Jeff Dudan | On the Homefront with Jeff Dudan #87

Hey, everybody, Jeff Dutton coming to you on the home front here. And today I want to share with you. Two simple but powerful things, when used in combination with one another, are absolutely essential to building a high performance organization. The crazy thing about this is I didn't even recognize it when it was happening until I had the benefit of education and some perspective to look back and say, wow, this was absolutely essential to building the high performance culture that we had at this company that I built for almost 25 years. So, first of all, we're going to talk a little bit about culture, because generally people will blame high performance on the culture. Well, it's the cultural expectations. That's the way it's always done. And I use a slide in training. That is an excerpt from the book Nuts, which was written by Herb Kelleher, who was the co founder of Southwest Airlines. And that quote says, culture guides behavior and provides a sense of identity, stability, and organizational boundaries. Okay, Identity, stability and organizational boundaries. I love this next part. It is the organization's memory, and you must work harder at it than anything else. I believe that intentional cultures are absolutely critical. If you leave it to chance, you're going to get a culture by default. That's an average of everybody that you hired, and whatever they thought or whatever they learned at the previous place they worked. You get this melting pot of cultural stuff, and now you've lost control of it. So intentionality and building culture is absolutely critically important. And the other thing that I would add to that, if I could write anything into that definition that Herb Kelleher wrote in the book Nuts, it would be that it lives in the stories, because stories are powerful. We're tribal people, and that is how expectations and business as usual gets passed from one person to the other. Now, Southwest, incredible culture. They still, you know, 40 years of consecutive profit, Somebody fact check that. But, like, quarter over quarter, they never take unprofitable routes. They line up differently, they load their airplanes differently, their employees speak differently and engage with the customers differently. And just really an interesting take on how to build a culture that. That is unique and how to create stories that clearly exemplify the types of behaviors that that they want to have that are permeated and that become just ingrained in how they do their business every day. So big, strong book recommendation there. So I'm going to go tell you a story and to really make a point of these two things that I think can be transformational inside of your business. So it was 2004, and I was in Charlotte, North Carolina, and we were running a restoration, remediation, emergency service business and there was a huge ice storm and power went out across the region for three weeks. And oh, by the way, pipes don't leak when they freeze, they leak when they thaw. So after the initial surge of water damages, and we had 44 vehicles and thousands of pieces of equipment and we were running all over Charlotte day and night, night and day. And then after the original, you know, rush of contracts and jobs and emergency services, every night, as the power would come on in a new neighborhood, there would be a thousand new water damages that were forced upon the market. And all of the contractors had to scramble to serve that new demand. And it was sometime during the process of this three week period. And again, our whole team had been working day and night, night and day. And we had a girl named Julia, who was a 19 year old student at a local university. And she worked for us during the summers and she worked for us on weekends. And she was sitting in there on a Saturday morning and the phone rang and she answered it and somebody said, hey, I have water in my building. We need somebody to come out. Now our first handle was unique, so I'll share it with you. Number one, when you call a lot of restoration companies, they'll say, okay, well who's your insurance company? Do you know what your deductible is? They go to the transactional side of the business. For our business advantaclean, we would start with empathy. The first question we would say, is everybody okay? Because in a water damage situation like that, where pipes are breaking, just generally everybody's okay. But that wasn't the only thing that we did. We did crime scene cleanups. So sometimes you would have bodies. We did fire restoration. So sometimes there was dogs and cats. Even if the house isn't completely engulfed in flames, dogs and cats, they tend to run and hide under beds instead of getting out of the house like a person would know to do so they can be impacted in that way. We have vehicles that go through businesses and drive into home. So all kinds of things happened and sometimes everybody wasn't okay. So we started with that and then we had basically a really quick protocol. What's the source of the water? Is the water turned off? How many rooms are affected? What's the floor covering? And then we would say, yes, we're on the way. And then we would dispatch, we would put them on hold for just a second to. After we'd get the, we'd get the address and then we would dispatch and then we would get back on the phone with the people, because, number one, there is additional information that we need now that we've established rapport and relationship. But in addition to that, there was a. We