had about plumber, you know, again, the stories of lawyers and plumbers, gouging and, and, and patting their bills and things like that, though, that's why those are two of the industries that historically have terrible reputations about pricings, because they didn't get their pricing upfront, because customers want to feel like they got value or got a fair deal. So the objective we held our team accountable to achieve was providing upfront pricing, which a customer agrees to in every single case, except for the three exceptions that we knew existed. If it wasn't one of those three exceptions, then the we we made sure we gave pricing upfront customer agreed to it every single time. This is something we had to measure and review every single day. Number three, customers want to feel like they and their belongings are safe. The way to accomplish this, of course, is by explaining the various methods and tools a service provider will use to keep their property safe when applicable. Which you can't do that unless you clearly define those things up front as a company, before we even go out to the customer have to define what are those times one of those times when it's applicable to explain what are the methods and tools we're going to use? You know, and so then there's two things one would explain to the customer when it when applicable, or appropriate. And two, we have to make sure we're actually doing the stuff we say we're going to do. So that we would we would you know, we could measure that by doing jobsite evaluations, or, you know, if you call them inspections, whatever, whatever your terminology is for your company, but that's a component of customer service was their stuff, feeling spit, you know, safe like this taken care of, we could absolutely measure that. Individually, we can measure and make sure we are team follow the script by practicing the script in our company meetings on a weekly basis or monthly basis or whatever. And know that they knew the script and they could they could very well recite the script about safety and, and accident prevention and how we're taking care of the customer's belongings and things like that. And their home or their car or whatever it is we're working on. It absolutely measure that they can recite that and absolutely measure that they can explain it. And then we can measure to actually do it, we stopped by the job sites, or walk out the shop or whatever it is.
Number four customers want to feel like they're valued and respected. Generally, we fall short here by being late or inconsiderate their time or not getting an estimate to them when we say we're going to those are all things are very measurable. Customers want to feel that the service provider is knowledgeable and competent. We they generally assume this is true unless we give them reason to believe otherwise. But that's something we can we can absolutely measure. And if your customers are recurring, then consistency is a key component of superior customer service as well, which should be accomplished by doing all these other things consistently. Well. Again, I'm not going to get into detail on every aspect of customer service today. That's a whole other podcasts a whole other topic. And we're limited on time. And you might have your own way of breaking down what your version of superior customer services. My point is for each SMART objective we develop and establish. By creating those things, when we do all those individual things, well, we will achieve the goal of providing superior customer service. So we have to develop these smart objectives. And we may need to develop KPIs that will be measured. A smart objective that's not measured with KPIs is not likely to be met, or to stay relevant for long. So that's kind of the process for for folks who are having difficulties with their team. getting on board with goals, we have to identify what the goal is, and what is the path to get there. What are the specific actions we have to do that are measurable, SMART objectives that we can do to get us there. So let me take sticky take a moment here to tell you about my book, I'm not going to go into a long winded recital because of my voice here. But just want to remind you my book is available on amazon.com. If you haven't gotten it, check it out, you can go to Amazon and put in my name and put it in service industry and it'll pop right up or you can go to si s as in service industry success, the book calm. That's si es tu book.com. Go there and get yourself a copy today. So the first, the first action, the first step in almost all these cases, the obvious issue is that we don't have an agreed upon goal and or path to success. Step one in solving that particular problem is to establish a goal that everyone agrees upon and can explain. Now, depending on how you want to handle this in your company, this can be something you just laid out and say here's how we're going to do it. You may want to or you may want to develop it with your team and ask for input. But we have to have a goal that everybody can agree upon and explain. Once the goal has been established, then we need to break it down into smart objectives. When reached collectively result in the goal being met. Again, SMART is an acronym for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound. For each objective, you may need to develop KPIs will be measured, and perhaps even posted. A smart objective is not measured with KPIs is not likely to be met, or stay relevant for too long. So just a quick recap here. If you're saying things like, I'll give an example I used to have a boss that he was, and he was a very passionate, energetic guy with a lot of energy. And he would, he would almost be ranting as he walked through the office, we're going to do everything with excellence. And that was his that was a key phrase, we're going to be excellent everything we do, we're going to do things with excellence. The problem is you can't measure excellence like that. Not in that in that context, we have to have specific, measurable objectives that we're going to do that we can measure, we hold our people to do those things that we can measure, which will reach the goal of getting my example providing great customer service, or his example being excellent. What does excellent mean, you know, what are the what are the three to five things that when you break down, Excellency, to him? Or to his team? What are the three to five things that make you excellent? What are the SMART objectives you can develop from there? And what are the metrics we can we can develop so we can hold our team accountable to reach those. So that's it for today, I appreciate you bearing with me with my voice. I'm sorry for how it sounds. I feel much better than I sound by the way, in case you're wondering about that. Don't forget to go to essays, the book.com To get your copy and service industry success today. And if you haven't yet, please share this podcast with a friend or colleague who's a business owner and service industry. Give us a rating review. If you can spare a couple of minutes. We have a few of those. And we have a ton of style five star ratings. We have a handful of reviews, which are you some more if you have a minute to do that for us. That'd be great. And that is it for this week. And I will see you all next week.