Trying to change a process for 30 people is nearly impossible. You have to work on implementation pretty much every single day and drill it into everybody's daily routine. Welcome to Masters of Home Service, a podcast by Jobber. Each week we talk to successful home service entrepreneurs and experts in their field to learn how they built their company so that we can make your business
more profitable and more efficient. We are in Las Vegas at Blue Wire Studios, and today we're talking about one of my favorite topics, which is mastering operations. We are going to have a two-parter today. We're going to focus on efficiencies, production, job prep, customer happiness, the handoff between sales and production. We have two awesome guests with me today. Today we have Christine Hodge. Christine, welcome. Thank you. So Christine,
you're the CEO of Clearview Washing in New Jersey. Yes. You guys do Lear cleaning, exterior cleaning, commercial cleaning, all that kind of stuff, right? Yes. Awesome. You also spoke at the huge convention with David, who's also here with us. David, you own Revived services. Yep. And you do Christmas lights, exterior cleaning. Also, you have a podcast, home service business coach. What are the most common operational issues that you
see fellow entrepreneurs are making? Let's start there. Let's get into it. The. Most common issue that you have is implementation. You can come up with 10, 20, 30 processes as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, as a senior leader in your company, you'll come up with a process for everything every single day because you're a problem solver, right? But implementation is nearly impossible without consistency. What. Do you mean implementation? Like making people do it? Yes. Yeah.
Okay. So it's easier to have you and one person do it. If you work with your spouse, you and your spouse can say, well, we can implement this process. We're going to do this moving forward. Then you bring on two or three people and then you have five to 10 people, and then you have 15 to 20 people. In our case, we're close to 30 people. Trying to change a process for 30 people is nearly impossible.
You have to work on implementation pretty much every single day and drill it into everybody's daily routine and try and make it an easy transition. Yeah, I'll jump in on that one. I think if we actually go high level here, I actually think a lot of business owners have a flawed business model to begin with operations. I actually think it's like an epidemic in home services that you've got the blind leading the blind, and a lot of times Christine and I are trying to run premium price companies.
We're actually competing against guys and girls who don't know their numbers, and so I actually think a big mistake that cascades into operations as you don't get the right price for the initial project and your whole house of operations is built on sand before it starts.
Because as Christine said, you got to get people, you got to recruit, you got to do marketing, and if there's not enough meat on the bone from that accepted contract price, you just end up going down, down, down, and it's a race to the bottom. Yeah. Hey, masters of Home service listeners, we've got some exciting news for you. Jobber Summit is back on March 6th.
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In terms of job prep, something I've been obsessed with lately is the handoff between sales and production. So Jim goes to the house, meets the client, has a wonderful experience with the client, client, super excited about the job, and what we don't realize is that there's a lot of explicit and implicit promises that are made about what's going to happen. You guys aren't going to come on Tuesdays and then we show up on Tuesday and we're already off to a bad start.
How do you guys make sure that your production crews, the guys are actually doing the work, how do you make sure that they fulfill every promise that the sales person made to the person, whether it's doing the job and all the other little things? It's huge. Yeah. I mean there's a lot of moving parts. Running a home service. Business, that's a big question. We can break it down a little bit.
Let's go deep though. I mean, I guess first of all, trade of a sales consultant, we call them in my business, they tend to be very great with people, but oftentimes are not very highly detail oriented, and so they will unbeknownst to them, make some promises to the client. Could we start a little earlier? I've got a sleeping baby at home. Oh,
no problem. It's fine. Exactly. And that conversation doesn't get moved into the fulfillment process or we call it production, and those verbal promises don't actually get put into writing, and then the business owner, we think, oh, we've got production sorted, but that communication didn't actually get passed down the wire, so it turns into this kind of game of telephone and the waters get muddied really quick. So that's where deep diving in your processes and saying, Hey,
sales consultant, I know you're great with people. Any promises we make, you've got to put that in the job notes so that our crew leads can see that. So that's one thing that's caught me in my painting business, and that's caught me in my Washington Christmas site business as well. Our approach is very technology driven, so we would harness the power of technology to make up for human error. So for example, the software that we use for quoting, we have a house wash, right?
But sometimes there's a separate structure, so a detached garage or a shed that also wants a soft wash, our sales representative would put in house wash and forget to leave a note saying, this price includes the shed. And it's a freebie. Well, when it goes into jobber, either the crew is going to just do it or the crew is going to say, well, the notes didn't say that it included the shed. So my next step is go into that quoting software and create a shed line item.