didn't want them hanging up and calling another company to see who was going to get there first. So in this particular situation, Julia's about six minutes into this call, and she's on the Nextels. I don't know if you guys remember those big brick Nextel phone. You know, you're chirping at people. And she's not able to get anybody because everybody had been out till three or four in the morning working jobs, and there just wasn't anybody available. So Julia makes the decision at this point to forward the phones to the answering service, to go into the lot, to get into one of the service vehicles, to take a job folder with her and drive 40 minutes down to the other side of Charlotte to this apartment complex who called. And she gets out of the truck, she walks up to the front door, knocks on it, and hands and says, sign my paper. We'll get started right away. And she signs. $100,000 job opportunity, by the way. Water damage. Extraordinarily profitable culturally. We never missed a job. So maybe that was one of the things that she saw. But. And you know, so she. She gets the job. So here's my question for you, and I'd like you to answer out loud, even though I'm not going to be able to hear it. Should she be rewarded for taking action and winning $100,000 job, or should she be fired for jumping into a vehicle? She didn't have training. She maybe had gone through some technical training. She knew kind of how jobs work. But, like, that wasn't her job, and it was nothing that she'd ever done before. And the second question is, why would she think that this was okay to do? Like what. What would. What would possibly possess this person to jump into a truck that she'd probably never driven anything so big before and drive all the way across town to service this customer? So I used to think, as I told this story, because, by the way, I'm sitting here in 2024, this. This story's got 20 years of age on it, and I'm still talking about it. I used to think it was because of our culture, because of the example that was set where when I would talk to restoration people, I'd say, will you get out of bed in the middle of the night to make five or $10,000? And the answer should be yes. So even me as the owner of a business with a large employee base, I was number five on the call list because if the first people didn't answer or they weren't able to get reached the middle of the night or they were otherwise engaged in a different emergency. I had a kit, I had a kit in my car, I had a kit in my truck and I would go out because I was willing to get out of bed for five or $10,000. And there's even situations where I showed up and signed dollar job. And you know, on a week on a holiday weekend where we made three, you know, we, we did a training once to an insurance company for their continuing education. And it was right before a three day holiday weekend and they called me. I was having my kids and we were little, they were very young at the time. So we were walking them out to get into our truck and we were going away to the mountains for the weekend. And it was Friday afternoon and my phone rings and it's this insurance company say, hey Jeff, really great class this week, would you. We've got this, this huge fire at a laundry facility. It's about an hour and away up in Hickory, North Carolina. And we are, our regional general adjusters. They, they're, they're, they can't get there because they've just got to their vacation destination. We can't get anybody there till Monday, maybe Tuesday. Can you go? So I took my kids, I put them back in the house, I went up to Hickory, I signed that job, we mobilized that that evening. And the next day I had made 300,000 dol. And we ended up doing over a million dollars worth of work on the job over the next couple of weeks. So that was an example, that was what people saw. I mean they, they knew that I would go and I would win these jobs and everybody else knew that whatever. If we needed to borrow equipment from a job to help a customer to get their job going, we would do whatever it takes. Which I love that phrase by the way, whatever it takes. So the example set was, was of we never missed a job. And when I asked people today in training there, they will say, well, it was the culture and it was this. And that's what I used to think. But in reflection, that behavior was created by a combination of two things. And number one was time based metrics. And here's what I mean by that time based metrics. We knew, and we had a call center that we answered 99% of all telephone calls in two rings or less. That we Would be solving the customer's problem on the way to a solution, educating the customer and letting them know what next steps were. We took the posture of we're going to help the customer no matter what it is, even if it's not us that was going to have to respond to that. Like whatever we needed to do to educate that customer to give them some insights to stop them from making a bad, hasty decision in the face of an emergency in favor of a great decision and whatever we needed to do to help them in the first 10 minutes so that they were smarter, better off, and had a sense of what to do next. By the time that we got off the phone with them, we, we. For emergency claims, which this was, we committed to be on site within one hour and then for estimates to the insurance company or billing statements within 24 hours of the last minute on the job. Not the last day on the job, but the last min on the job. Even if that bled into a Saturday or a Sunday. Because we wanted the insurance