How Remote Teams Influence Productivity in the Trades | Podcast Ep. 175 | Toolbox for the Trades

Hello, contractors, and welcome to Toolbox for the Trades. My name is Jackie Aubel, and today I am chatting with Michelle Myers, the founder and CEO of Pink Collars. Michelle and I had a great conversation about remote work. From keeping employees accountable to building a great culture. Michelle has a ton of advice for managing work from home team members. I hope you find this conversation as enlightening as I did. Michelle Myers, you are the founder and CEO of Pink Collars. Today we are going to talk about how to run an effective remote team in the trades. I'm so excited to have you on Toolbox for the Trades. Thanks so much for joining me.

I am thrilled to be here. Jackie, thank you so much for having me.

Well, we are going to get right into it because I know this is going to be a popular topic for our audience, but I've got to kick it off with an icebreaker, as always. And I would love to know, if you could pick up a new skill in an instant, what would it be and why?

I would actually want to learn how to fly an airplane. Isn't that silly?

I think, oh, that's very cool.

Yeah. I travel so much and I sit on the plane and I go, oh, that was a little bit of a hard bank to the right. Oh, that was a little bumpy there. Oh, I would may have waited to serve the drinks a little bit longer. I'm terrible. So I'm constantly thinking about, what is the pilot doing up there? And I think I would love to learn how to be in the flight deck and help fly the plane. So that's the one.

Well, that's also, like, definitely a skill you can pick up if you really want to. I know some folks who fly and they're really passionate about it, but I also understand wanting to understand the mechanics behind flying. One time I was delayed flying from New York to Orlando, 12 hours. Would you believe it? I could have driven. And I just. I was just like, why? I need to know why. I need to know the why behind this. So I totally relate to your need of, like, okay, I don't understand this. I do it all the time. And I think it would be helpful for me to know the mechanics behind it to, like, I don't know, make my traveling easier.

Maybe.

All right, cool, cool, cool. Well, that's a wonderful answer. So let's actually just get into your career here. How did you get into the trades?

Well, it's interesting. In 2008 and 2009, way, way, way long ago, when the economy took a little bit of a left Turn some of us were working in that time, I found myself without a job. I had been a commercial interior designer, worked on an architecture firm. My career was kind of in the dumps and my personal life was a little bit difficult at that. And my sister and brother in law were living out in the Midwest in Colorado and they said, hey, why don't you just pause for a minute, come out here. Lots of opportunities, we're building a lot of stuff, we're doing a lot of things and why don't you come out here and sort of push the hard reset on your life. And so in an effort to do that, I started picking up work. I had a young daughter at the time, so I needed something that would be work from home. And I answered an ad on Craigslist back before Craigslist was strange and did weird stuff. It used to be for work. And I answered an ad to run the phones and run the computer for a tree service. And so a husband and wife arborist team came to my little apartment, knocked on the door, handed me a clamshell phone, a Dell computer, no software, and said, here's our Google password, good luck, we're going to be in the truck. And so that's kind of how it started. That business turned into a company called my virtual page. It was named after my daughter. I figured if I could get myself out of the slump, I would do it in her honor. And so that business ended up turning into Pink collars in 201516 timeframe. And we took it from there and had our very first employee in 2013. So we've been in the business a little over 10 years.

That's incredible. And what a hard reset on my life. Change locations, going to find a job that I can take. And you found yourself in the trades and now you Pink Collars has CSRs. And how many CSRs do you have working across different brands at this point?

Well, we're in every time zone and in Canada so we can support clients all over. We have a few more than 20 CSRs, then we have an entire leadership team. So we have quite a big team that can help support clients all over the country. We don't do tree industry anymore. That's where we started. We have successfully moved into the skilled trades. So plumbing, H vac, electrical, we do a little bit of door work. So International door association shout out to those guys. But we really want to stay in the skilled trades now. So that's where we're going to land and we're good and happy to be here.

Awesome. And I have to give you props for having to survive that 2008 to 2009. It's so interesting to me how in my talks, that time period keeps coming up. I actually started college that year, and I started at. I went to Baruch College in New York, which was a very, like, financial business institution. And I'll never forget my first, like, month there. All I was hearing was about all of these graduates from May that had gone to work for, like, Frannie Mae and a couple other, like, big financial institutions who had a job for like, six weeks and then nothing.