Human error is inevitable the more people we train. I focus on training, but in order to make things very clear for our crews, I want technology to take over if we have the ability to do that, and we are able to do that with our quoting software and the integration with Jobber. To take it one step further, we've even added services for things like swing sets because the client says, I want to get a swing set, soft wash, and we are really harnessing technology to make up for that
error. And then in jobber, we would also really utilize the notes field or the job instruction field, the visit instruction field to be very specific with the job is scheduled from eight to 10:00 AM which the office does, but we would put a note in the instruction saying, okay, to proceed, customer won't be home.
Garage code is we try to utilize technology to be our lead source of communication and completely do away with text messages because then it's inevitable that something is going to get dropped because we're all working in remote locations on different projects. Yeah, we've all been a part of that conversation in the morning, one person bid the job, he's not going to be on that job today. Hey, hey, wait, what did you bid over? What are we doing there today?
That conversation should not be necessary, right? Correct. A hundred percent. I actually had a mentor back in the day, Adam, he told me, he said, discretion is the enemy of scale when you're trying to grow a home service business, and we know we need people. So a hundred percent to Christine's point, we need technology. We still are both routing people and trucks all across the city going into very affluent homes like the homes we service are anywhere from 1.5 to $4
million. It's people's biggest investment. You're sending a crew there. If you don't have your crap together and you're not organized, it's going to turn into a gong show. And I've learned as well mannered as our employees are, you've got to be a process driven company. The best you can, especially even if you're listening to this, you're like, Dave, Christine, Adam, I only have two employees.
Now is the time to start because a smaller boat is a lot easier to course correct than a big freight liner. What are some of those processes? I think a lot of listeners right now don't even have say a job site checklist. So in my company for revive, we've got a 10 step process that we follow from initial client greeting to our client exit meeting. It is printed. It is a one sheeter, it is laminated,
it is in every truck. The crews are referring to it, and then there's a touchup, Hey, Conrad's crew didn't actually take before pictures and the client saying, we damaged the gutter, we missed number three on our checklist. So we now have something we can point to as a management team and hold accountability. The problem with this industry, it's the wild, wild west. We get a contract, 500 bucks to wash a home, let's send the boys in turns into a gong show.
There's no way that customer is going to repeat. So deep dive. Some of your processes now in a simple checklist for each service you provide would change your business a great deal. I completely agree with him. The checklist for onsite are huge. We do ours through jobber because jobber now has the integrated job form forms. Yeah, forms on top of that. I do think that people learn in a different way. So I am very visual and so I've created flowcharts to present to our team. Basic flowchart.
I didn't buy any tools. I didn't buy any softwares. I'm using Microsoft PowerPoint and making squares and putting in what I need to see, but when I'm able to visualize the way I want things to take place and then share it with my team as a whole, give. Me an example of that. What do you mean? What exactly are you talking about? Workflow. For example, with the office, from the minute they have interaction with a customer, whether it come in through a job form on your website or a job or request,
what are the steps you take? So we do, and when the customer wants this, this is the prompt that you, I even have it scripted for them. So if the customer wants this, this is what you're saying. If the customer wants this, this is what you're saying when the quote is approved, this is how you schedule the job. From our quoting software into jobber, we know what we need to make per day. I know that each of my trucks need to make $2,000 per day.
If the truck is not hitting $2,000 per day, this is what you have to do. So I have a lot of if and when scenarios, but I have it visualized on this chart on a flow chart so they can see when is the ball being tossed to me. Because also in small business and in our industry, everyone can kind of start working on something. So a customer is upset and they tell our field technician and the field
technicians working with the operations guy to fix it. But in the meantime, the customer also called the office and then the office called me and now I'm working on it. And so I like to draw up this chart of like, this is my problem, this is not your problem. And they can kind of see visually at this point in our process, this is when the ball is tossed to me and this is when I take over. Yeah, exactly. Otherwise it just turns into a free for all. We made a document,
my office manager made it with me. It's called the what's what. And it's like when this happens, we proceed to do this. When this happens, this is the step and it is so important to Christine's point. It doesn't just come from the business owner from on high and here's what we're going to do, collaborate with your people a bit. One of our core values is a Japanese term called kaizen, which is continuous improvement.
It means Dave as the owner is going to be a good leader and a great listener, and we talked about this on one of our other episodes, so you've got to listen to your people and say, this tends to be a recurring problem. I'm seeing what can we do about it? Case in point, we did a lot of water fed pole window cleaning. We wash in this little beach town where I live and the water's very hard when we double filter it, it still doesn't clean the window. Great. We decided do away with that.