companies to know and the customers to know that like we, we wouldn't sit on a bill and it come out of left field that we were, you know, as we were prompt, we, we were, it was, it was consistent and that was the service that we provided. So think about this. She's six minutes into the job, she knows that our standard is we're going to be on site within an hour and she can't get anybody to respond. So she made the decision that, you know, if we were going to hit our time based standard, that if it needed to be, it was going to be up to her. You know, you heard that great saying, ten words, two letters each. If it is to be, it's up to me. If it is to be, it is up to me. So that was the decision she made. She jumped in the car, she signed the 100, she walked up to the door, signed my paper, we'll get started. Signs the $100,000 job, highly profitable. Water damage, dry out, demolition. It was an apartment complex, so it had gone to four or five units. And you know, it's a, you know, whether you could say like, all right, well, you know, she wasn't trained to do it, she shouldn't do it. But I think there's a lesson inside of that, is that time based metrics are difficult to get. You know, it's a very simple concept, but it's very difficult to get because most CRMs don't come out of the box with time based measurements to it. It's kind of easy to measure how many, well, we've got this many leads. You can measure percentages of conversion. There's all kinds of things that are easy to measure inside of a lead funnel and inside of that customer journey. And then also customer satisfaction. Variations in estimate amounts, variations between salespeople, like how much and how many. Like there's. You can measure that with almost any system out of the box. But the time based stuff is very difficult to get. But I encourage you as a business owner not to give up on it. And even if it has to be manual, it needs to be something that's talked about. Because your job as a business owner is to get all of the latency out of your business from the moment that you understand that there's a decision and a fearless action that needs to get taken to the time that that action, that action is commenced and implemented and is latency in the business. So how many times are you in a meeting and you have a weekly meeting, it's once a week and somebody gets assigned something but there's no time requirement on it. So you know when they're going to do it? 20 minutes before the next meeting, the next week. Oh, what was I supposed to get done for the meeting? Let me hustle up and you know, bring something of value on that item. That's if it was important, it should have been done during the meeting or immediately after the meeting. And the best business owners I know, like they, before they leave the meeting, they try to knock out half of the commitments, connections via email or appointment set or whatever it is. You know, because that week of latency between the time you knew something was important to the time that it got done, that's just a week off of the end of your life that you know you're not going to get back. So time based metrics is the number one thing. The second thing was we had it on a checklist on the front of the job jacket. We had special job jackets printed. But that started and commenced and everybody had to sign off when they received the folder, when they got to the job, when the last minute on the job was, when the s. So every time based metric that we had, somebody had to fill out that they were the one that did it and they had to initial it and they had to put the time in. So a simple checklist. If you read the Checklist Manifesto, which is a great book, look, that's a lot of book for basically saying you should use checklists. I mean, I mean could it have been a blog or an article Maybe, but there's a lot of great examples in there. Airlines, surgeons, construction, you know, these are all industries where I mean one out of, I mean 29.4 million people fly safely before somebody has a problem or there's a problem on a flight. So you know, these people have, they have pre flight checklists, they have post flight checklists, they've got all kinds of maintenance checklists. And even if you've done something 100, we had done 10,000 water damages over 20 years in this company. And even though we've done it that many times, you can't rely on everybody to remember everything in the heat of the moment. And simple checklists keep the service consistent and it keeps it on time. And then when you combine that checklist and you incorporate time based metric to it, that's what really creates a high performance organization. So in hindsight to me I had always blamed it on, we had this really high performance, great culture and everybody worked together and everybody was a team player. All of that true. But the underlying foundation that was built was built on checklists and time based metrics. So in your business, you know, anywhere that you currently have to do's or any, anything that can that should have a time requirement on it. I urge you and I challenge you to apply a time based standard to all the things that you'll do and to institutionalize those. Create simple systems that make sure everybody understands what's expected in terms of time. And in doing it that way you will immediately and drastically and permanently improve your business. I hope this has been helpful for you. This has been Jeff Duden on the home front. Please give us a like and subscribe. 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