Nothing.

So I really. My heart goes out to anyone listening who had to survive through that time, because I know it was a tough one. So you kind of found the remote work. I would say, come in for a week or two and then fly out. I did not envy that life. But it's crazy. Now I have. Now I have colleagues in all corners of the country, and it's really incredible. And as a individual contributor, I appreciate it. However, as a manager, I don't know, like, even though I know that my people are working, there's still that little bit of anxiety that you're like, I hope they're doing what they say they're doing, because you don't want to get stuck with egg on your face. I get. So I want to commiserate with folks listening who may be like, yeah, I understand that remote work is kind of the way to be and people want to do it, but it can be scary. Like, without that accountability, you don't really know how people are performing.

Yeah. So let's talk about that, if you don't mind. Let's talk about accountability. So we have accountability in several ways. We have mandatory daily standups with our teams, and they're small groups based on time zone. So just that leader and that group of individuals gets together, and so they're on camera really quickly. Five minutes. How's your morning? What's going on? How can we support you? Who's out sick today? You know, just kind of status on the team, and that really, really helps. We work exclusively on Slack as our communication method. And a lot of people in tech use Slack, so people are familiar with it. The cool part about that is that we engage with our team members and our clients both in Slack. And when you're working with pink collars as a client, you come into the Slack channel, and you can come in as deep or as far away as you would like in Slack. And so we can include you in everything or we can just Include you in the comm channels. We have management channels. And so we have all different tiers of engagement there for both the client and our team member to connect. And then we really instill in our team and in the clients that we serve that spending time like this on camera with each other is actually really beneficial. You get to see people's tone, you need to see, see their background, you know, all the good stuff in their office. What does their home look like, what does their office look like? And that really does inform you and get that connectivity piece built. So I really like that. So you add those components to the already recorded calls and the already tracked, you know, pieces of information that are being put in the software and you can really get a good 360 degree view of an individual. And then we add one more piece just in case it wasn't fun enough and we threw some slack. Automate what's called our end of day reporting form. And so each individual in our company has to do an end of day reporting form and whatever their seat requires, they actually do self reporting. And it's really fun to be able to see what they're doing throughout the day. You know, this is how many emails came in and this is how many text messages came in and this is how many calls were booked. And again, is the software tracking the majority of that? Absolutely. But it's good for people to kind of wrap their day up in a bow and say, this is what I accomplished. It makes them feel like they're not only being heard, they're in charge of reporting what they did for the day. And so they kind of have that feeling of accomplishment at the end of the day. And then I like empowering people to say, this is what I did. I don't want to chase after them and do all this reporting if they're not engaged in that process. And so them being a part of that end of day form I think is really beneficial. And then we encapsulate all of those in the week and then we send those all together to our clients. And that also just helps with engagement.

I really like that end of day form. You know, you want to give them the power to say like, this is what I really focused on today. And it also helps, I think, build culture with an internal team because everyone kind of gets an idea of what everyone's working on. It's like, oh, I see that this person is really focused on this. So I'm going to ask them about any questions I have about this and so on and so forth. So I think that's a really great idea. Literally just wrote it down for myself. So it's actually very cool. Like, I love it when I learn stuff that I can use. So talking about accountability, you've learned in your time that, you know, sometimes not everyone is accountable. And I know you implemented EOS Traction to kind of support this. And so for anyone who doesn't know what is EOS Slash Traction. Is it Traction eos? Is it EOS Traction? Like, how should I be talking about it?