We're going to go back to traditional hand cleaning and we're going to charge for that very affluent town and our clients are loving it. And that didn't come from Dave, that came from one of our technicians. That's what we're talking about. You've got to get a little more, I think analytical and a little more scientific with your business. And depending when you hear this, the off season of the winter is a great time to look at these processes and
what's clunky in your business. Yeah, take your pick. What's your most important or favorite process that you have in your business? I'll give one. A simple one is an inbound call script. So we get thousands of calls every year. We got two members in our office and we want them saying virtually they're going to speak differently, but we want them following this same template. We get into premium priced Christmas lights. It's not for everybody.
We're not going to send our sales team out to go quote everything. We first need to walk them through this inbound call script qualifying exactly. It's about five to seven minutes. We're even able to give an approximate ballpark. Mrs. Smith, you're going to be our light minimum is 4 95. Most houses range in kind of the 500 to the a thousand dollars range. We'd love to send an estimator by to come and tailor make a quote for you.
We've got Tuesday, we've got Thursday, and another thing a lot of business owners forget. You ask what your lead source is on that call as well because people think, oh, Facebook ads are working well. Are how many calls come in from that? Are you measuring that? So for us, an inbound call script is the first interaction with your company and we tell our team, assume that prospect has already called two other companies and you want to dial
it in so much. They're like, this company seems different. Mine is a new one for this year, which I'm very excited about. We will not allow a residential customer on our job or calendar unless we have a credit card on file. So no matter how much money your business is making, like you're making $200,000 a year or you're making 5 million a year. In our industry there are cashflow issues and some of us are seasonal and some of us go all year, but cashflow is big.
And then once you get into more commercial work, it's taking more than 60 days, 90 days, you can never really beat that battle. It's just inevitable. No matter how many processes you have in place, the commercial client wins for a residential customer to get on our calendar, and we implemented it on March 1st, we had to have a credit card on file on jobber with a disclaimer on our quote.
So we have a signature on it that says your credit card will be automatically charged by your field technician upon completion of your service unless you choose to pay by cash or check on the day of. And that's alleviated so many cashflow issues. Then we have become more into commercial this year, so we're at about like 60, 65% commercial this year and a commercial client has to, if the job is over $5,000, we require a 50% deposit.
I like that and we need to receive it at least two weeks before the job start date or we have to move the job. Who's in charge of making sure that deposit comes in?
One person in our office, it's actually my mother-in-Law, I made her commercial coordinator, so she's backup to helping our residential administrative assistant, but she also handles the commercial components of sending out the deposit invoice, collecting that money and moving the job if needed, and also scheduling and things like that for commercial. But those two components alone, and I know that everybody in our industry has cashflow issues, but this is the most underrated topic ever.
No one ever talks about it and I was determined to find a solution This year. We haven't had a single issue. There hasn't been a single payroll day or anything where we felt that we didn't have the money for because we've implemented these two steps. Yeah. Let's take a quick minute to talk about our favorite platform, which is jobber. Guys. What is the most valuable feature of jobber? For me, it's the ability to access it anywhere.
I love that my technicians can access it while they're in the field. I love that my sales representatives can access it from their iPads onsite at a sales bid. I love that my office can access it from their computers, whether they be at home or in the office. So for me, it's the ability to, I love that I'm here and I can access Java when I need to, so it's the ability of accessibility and convenience. I'm going to jump in with one word, simplicity.
I actually tried three other CRMs in addition, I got to my Dutch roots. I was trying to save a buck and stay on Google Drive and organize everything. Google. Calendar. Exactly. Bad idea. So my buddy pushed me over to Jobber. I checked it out and I was sold very quickly just based on this simplicity. We don't take on complex jobs, we don't take on complex CRM. Simple, simple, simple. Well said. So that's why we chose jobber. We're five years in now and we're not looking back.
If you want to try jobber, which you should, it'll make your whole business more efficient and more profitable, then go to jobber.com/podcast deal, get an exclusive discount for new members and take the plunge today. You won't regret it. Turn on job repayments and go build your business. I think a lot of our listeners can relate to just the grind of we have a job scheduled today and then we realize that we're actually not really prepped for it and then we disappoint the clients.
It's kind of fiasco and everybody's frustrated. Different industries have different job sizes and all that kind of stuff, but we can all relate to that to some degree. I want you guys to think about your most complex job or service that you guys provide and walk our listeners through how either your production manager or whoever it is for your company, make sure that job gets done flawlessly. Because again, we don't want to be caught with our pants down and be like, oh, we're not ready.
