Frank Blau
Contributing Writer
For many years of my life I devoted most of my time to helping contractors in this industry overcome their basic lack of business knowledge. It’s been a rewarding experience that has resulted in hundreds of new friendships around the country. Seldom does a day go by when I don’t receive phone calls and letters from my friends who call themselves “Blau disciples.”
These are the ones who have seen the light and have transformed their businesses into shining beacons of profitability and professionalism. I wrote about one in a previous article, showing P & L that had changed from losing money to generating upwards of 20{938cd9e8dae860e800efc538277d4f7684e6f6981618ba70d1c34357a53c2e1f} net profit, with owner’s compensation rising from $46,000 to over $100,000 annually. This firm’s top service tech earned $81,000 last year.
This is where people in our great industry belong on the compensation scale. The vast majority are nowhere close. You would think they would get wise and start to imitate the ones who are successful. Instead, many of them go out of their way to drag the good people down.
Solid Citizens: I call them “good people” in more ways than one. It’s not only business success and making money that makes them good people. Those who have listened close to my message understand that making money is more than a matter of charging higher prices. It has to do with shaping up your entire business operation to justify those higher prices. The highest priority is changing the way you treat your employees and customers.
Number one, you must share the wealth. It’s not all about the owner raking in all the money. It’s about decent pay and benefits for all employees. This includes health insurance, profit sharing, pension plans, paid vacations and special perks. This is standard procedure in most industries, yet very few PHC service contractors offer significant benefit packages. No wonder we have such trouble attracting good people to the industry.
Number two, it’s about giving your customers good value for the prices they pay. It’s about having your technicians dispatched efficiently, showing up on time, dressed professionally and with shoe covers, trained to be courteous and helpful. It’s about obeying all the laws pertaining to permits, insurance, environmental and employment regulations.
Number three, it’s about working with your vendors and suppliers to make the public aware of all of the tremendous products this great industry has to offer that can make their lives more comfortable and convenient. For a full list of products that your techs should be using go to https://www.shubee.com.
People who do all this are the solid citizens not only of our industry, but also of our country. They obey the law, they pay taxes, they get involved in political and legislative affairs, they give to charity, and they lend a helping hand to people in need. They don’t have to cheat and cut corners in order to make a living.
Enter The Slugs: Then there are the slugs. Our industry teems with them.
They have nothing to sell except a low price. Some are good mechanics, some mediocre. But even the good ones seldom are able to give top-notch service to their customers, because they are always scrambling for ways to hold down the cost of a job. So everything must be CWC (“cheap, white, chrome”). They actually go around telling consumers not to buy higher-priced merchandise because “it costs too much.”
For the same reason they drive around in rickety, dirty, unpainted vehicles because maintenance costs too much and they’re too busy scrambling to make ends meet. Buying a new truck is out of the question. Likewise, they tend to work with well-work tools and equipment, which reduces their ability to perform on the job. They show up in dirty cloths, or else undersized jeans that have been washed too many times.
Their employees are usually underpaid and therefore under-motivated. A lot of them move around working for one slug after another, until they get fed up being mistreated and start their own business. Having learned everything about the business from slugs, most of them end up becoming slugs themselves because they don’t know any better. The vicious cycle continues.
The slugs never have any money to spare, so they take forever to pay and often end up stifling a bunch of suppliers. (Many of these suppliers I would label “assistant slugs.” That is, for reasons hard to fathom, they keep extending credit to the slugs and thereby help to keep them in business undercutting the reputable contractors. ) It’s hard to eke out a profit on cut-rate prices, so the slugs tend to cut corners by ignoring many of the rules and regulations that the solid citizens must abide by. When work is slow, they pick up a few extra bucks by slowing down so a one-hour job stretches out to two or three hours of labor billing.
Sad vs. Mad: I have always been very saddened by the slugs. I have done my best to lift them out of their misery, but as the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. Most of them do not take well to instruction.
Lately, my sadness has begun to turn to anger towards a great many slugs. That’s because hardly a week goes by when I don’t get a letter or fax from one of the good people of this industry who are fighting off some consumer protection complaint about their prices. This is what happens:
The contractor who operates in a business-like manner will tell the customer in advance what a job will cost. That customer then signs a contract showing that he or she understands the prices and all that’s involved, and then signs off on it. Most are very happy to know exactly how much the job will cost no matter how long it takes. They also are very pleased to have the work done by a clean-cut young man or woman dressed well and with impeccable manners.
Then, a day or two later, the customer happens to talk to a slug. The slug tells the person, “Hey, you got ripped off! I would have done that job for half the price.”
It’s a topsy-turvy world. The people who are trying to run their business right, trying to do well by their employees, customers and the law, end up getting accused of wrongdoing. The slugs, on the other hand, end up looking like heroes.
I’m getting sick and tired of the slugs. They are the ones who are mud, not the good business people who sell value instead of price.
I’m mad as hell and tired of keeping my mouth shut about it. I say to all the slugs who might be reading this, that every person has the right to lead his or her life the way that individual sees fit. If you wish to remain a slug for the rest of your life, God bless you. That is your right.
But please stop trying to drag the rest of us down with you.