Okay, Traction. Traction is the title of the book, and that is the result of implementing EOS as a system. And EOS is an acronym. It stands for entrepreneurial. Say that 10 times fast operations system. So EOS, okay, so it's an operational system for your business. And what I love about it is it's a framework on which everybody works together in the same place. So we're all rowing in the same direction, right? And for those of us who are on camera, who might be visionaries, that would be me. And get shiny squirrel syndrome and can have a million ideas in a thousand different directions, right? That's me. EOS puts a little bit of framework around me to protect my team from all of my ideas and all of the little rabbits I'm going to chase. Right? And so it's really beneficial for my team because I have to structurally put it in to eos, which is the software that we use. We use a software called 90. They're tons out there. But Gina Wickman let me go back really quickly to cover what EOS is real fast. Gina Wickman created this system as a way to put not only a communication cadence together for your team, a meeting cadence together for your team, and an issues resolution system for your team. And people love to solve things and check them off the list. Right now, the visionary person, this guy over here, I love to have a million threads, right? Like, if there's a lot of undone stuff, or my sister calls it open loops. If I have a lot of open loops, it doesn't really bother me. I like to kind of dip my toe into these different projects throughout the day. The majority of people that work on my team are not like that for me. They're not that way. My CSRs and dispatchers and client success team, they all want to check a box. They want to finish things. They like to get things completed. They are probably much finer humans than I am, right? So they just like to do these things. And so EOS really gives us a place, a playground in which to exist together where I get to say all the things that I'm trying to get out and work on and all the different open loops and then they get to come in and put their open loops together. And then most importantly, we both have an equal voice in solving issues in the business because they're going to see things completely different than I am. And then the success team, success manager is going to see things completely different than the client. Success manager is right. So each person in the seats of the operation is going to see things differently. And every person's voice is valid and important to solving the issues in the business. It can't just come from one person down or two people down or one person up. Has to be more collaborative. So the visionary really does get kind of held down on the carpet to making sure that those things are done. And it's so beneficial. So we are about two years in now and I am thrilled to report that the leadership in my company is better. The people that are moving the train down the tracks is better, the communication is better, and the issues resolution is really better. And at the end of the day, all of those things result in traction, which is why the book is name Traction, because all of us want to move the business forward.

Okay, I have so many things I want to talk to you about that first thing is getting the book traction. A good place to start, it absolutely.

Is purchasing the book is an incredible place to start. But if you go on eosworldwide.com and this is not a plug for them because I don't have any connection. But if you go there, you would find somebody called an implementer. An implementer is someone that's going to come into your business for one day for free. It's really a great thing to do. I recommend it for every. Everyone owns a service business to go do an implementation day. It's free 90 minutes. They're going to come into your business, they're going to sit down with all the people on the leadership team, they're going to talk about sort of what EOS is as a system, and then they're going to leave and you guys are going to vote on it and say, yeah, this is a really cool thing, let's do it. So if you hire an implementer, here's the two things that happen. One, you make a physical and a financial investment, right? A investment of your time and of your resources to have this individual speak to your team. So now the dynamics have changed, right? Because now the, the team and you are on the same side. And the implementer is leading the charge. And then number two, the communication with the implementer while you're in the room, or maybe not in the room or while the implementer is there and or not there. The dynamics of that, even just the communication change and the implementer will pull from your people what you may not have known to ask the implementer. It'll just fast track getting EOS off the ground. So I highly encourage people to at least meet with someone and see what it feels like. It is a pretty large investment. It's a year long engagement with a person, so you think of them as kind of a part time employee for your business. But the wealth of knowledge that they bring and the structure and the boundaries and the communication, they will pull things out of your people that you didn't even know existed. So it really can be magical and I highly recommend it.

I'm like thinking about like, can I apply this to my team in some way? And shout out to my team members who will be listening to this podcast. I'll check with you first, I promise. When you said shiny squirrel syndrome, I was like, oh my gosh, if I had a dollar. Do you by any chance have adhd? You don't have to disclose if you don't want to.

You know, I have never been diagnosed with it, but I certainly, if you saw how many tabs I had open on my computer, you would certainly consider that I might have some sort of a disorder. Right? So. And I have multiple computers and multiple screens. Like if you saw the other side of this camera setup, it's four screens. I can plug in three computers at a time. Like I can just go kind of bananas in here. So yeah, it could be a thing. I'm not diagnosed, but it could for sure be a thing.

I have it. And the more I learn about it, the more, more I am trying to implement things to make my life a little bit easier and especially when it comes to managing people, you know. And I'll also just say I don't think it's a disorder. I think it's just a different way that your brain is wired and it's just helpful to know about it. You know what I mean? But the way you were describing yourself, I'm like, oh, that's why Michelle and I connected. We met at ahr, by the way, and Angie Snow told me to talk to Michelle, so that's why she's on the show today. And I was like, that's why the open loops. Oh my gosh.

Yeah.

I mean, anytime I'm having a conversation. If sometimes, like, don't forget about this. And I'll be like, oh, God, I can't forget about that. And sometimes it's just ranges, doesn't shut up.

