Can Do, Will Do, Done!

Can Do, Will Do, Done!

Tim McGuire
Contributing Writer

In the last issue of the Buzz I mentioned the need to associate with a group of people that can help you with your business.  One such associate of mine is a very gifted man I met while attending Nexstar’s famous Gold Star Academy (a course on Service Management).  We were both students at the time and we both ran similar sized union businesses.

Bill Raymond, of Frank and Lindy Plumbing and Heating Service Company, not only runs a very profitable business, he is also a very talented trainer.  During a subsequent training session, Bill told a story of a fictional logo character named “Jack Stone.” For a period of time Jack Stone became a model for our company, mainly because of his famous slogan “Can Do, Will Do, Done!”  Our company took on this slogan to help us stay focused on what we could do at our business.

We were able to use a simple but effective message to unify our company.  I created a report we duly dubbed “Jack Stone Report” This was a report that displayed all the important numbers for our company. It allowed us to keep score. Now we were not perfect by any means and even today we are a work in progress. What I discovered from the reports were trends and patterns that, along with intuition, helped me manage the business.

I have come to believe that even if the information you gather is not 100{938cd9e8dae860e800efc538277d4f7684e6f6981618ba70d1c34357a53c2e1f} correct, but consistent, it can become useful in managing your business.  I’ll be honest; when I first started collecting information I had no idea what I was going to do with it. Over time as my skills sharpened, I started to understand what the information was saying. I would eliminate some stuff and add other stuff I thought was necessary.

I remember a conversation I had with our team when I decided we needed a report every Tuesday that summarized last week’s activity. They told me there was no way they could get it to me by Friday, let alone Tuesday. I said, “Ok, let’s start with Friday.”  After a few weeks of this I asked if they could get it by Thursday. They had reasons why they could not do it and I asked them if the reasons were solved could they do it then. Everyone agreed that they could do it if this or that happened.

Before I knew it I had it on Tuesdays and the team came up with the solutions that they needed in order to get the information I needed. I congratulated them in coming up with the solution on their own. I knew if they did it, they would own it. They had all kinds of things they needed to do in order to get the information in. Most of it centered around getting the paperwork from the techs on a timely basis.

They created the Red Tie Report, which was a dispatch gathering report we used to track each call for each guy. We tracked dispatch time, arrival time and completed time for every call.  We tracked how much was sold and what form of payment we received.  At the end of day we would tally up the total. We didn’t need a sophisticated computer system to track this stuff.

Both the Jack Stone report and the Red Tie report were sales management tools that allowed us to steer the ship straight each month. When the Profit and Loss Statement arrived by the 10th of each month to report the official score, we would rarely have a variance of more than 3-5{938cd9e8dae860e800efc538277d4f7684e6f6981618ba70d1c34357a53c2e1f}. If the variance was larger than we felt comfortable with, we would research it and usually come up with a valid explanation for the gap.

Well that was a long time ago, long before SW 21 and the other dispatch software now available on the market. Now we’re able to get yesterday’s information no later than 9:00 a.m. the following day.

If you are not using daily, weekly and monthly reports in your business, what are you waiting for? Get your team together and ask them what they think is important. Let them help you build your dream company. Let them know that, together, they can build any kind of company they want. Fortunately, the majority of them will want to build a professional, profitable company they can be proud to work for.

Jack Stone is proudly displayed next to my computer screen, reminding me of that slogan of the past that has helped us achieve success, “Can Do, Will Do, Done!”  Thanks, Bill, for the inspiration.

Tim McGuire is owner of McGuire and Sons Ben Franklin Plumbing in Hopkins, MN., Master Plumber and Pipefitter with 24 years in the plumbing industry and a founding member of Nexstar Network. Tim can be contacted by calling 952-292-5541.