And we also don't want to have to have that conversation with the guy who sold that morning. He might go on vacation today and then we have no idea what he promised. So walk us through in detail how you prepare for your most complex. Jobs. Yeah, I'll jump in on that. I would say we do our very best, Adam to not even take on complex projects. That's honestly what drew me to the home service space. I had a painting business for 10 years. We steered away from scraping off popcorn ceilings.
We steered away from refinishing doors. We steered away from really highend decks. Again, discretions the enemy of scale, and I want my field technicians to be able to get trained up in a one week full on training bootcamp that's headed up by a production manager. So if it's a complex service, we're probably going to say no. I would even say if we get 10 inbound calls today, we're probably only going to quote seven to eight of them.
There's something in your business called lead slippage, which means every call that comes in that may be a lead, that does not mean you go and do an estimate. It has to be a right fit. And those of you in Christmas lights, goodness me, I know you're out of the gate and you want to get all these jobs when you find you sending your team on a sketchy roof that you're, if leadership 1 0 1 never asks someone to do something that you're not willing
to do. So if Dave's not willing to go out and get on that roof to make $2,000, it's not worth it. And again, don't make exceptions here because learn from my mistakes. We've went out, we've done that $2,000 job. What happens, Fred Smith tells Barry Jones, tells Catherine Smith, and you start getting word of mouth referrals on the sketchy jobs. And again, like I said off the top, you end up with this kind of flawed business model that's full of complexities. That's. Great.
I'm going to piggyback off of what David said to start, because we will not take on complex residential jobs. So if a window washing requires a window restoration, we used to do it just for the money and we don't need to do that and you can never charge enough for a window restoration. We walk away from those. However, the complex jobs for us are large commercial projects that require a lift.
We have our technicians are key technicians lift certified, and this is part of my workflow is from sales. It goes into the commercial coordinator and she is putting on the calendar on our jobber calendar a task for our field operations manager of when to order the lift. Okay, lemme stop you there, Chris. So you get the email approved quote. We've all seen that hopefully thousands of times that point.
Your commercial coordinator, your mother-in-Law, I think you said she then is it flagged like this needs a boom or she looks at every single one and if it needs a boom, then she or Lyft, then she then puts a task on the jobber calendar for a production manager in the field. Yes, our field operations manager, so there's a note that goes into the quoting software of the water source. So the water source has to be identified by the sales representative.
Are we going to need a hydrant meter or can we tap into the spigots? That's a big one for us. If we need a hydrant meter, it's noted on there by the sales person and our residential sales team is different than our commercial sales team, so they're trained in looking for these key aspects.
If we're cleaning rooftop solar panels, they're documenting the rooftop access is how are we getting to the roof because I know that there are certain 50 foot ladders that go straight up in a very confined space and I know who I can and can cannot send on that job. So their notes are very, very detailed in our quoting software.
When the quote is approved and our commercial coordinator takes over, she knows she's putting a reminder for the lift to be ordered on a particular day in advance of the project. She knows that she has to contact the water company that's relevant to the town we're cleaning to get the water meter permits and all of that and make the payments and things like that, and then she's collecting the deposit on the project. Okay. Two.
Questions. Yep. Why doesn't your mother-in-law order the lift and number two, how does the production manager know what data order it for? She's putting the date for him on the calendar, knows the date, so he's getting a reminder so she knows the date of the project start. Okay, so interesting. We're doing a very large project right now as we speak.
We didn't need the lift until a week and a half into the project, so we started the project on, I'm going to give you last Monday, and we don't need the lift until this coming Wednesday. She put the reminder on for this Thursday for our field operations manager to order the lift. Got it. He saw that and he saw the name and he reached out to her and said, how come it's on for Thursday? Why didn't we need it?
He saw this in advance of the project because researching a few weeks in advance, and she said, the lower two stories can be done by ground. The ball is being tossed from the sales rep to the commercial coordinator. Then the ball is being tossed from the commercial coordinator to the field operations manager. Why isn't the commercial coordinator ordering the lift?
Because she doesn't have the technical background to communicate effectively to the lift operators and the delivery person and things like that. Do you need a 30. Foot boom, 40 foot? She know those code. Exactly. Exactly. I appreciate you going down that road with me because I like David's answer too. We keep it simple. We don't do this kind of jobs, but some of our listeners, their whole business is complex jobs. I want to go down that road for some of our listeners. That's really helpful.