So for a person like us, the next most important key factor in working with EOS is now that you've got an implementer, right? Somebody that's going to kind of come in with a clipboard and ask the right questions and kind of lead people through the organization. Part of getting EOS started. Every visionary needs their opposite. And it's interesting you will find in most businesses it's either a husband and wife team could be a visionary and what's called an integrator. The integrator is somebody who, like, actually does the stuff. They're the person that, like, checks the boxes and does the thing and, like, gets things accomplished, right? The visionary kind of has a million open loops. And the integrator says, okay, visionary, we're going to calm down, we're going to take these two things and we're going to take them to the finish line. So naturally, we are drawn as integrators and visionaries to one another in life, in business, in marriage, we're just drawn to each other. So this is a natural component of us as being humans. And so you will find in your organization a natural visionary and a natural integrator. Here's the cool part. You can be a business owner and be neither. And EOS says, that's okay. You don't have to be the visionary and you don't have to be the integrator. You can actually be the owner of the business and have people in your organization that can fulfill those seats. And then you look at yourself and you're like, I'm not completely insane. I knew I was terrible at that, right? I knew I wasn't good at this. I knew I wasn't good at that. That's the thing that's brought so much clarity to our business, is that it's let everybody be who they are naturally and not feel indicted for not being good at the other stuff on the list. And if anything that I can impress upon the listeners is that EOS gives you that freedom to be able to be fully yourself and say, okay, I'm going to be accountable to these certain things that I'm naturally good at that I naturally like to do, and then I'm going to find people on my team that can play to the weaknesses that I have and then compliment me in a way that can move the business forward. And when you can Say that to yourself, whether you're the visionary, the integrator, or the owner, there is such a sigh of relief that comes over you because then you, you're like, okay, now I know where I am and now I know where we can go. And that clarity is super empowering for everybody on the team. And everybody has that, that moment, that first year that you're putting EOS together because people will naturally navigate to where their seat is the best. And I will tell you, we put this in in the first year and our entire leadership team has turned over. So you have to be prepared as the owner that you may not have the right people or the seats may not be well defined for the people that you have. And there may be some friction there that you may have to work through. And it's painful, it's not pretty, and it's not easy. Didn't happen all at once. Wasn't a big, huge implosion. Some people self selected out. In fact, all of them did. There was only one that had to be selected out. We know together, jointly, we decided together. But at the end of the day, the result is that the people are here that are in the seat and they're properly in the seat thrive and then the business thrives. You can see it happen immediately as soon as those definitions are closely defined and the people are in the right place.

Oh my gosh. I could talk to you about so many things from that. And I just want to let you know if you ever decide to sunset pink collars, you could definitely become an EOS salesperson. I mean, truly, I'm upset you don't have a referral code. I really am sorry.

Well, let.

And also I want to say you might not to diagnose you in any way, but you might have adhd. Because remember when we decided to do this conversation? Effective remote team. And now I'm just talking to you about eos.

Oh, yes, it could happen. I know, it's okay.

Okay, well, let's talk a little bit about call recording. Right? So call recording is so important when you have a remote call center. But when I, when you and I were first talking, I was like, no one has the time to review every recording. So I would love to know what processes you recommend for call center managers who want to quality check their calls of their remote employees. But like, or like, I only have maybe an hour in my day to do this type of quality checking. What do you recommend?

Well, we partner very closely with power selling pros. Shout out to those guys, Brigham and his team are fantastic.

So they're going to be on the podcast too.

Oh, great. Oh, fantastic.

They're going to be on the podcast after you. So that's a very good. That's a very good shout out to them.

