When I started my hardwood floor and staircase company almost 10 years ago, I thought I was ready for anything. I’d grown up in the industry, earned a business degree from one of the best schools in the country and had some incredibly talented journeymen working for me.
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When I started my hardwood floor and staircase company almost 10 years ago, I thought I was ready for anything. I’d grown up in the industry, earned a business degree from one of the best schools in the country and had some incredibly talented journeymen working for me.
But, as I’m sure almost everybody reading this article can relate to, I got a pretty rough lesson early on—because none of that was adequate preparation for the realities of handling the day-to-day business side of things.
It seemed like for every successful month, there was a month of no business, or a month of emergencies that followed. It was only a few years ago that I finally realized why. In short, it’s this: People want to do business with us because they want the job done, but they’re also so afraid of being taken advantage of they look for any reason to reject us. Sure, we do 99 things perfectly, but it’s the one less-than-perfect thing that the prospect latches on to and uses as their excuse to look elsewhere. Usually, that one thing is related to customer service.
For me it was a shock to realize that it takes a lot more than just fantastic quality work to be successful in this industry. Lead generation; prospect qualification and closing; ensuring consistently professional communication between contractors and clients; collecting payments; and juggling the workloads of contractors—these proved to be more crucial, and a lot more work, than we imagined.
One of the most important lessons I learned early on was from a client who told me, “Don’t tell me about the labor pains, just show me the baby.” It is becoming common for clients to default to not caring about anything we do so long as we finish the job perfectly, quickly and with minimal disruption to them. This has become more relevant with the growing popularity of renovation-themed TV shows, because more and more clients let these shows dictate what they feel their experience should be.
And so for the past decade, I’ve tried a lot of systems to keep my business organized and ensure clients have seamless service. In the early days, I used a wall calendar for appointments and a filing cabinet to store hand-written job notes and completed estimates. Now I use a system that combines Microsoft Excel, Google Calendar and hard copies of everything. With a lot of time and sweat, these systems helped me find ways to minimize disruptions for my clients while keeping a high level of service. Some examples of ways to do this are:
• Don’t upset clients because of a missed appointment. Set each contractor up with an electronic calendar. Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook work well, but there are other calendars that can be accessed online or via smart phone as well.
• Clients will change their availability; let them. Email and mobile phones let a business owner notify contractors instantly.
• Send text messages to contractors every morning with a reminder of the day’s activity.
• Ensure that contractors “courtesy call” each client about 30 minutes before arriving for an estimate.
• Maintain a collection of quality before-and-after pictures from each project to show the client. Use these photos to show your craftsmanship to future clients.
• Conduct personalized follow-up with each client after the job is complete to get testimonials and referrals.
• Do a daily check of outstanding estimates to follow up and try to close.
• Do a daily check of outstanding payments owed to follow up with and collect.
All of these things take time, and it’s easy to let some of them fall through the cracks, especially telling contractors when client availability has changed. Phones aren’t always answered, emails or texts not always checked, and it can be a monstrous pain to juggle the changing schedules of dozens of contractors. But it certainly needs to be done, since a missed appointment is the business equivalent of reaching into our pockets, pulling out a large pile of cash and then lighting it on fire.
And as I’m sure we all know by now, it doesn’t take many of these things falling through the cracks to cost us in money and reputation.
Regardless of how your business is currently set up or how big you are, you will see a tremendous increase in your profitability when you can be certain that, on top of doing excellent work, you’ve also made life extremely easy for your clients.
