Have you ever had the experience of having 2 of your customers compare their bill? You had Bob go to one customer and the next day, Tom went to the customer's house across the street the same job? Then Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Jones got together the next day and compared their bills only to find they payed different amounts of the same service from your company?
Now that's an explanation you don't want to have to ever make the customer on the phone. When businesses are small, it's fairly easy for the service manager or the owner to do all pricing. You when companies becomes larger, it starts to exceed the ability of the owner to supervise every bit of the work.
This usually happens at about five service trucks. In fact doing five service trucks, and controlling each one of their sales and pricing, usually means the business owner puts in about 70 hours a week just putting out fires and giving bids. He is usually still drive his own service truck, and is really frustrated at how much he has to do to keep up.
This is when I hear the line, "A small service company with 5 trucks or less can actually make better money than a larger company, until you get to 10 or 11 trucks". The fact that 90% of the service companies in the country are 5 trucks or less would seem to make this a true statement.
But that's not the real problem. the problem is the businesses failure to develop clear, consistent, easy to follow policies that make everything the company does consistent across the board.
For Example, if you don't have a policy that is simple and clear about how a Technician get permission to take a day off, it means that every time a day off is needed it is cleared through the owner. With 5 Technicians to control the owner can do this in his head, more than that and it gets a little more difficult. Without a clear system or policy the time off become confusing, or even worse gets lost.
Your business is slammed with work, and you look in the parking lot and see john's truck parked there. "Where's John, we have calls for him"
"I looked in the warehouse and they haven't seen him today."
"Well, of course not his personal car is not in the parking lot and his service truck is there. Get him on the phone and find out where he is."
"I tried that he doesn't answer."
Well you keep trying and when he finally answers I want to talk with him, I want to know where he is and why he can't answer his company phone."
Three hours later, John finally calls in and you are in the middle of doing one of the job you scheduled for him, and you are really good and mad by then.... "John where the @$!! are you!" and after a long pause you hear "You gave me the day off, Cindy just delivered our baby girl, is everything OK down there? I'm not in trouble am I?"
As soon as, you decide to start a business the very next thing you need to work on is a set of consistent policies and procedures, that (dare I say it) are written down for everyone in the company to use.
McDonald's operates 10,000 plus hamburger stands, they are the most consistent restaurant chain (and I might add here most profitable) in the world and the all use "the Book". It is written to a 5th grade level and every employee reads it, and it details every operation of the restaurant down to saying how many sesame seeds are needed on a Big Mac bun. Before "the Book" they had consistency problems and could not control more than 15 franchises'.
It is the same way for a service business, if you want to grow past 5 service trucks you need the same type of direction in your business. If you do you will make more money with 6 truck than you did with 5, and more money with 7 than you did with 6..... and so it goes. With good consistent policies every time you can add more trucks to your business it can mean more profits from the business.
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