Perfect. Okay, Frank, we didn't know that. Okay. So Brigham and his team of coaches are incredibly engaging and a lot of fun. So our team does never think of it as, oh, we're not doing anything right. So here comes a coach. Right? We're messing up. Here's a coach. They make their process super collaborative and super helpful and more about teaching than anything. I would first start looking into them. They can absolutely engage with one or more of your team members. If you have somebody that you really want to focus on on first, they can start there. If you want to just engage them with your entire team as an organization, they can start there as well. So they've got a great group of people and I would highly recommend starting there. A little birdie tells me, though, there are AI companies out there that are building coaching and listening models. And so there's one kind of circling around. I'm not going to say their name because I don't want to let the cat out of the bag, but I know that there's some companies that are working very closely in the Service Titan ecosystem to work on call recording review and call recording review for tone, for keywords, for call time, for call flow, for response time, for what did the customer say and then what did the agent or CSR say? And so I believe that there's going to be some really cool tools on the horizon coming out, not only through Service Titan, but other vendors. So I would investigate in those as well. But for now, I love power selling pros. I think they might be starting to use a little AI too. But you'll have to ask. Bring him that when you have him on. You'll have to ask him about that. But there's a lot of good options out there. And then internally, what we do, we QA shadow is what we call it. And so we not only shadow the person live while they're on the calls, but then we also just randomly select calls and go over them in our standups in the mornings. And so it's a good teaching method to talk to our team about. So. So we'll do a really good call and we'll get everybody all fired up and we'll say, okay, this is a good one. And then on Friday we're going to go over one that we think needs a little bit of improvement. We talk to that team member first. So we don't ever, you know, shout them out or do anything public that would make them feel uncomfortable. But we always make sure that we're constantly up, leveling our team and learning from one another. So that is an important aspect of having remote teams, for sure.

So I imagine for these standups where you review the calls that went well, the calls that could have been done better, you probably have people on your team because this is such a routine, you probably have people on your team who self select their calls. They might say like, hey, I think this would be a great call for training. Is that right?

They do. And so our team success manager will work with them and talk to them first and say, hey, this would be a good one for the rest of the people to listen to, the rest of the team to listen to. So we collaborate on that. That's not something we do cold to people, but it is. Sometimes we have customer that's really, you know, a little wiggly and hard to capture. And so it's fun to listen to. How people handle those objections again, shout out back to power selling pros is that they give us that call flow and how to work through those objections. And remember, in every instance in the world, including a phone call, the person who's asking the questions is actually the one in control of the conversation. And a lot of our CSRs always just need to be reminded of that, that you're in control the moment you continue asking the questions. Once you get a battery of questions from the client or the customer in the field, that's when they're in control of the call. So it's always important to maintain the question answering and make sure that that CSR is in charge of that call. And that always helps.

Amazing. All right, so I want to know too. I mean, I already alluded to it. Remote work is everything. People love remote work now. But I would love to understand how you are able to get employees to buy into a company if they're working remote.

We had a lot of visual context, so whenever we're talking to a team member, we need to communicate with them. We always get on Zoom, we always get in a huddle in Slack. We always make sure that that auditory or visual component is there. We work really hard in the onboarding period to understand all the things that makes them unique and amazing. And so we take in all of that data and we keep it in applicant tracking system called Bamboo hr. And so that really helps us if something is happening in their life. So that we can touch them in a way that makes sense to them and resonates with them. We just recently had somebody that had a terrible family tragedy and I went into Bamboo hr. I could see what her favorite drink was, what her favorite flower was, what her favorite book was and then I could reach her in a way in her time of need that resonated with her. And that's not trickery, that's just me help. That's just helping me to be able to connect with that team member. So that's really important to dial in that information about your team so that really you can reach to them in any way, whether it's good or bad. You need to be able to speak their language. And so we take in all of that data about our team as part of our onboarding and we just ask a million questions about people because I want to know your kids names, your dog's name, I want to know who your brother in law. I mean, I want to know it all because I want to be able to speak to you knowledgeably. If we're having any sort of an issue, if I've built that trust all along in the relationship or my team of leaders has built that trust in you, then you're going to trust them. When they say, gosh, Jenny, we don't have any, Jenny's working, you know, I really wish you could do this or this is something that I would encourage you to do. And when you have spent time with that Jenny on your team, even if it's remote and you've worn silly hats together on a huddle or you've goofed off or you've talked about something personal in the, you know, in the break room channel and you've sent that person flowers, you've built that trust of that team member so that they believe in you and your company and your vision. And to be honest, I have this little thing. I will make it sure that I send it to you in the notes for the show. I'm not going to read it all, but for those who can't see, it's a little visual diagram of a ladder essentially. And it talks about the performance chain and it's called the service profit chain. And I know as business owners sometimes profit is like a scary word or a dirty word when we're talking about culture. But culture feeds into the accountability and it feeds into the profit of your business. So it starts with leadership and then it goes immediately to engagement. So not only do you have to have your leaders, right, but engagement is the Single second most important, important piece of the puzzle on the way to the profitability of your company. Once you have engagement, you will have team member loyalty. Then you will have resulted productivity. Then you will have quality. Again, we're quality assuring, we're checking things, right? So as a business owner, that engagement is huge because you can't get your quality until you get the engagement right. And then once you get quality, you get value. Once you get value, you get customer satisfaction again. All those people that we're talking to on your behalf, we want to make sure they're satisfied. Then once they're satisfied, they are loyal. Then once you have customer loyalty, you in turn have a profitable business. So when you start down there at leadership and engagement, if you don't get those two things right right off the bat, you're going to have a really hard time getting up the ladder to profit.

