Business Systems… and More
Business systems and more systems is the future in advancing profits and your core business developments. Everything must be looked at to be thought of as a system.
How your talk to your employees is a system. How your employees speak to the customers is a system. Estimating with a higher closing percentage is a system. Getting tasks completed is a system needed for communications clarity. Hiring needs to be the correct system to keep good employees that will want to stay. Goals, yes goals is a system to get everyone involved.
The lens needs to be highly focused on every single operation of ones business. Then breakdown every aspect of that to how you can systematize the process into an easily duplicatable process over and over again that anyone can accomplish that operation if trained.
Systems provide you the ability to train minimal paid person to perform the operation successfully. What!? Yes, this doesn’t mean you can turn your business into a minimum wage haven of employees to make more money. It means you have created a system that can train the someone to do a job at a lower wage because it is easier to work that operation. This gives you better profits and a better future to pay that same person more in the future to learn harder better paying operations. If you think like that then your employees will always have a future in believing in your culture.
Masters Services Systems
I own Masters Services, one of the largest chimney services in the United States. I started 23 years ago. Over the years we had plenty of systems but not until I became a business coach did I learn what and how systems does to your profits and culture. Here is a list of systems Masters uses with most of them being implemented within the past 2 years, but not all..
- Hiring System – New hires fill out hiring paperwork specialized in their position, watch “Welcome Video” that Christa (my wife) and I made informing them on our culture and history, and get fitted for uniform
- To-do’s – a program to assign tasks for managements daily, weekly, or monthly job duties that they can check off that its completed and everyone necessary can see its completed
- TV Reporting Program and web page – Like a restaurant digital sign we have 2 web reporting sites broadcasting our sales goal progression in real time, bonus achievements status in real time, number of new clients scheduled daily, number of jobs scheduled daily and the dollar amount, mistakes that have been made to correct by days end, and the current weather radar for everyone to see in real time.
- Call Center Scripts – A digital script is followed to say exactly what and how we want to sell our services and products to how we communicate with our new clients concerns and questions. It’s all scripted for existing employees and easy to teach new employees.
- CRM – of course we have a web/app based scheduling, estimating, invoicing, inspections, accounting, and work flow program.
- Service and Items Sales System – I developed early on how exactly I want to communicate my services and items to the customer with sales scripts written down for my salesman to memorize during training AND to continue to go over them during meetings.
- Welcome a customer at the door system – I have a very specific way I want my salesman to talk to the clients at time of initial contact. I have them ask several qualifying questions and depending on how those questions are answered I have trained them to assure they hired the right company to solve their issues. It sets the tone on the fact we can and will do the best job possible and puts the customer at ease right from the start.
- Rebuttals for objections answered how the company wants them addressed. Example… Customer opens front door and says I’m broke so make this as cheap as possible. Our reply.. The chimney tells the story, we just read you the results. I am here to make sure your fireplace is safe to use and nothing less. Can you show me your fireplace? Works every time!
- Credit Card Processing Mobile App
- Call Recording
- Truck Monitoring System – sees where they are and been, tracks speeding and quick stops, and much more! We do monitor it weekly or some weeks daily
- System of Termination of an Employee – We go by the State of Texas employment laws for right to work state laws. Management strictly follows our system.
- Sales Goals Projections – We look at the last 3 years and come up with the next quarters sales goals. It goes up on the TV Reporting Website. The entire company sees our goals to help achieve and push over them and since we started we have broken into new territory of sales growth!!!! Employees want to know they are in a good company and also want to know its growing to feel like they are a part of it. Of course they are!
- Track exactly where every new client found us. I have been doing this one for nearly 20 years. It’s great because you can see what works and what does not.
- Website Operations Manual – living document of how we do everything. This is hard one to keep up with but we try.
- Weekly management, crew, and call center meetings – Must do to keep everyone on same page
- Social medial – Every week we post, goal is everyday and we try. My call center does it.
- Decision Tree- Label a question so the employees knows if it’s a question he needs help with or can make the decision on their own
I will be doing more posts on each one of these systems in the future as well as on my podcast. If you would like to listen go to: https://outsidethebusinessbox.podbean.com to here about more of these systems.