And I think honestly, both models work. I know at home service business coach, we literally coach people that do more complex commercial jobs. If you have processes as Christine's saying, the money is excellent, that's an excellent business model. But sometimes we see residential guys and girls thinking, oh, let's just get a boom and we can take on this big job. And every time Christine takes on a job, I take on a job with our brands.
It's like putting on a jersey for a sports team. You're going into battle, you're representing that brand, all those reviews. And so again, we're talking operations here. I think a strong operational engine is built from strong sales processes and not just taking on any job. Oh, we can do this. Sales is the foundation that the operational house is built on. So you really want to slow down the front end process and don't just say yes to anything.
And you don't want to spread yourself too thin because here's the thing, if you're sloppy small, you're sloppy big. If you're sloppy small residential, then going into commercial is not a good idea. Well, and as you grow, A CEO is looking at something called capacity planning. We run seasonal businesses so we know there'll be peak months that we are just busting at the seams with work. So it's a perfect time to put a little more meat on the bone.
Raise your prices a little bit. And I love looking at our calendar saying, I've got a hundred grand on this month coming up, and I know that's going to be very profitable. And easy. Exactly. And so if you're building this business for time freedom and for income as I am, that's why we've chosen, let's just keep things simple. But that does not mean the listener. This is the only way you have to do it.
But I do think you have to choose what is my economic business model, and you need to stick to that. I agree. And there's a huge safety component that goes into commercial work. There are very detailed safety measures that we've learned, we've been professionally trained on, and they don't stop. Our toolbox talks are very, very frequent, and we are opening up our OSHA book and we are like,
this is relevant to the job next week. This is relevant to the job next week, and this is relevant and we have to do a review because OSHA was not a one-time thing. More lawsuits can take place. There's kind of like if anybody is injured on a job, even not somebody related to your workforce, but somebody walking by and tripping over a hose, for example. So there are signs that need to be put up. So there's a lot of additional protocol that goes into the complex jobs.
I encourage if anyone wants it to be their business model, great, but you do have to do a lot of the backend work to prepare for it. Yeah. Christine, David, it's a great episode. This is part one. Great. We'll come back to part two. Any final thoughts for our listeners before we shut it down? I got one last gold nugget to drop, and I just want to share what helped me a lot. We started implementing weekly production team meetings,
and we did this before we'd have an office. I'm from Canada, right? So our local coffee chain is called Tim Horton's. It's a Canadian brand. And so we would meet and push six tables together and have 10 of us there, and we would meet there and we would talk through the week of the jobs coming up. We'd read out our reviews, we would pass out marketing materials. This is again when we were small before we actually had an office space, but that's really where our culture was built.
And paying your technicians for a weekly meeting to get everybody aligned is one of the best investments I think you can make because we'll never regret that, man. People are an investment, not an expense, and when you figure that out and start investing in them, that weekly team meeting has helped us a lot. I believe that whether you're solo, you have five employees, you have 10 employees, everyone who works with you is your family or everyone who works with you is
just an employee. Regardless of your scenario, you have to write down your process and you think you don't. You think, no, I know what I'm doing. They know what they're doing. We've talked about this. We've had meetings about it it'ss wrong. You have to write down your process very detailed. Everybody's job responsibilities and the workflow, and that way there's clarity and transparency amongst your organization to set you up for success in growth.
Great point, guys. Thanks for being here, Christine. David, that was a great part. One, I'm going to summarize this conversation in three actionable steps. Number one, use technology to eliminate human error. Yes, there is going to be a shred of human error leftover, but you can eliminate a lot of just the humanness to it by having some proper technology in place to eliminate those silly errors with especi jobber. Number two is you need to build out your standard operating procedures.
We call those SOPs. You need to have checklists. You need to have things that people do every time, even if they've memorized it, even if they know what they're doing, they need to do it every single time. And number three, learn to say no. Not every lead is right for your business. You have to make sure that you are going after the proper jobs for your business at the right size, at the right time, and just being okay with saying no to some jobs that might be out of your reach.
How can people find out more about you guys? Christine, you. Can find me on Instagram at the process CEO or check me out on my website, the process ceo.com. And I'm home service business coach on all social channels and home service business coach.com. That's awesome. Well, thank you guys for being here. The backbone of the economy is small business. You guys are champions of that. So thanks for being here. Thanks for having us. Keep it up, and thank you for listening today.
I hope that you heard something that will make your business more profitable and more efficient. Come back next week for part two. I'm your host, Adam Sylvester. You can find me@adamsylvester.com. Your team and your clients deserve your very best, so go give it to 'em. We'll see you next week.