Yeah. Okay. I'm so happy you came here with. So you came prepared with so many resources and referrals. I. Oh, my gosh. So appreciate. All right, we are running out of time, which is just goes to show how much I'm enjoying this conversation. But I have a final question for you that's kind of like more to what we're seeing now. So it's service tight. You know, we've talked about COVID a bit on this show, and obviously being in the skilled trades, you know that Covid boom happened. People were home more. They were doing projects that they maybe would have put off for hours for. Not for hours, for years. And now we're kind of seeing the correction of that, and we've kind of gotten back to a pre Covid level of business operations. So what would you recommend to owners who are making sure they're optimizing every call?

Well, I think rehashing your calls is really important. Getting back in front of customers that didn't close. So whether you're doing outbounds, whether you're doing email, a campaign, a text campaign, whatever you're doing to get the word out in front of your customer again. Remember, the world has gotten so much more technologically noisy even in the last five years. I've noticed it. I mean, I don't know about you, but it's not enough that you buy a pair of shoes from a vendor one time, you turn around and you've gotten 100 emails from the same shoe person, and it's like, okay, wait a second, I just wanted the pair of tennis shoes. I don't need. We don't need to get married right and so that's what we're used to as consumers now. We're used to kind of being bombarded. And so in the service industry, we need to kind of look at those companies. We need to look at Nike and we need to look at Apple, and we need to look at some of these major businesses and see the level of communication at which they're actively pursuing us as consumers. And we need to think about the homeowner and go, man, it's pretty noisy in the homeowner's world technologically, right? They're getting a zillion text messages, a zillion emails, phones ringing off the hook. How can we differentiate our message? What can happen? You know what I'm seeing that's really cool out there. People are going back to snail mail. People are going back to like postcards. I have a referral or a card where I say that, you know, to a waiter or busboy or a person out in the world, and I say, hey, you're awesome. It's a, you know, I'm a recruiting card and it's a physical card. I had people like freak out about this the other day and I passed it around a whole group here in my industry and everybody's like, you actually have an old school business card that you pass out to like recruit people? And I said, yeah, people want something to hold onto. People want an experience. So the companies that I'm seeing that are doing the customer service experience, well, obviously Tommy Mello, I mean, he's engaged in his community, right? He's on camera all the time. He's put together a written piece of material, a magazine, right? An old school magazine, like he's producing one. And so I think those methods being in your community, being present, that's huge. But think about utilizing the technology to help support you to play ball against some of the other noise that your consumer is going after. And then that personal connection. I mean, I almost exclusively, I order all my groceries online. I'm an Amazon sort of repeat offender. Everything I do is like type and text. And when somebody actually calls me, it's like really sort of refreshing. And so I believe we're still needing human connection. And so I would encourage you to get your CSRs, maybe pull one of them off the phones for a couple of days, for a couple of hours a day, and just make outbounds and just check in on people. Hey, how's your system working? Hey, what's going on? We're just thinking of you. We just know you're probably need a tune up or we're having this thing and we're just checking in on you. How are you doing? And I really do believe that with all of this AI and all of this noise I do still believe that the human connection, the voice, this kind of work that you actually do is really, really still very, very important in the service industry. And so I would encourage you to get people on the phone again and get them reaching out to your people, to your customers. So that's what I would do.

I think that's phenomenal advice. 100% agree with you and Michelle this has just been a wonderful, wonderful convers conversation filled with a wealth of information that I want you to know I'm going to be acting on when I get off this call. So thank you for taking time to join me on Toolbox for the Trades. This was truly a delight and I can't wait to see you at the next conference. I hope our paths cross again soon.

Can't wait.