KickStart: STOP🛑 consistently ‘over scheduling’! Instead, book employees (or you) for 75% of the day to have ‘troops in reserve’ for your inevitable overflow work.
Running a multi-crew, residential Home Services operation is not for the faint of heart! It’s a WAR out there! And as a business owner or manager you are the ‘commanding officer of your troops’! OR…
If you are a ‘Lone Wolf’ owner-operator it is even more important to not crash and burn out! Read on to learn how to avoid disaster…
In war generals quickly learn to never commit ALL their soldiers at the beginning of the battle. Instead, it is essential to keep ‘troops in reserve’ to 1) respond to dangers, 2) reinforce weak areas and 3) to react quickly to opportunities.
So, how about you?🤔 Are your ‘troops’ (especially your ‘front-line’ service workers) totally committed (booked solid) for tomorrow, next week, even… next month?👎 BIG MISTAKE! Instead…
Always keep troops (employees) ‘in reserve’!
I know. I can hear your anguish: “Steve, I thought the goal was to keep my people booked up solid with profitable residential services? Didn’t YOU book your employees solid? You couldn’t have had it both ways in your business!” As a just starting out home services entrepreneur I agreed with you…
For years, I would typically schedule four average jobs per day for each crew. (Your job number and times may differ.) BUT then inevitably the customer would 1) add more work, OR 2) the job would take longer OR 3) Mr. Murphy would invoke his Law! So, an initially 8-9 hour long day would stretch to 11, 12 hours or even longer! The result?
Burned out workers, irritated clients left hanging, unhappy spouses AND a payroll bloated by unjustified overtime!😲 (I quake even as I write this!) Even worse, with my crews at (or beyond) their breaking point I had zero resources to respond to high-profit emergency and ‘Additional Service Options’ (“up-sells”) work.
This constantly ‘under the gun’ business model was agonizing!😥 (Am I ‘preaching to the choir’ here?) Then I got smart. I discovered an ’employees in reserve’ approach that gave me ‘the best of both worlds’!💖 Let me share Steve’s Secret Sauce with you…
Book your residential crews ‘3/4 full’. Here’s the deal…
Instead of maintaining our four jobs per day booking average I told my office staff to normally only schedule three average jobs per day per crew. (To keep my workers from slowing down to ‘pad their day’ I developed my Worker Efficiency Bonus(WEB) Plan but that’s for another blog post!)
This ‘Fudge Time’ let my staff routinely sell Additional Service Options AND have the time to complete them. (Without going into overtime pay.) We also had the resources to handle last minute “gotta have it done today” people who often would become our biggest Cheerleaders. Plus we now could switch employees around to help other crews to finish on time.
The really great thing here? I also raised my prices💲💲💲 (another bog post!) which let me add more trucks and employees to build a Critical Mass Business that would run smoothly without me! The result? I (and my employees) wound up making more money while working sane hours! And all because I started keeping some ‘troops in reserve’!
RESOURCE: You’ll get 100’s of new hiring ideas and systems in my 3-hour, online Hiring the Very Best! LIVE seminar. To learn more and/or easily register online click HERE.
Steve