Unlocking Secrets of Success in Jim Penman's Epic Lecture - PART 1

Jim Penman (lecture) emphasises customer service as the primary driver of success for Jim’s Group franchises. Key operational rules include answering calls quickly (average wait ~10s), calling customers back within two hours (ideally within 10 minutes to maximise conversion), texting when calls fail, giving appointment windows, dressing/vehicle signage, precise written quotes and follow-up. He links higher customer-service ratings to better income and retention, urges charging premium prices (target ≈ $60/hr or more), and notes significant investments in software to support these practices.
Questions this video answers
Over 220,000 leads.
About 10 seconds (target under 10s).
Within two hours (absolute maximum).
Around 85%.
Just under $3,000 a week.
Chapters
Okay, well, welcome to everybody. Over the next few days, I hope to meet everybody who's here. Unfortunately, those of you who are long distance, I won't, but I would like to greet you. One thing I should say is that I tend to bite my nails. If I shake 120 hands, I'm going to end up very sick because I'll put your germs into my mouth. So what I would like to do with you is to fist bump you. Is that all right? So just like this. Okay, thank you. That's like that, yeah. Okay. Just a warning might seem a strange habit, but probably been picked up during COVID It's worked very well. Now, over the past few years, something very odd has happened. In the early days of gyms, like back in the 90s, it was not easy to find work. In fact, it was so difficult that we had teams of canvases knocking on doors to try and drum up leads from my mowing glass, which is basically all we were in those days. In recent years, especially over the past decade, it's become easier and easier to find work to the extent that in recent times we've actually had an unusual problem which we never knew, which is unservice leads. Like last year, we knocked back over 220,000 leads. That's people calling us up to say, we want work done. And we say, sorry, we've got no one to help you. Unheard of in the past. And this is not because we've actually done more advertising. In fact, in certain divisions, particularly mowing and fencing, we've actually cut back on the advertising in some situations, even given back in total more than a million dollars to our franchisees in various ways because we can't spend the money because they're so busy year round. So this is a very strange change if you think about it. How many businesses do you know where you go to them and like one in four clients is saying, it's being told, no, we can't look after you. But there has been one change that's taken place over those same years, which I believe explains it, and that is we've seen an improvement in customer service based on the very simple measure that the level of complaints have gone down dramatically from what they used to be. Compared with pre gyms days, they're now less than 1% of what they used to be. And even the early franchise days, they're down by about 80%. We can measure these kinds of things. So customer service is the key to what makes Jim's work, and it's Also the key, one of the key things that will determine what you work now, one of the things about, we measure all the time how well you're doing. For example, one of the questions we're going to ask you in an annual survey, which you won't get because it's just going out right now, but every year we're going to ask you a question. How do you rate your income? We're not asking how much money you're making or how much you're turning over, it's how do you rate your income? Good, satisfactory, poor. Now in recent years that's actually improved. It used to be something like 10 to 12% where franchises were reporting poor income. Latest figures, 8%. So it's improved a lot. Some divisions as low as 3 or 4%, very, very low. But that 8% of franchisees is not randomly distributed because when you have a look at those and compare them with the levels of customer service, what you find is that top ranking franchisees, only about 3% have report poor income. Of the franchisees in the lowest group in terms of customer service, something like 25%. It's not all by any means, but it's a lot more. Same on attrition rates. What's the likelihood you're going to be here still the franchisee in 12 months? Well, I'd love to say the answer was zero. By the way, the. Does anybody know what proportion of people who go into an independent cleaning or gardening business, what proportion of those actually are likely to be there in 12 months time? Anyone looked it up? Have a look, Google it up. You'll find the actual likelihood of an independent cleaning or gardening or similar business being a business of 12 months is between 5 and 10%. With you, the chances are 88%. That's just statistically speaking. 88, 12% of you will be gone in the next year. Now, either because you're not doing so well or because you've got another job offer or because your health reasons or anything like that. But the interesting thing is the franchisees who leave in the first year tend to have much, much lower levels of customer service. Average star rating, which we talk about later in gyms, is around about 4.7. These days, average person who leaves this rate is about 4.2. So not only does customer service relate hugely to the success of Jim's group as a whole, it will have a huge impact on you as to whether you're likely to succeed. And this is why I choose to talk my start because I own the company. I like to talk whatever I like. So I choose to start talking about customer service. So let's start talking about what customer service is. When a customer calls our call center, what is the first thing that's going to impress them? Quick answer, pick up the phone fast. You know, every day I go into the call center, which is just down there, I look up on the board and I'm looking at statistics. And one of the things we look at is the average wait time. Now, because of the way that the answering service was the minimum, about seven seconds. So if we're under 10 seconds, I'm pretty happy and I'll go and high five the girls and so forth. And the guys, there's some guys in there to say, you know, well done. And we look at number of proportion of calls that have dropped out. So we look at statistics like that, statistics like that very, very carefully on a daily basis, exactly how long customers have to wait. So by the normal standards of call centers, our call center is grossly overmanned. Because if you've run call centres in the past, anywhere else I've been on, call centres like Commonwealth bank, wait half an hour to get a response. Our average waits about 10 seconds. What's the other strange thing about that call centre? It's in Australia and we're surely opening up one in New Zealand too. The overflow calls will come here because we want not only to give clients a great experience in terms of having the phones answered quickly, but as far as possible answered with local accents, with local knowledge, local towns, not get mixed up between cities, which can cause you a lot of problem. Because if you get a job and it's in the Surrey hills and you're in Melbourne, but the job's from Sydney, you'll quickly understand that's not a particularly good job to have. Get back to the call centre very fast, tell them made a mistake. But ideally we try and remove that to a minimum. So even before you've got the job, we're spending a lot of effort, a lot of time, a lot of money, making sure that the customer's experience is as good as it possibly can be. Now, when a customer calls, what are we going to promise them? Does anybody know? Call back within two hours. Call back within two hours. Here's the man doing his homework. Well done. Thank you. Going to call back within two hours. Why do we say two hours? Is that an ideal time to call back? No, it's the absolute maximum time you're allowed. If you wait more than two hours, you're basically in Breach, which means you've really broken the guidelines. Not fatal by itself, but it's a really bad thing. The quicker you can call back, the more likely you are to get the job. We did some surveys. A lot of doing gyms is. We measure stuff. We're always measuring things. You probably get sick of me saying this by the end of this talk. We measure everything. And one of the things we're very interested in is conversion rate. What happens when you get a lead? What is your chance of converting into a job? Now, we did a survey some time back where we actually looked at that. We also asked the clients when the initial callback came. And we found that when the callback came after two hours, customers were still booking, but less than half. When the customer reported the callback within the first two hours, but after the first 10 minutes leaped to 78% when the customer reported the callback within the first 10 minutes, 85%. In other words, we're virtually doubling the chance of getting that job, of converting that lead into a job simply by calling back faster. That's an amazing difference, isn't it? See, people think that people call, are going to get the job done because the price is good, for example. That's a typical reason, actually has remarkably little effect. It's far, far more important as when you call back. Why do you think that's the case? Why is it that calling back promptly so fast just shows two. Obviously, they might go to a competitor. Yes, yes, exactly. Don't ring the competitor very often. In fact, usually we believe people will ring us first. If they get a call back from our people, then they don't tend to go anywhere else. What's the other reason? They feel valued. They feel you're professional, you feel you're honest. You promised two hours called two minutes. Hey, they this person is reliable. This person does what they say they will do and more, which is usually a pretty good indication. If you're the kind of person that rings back within two minutes, you'll be the kind of person that likely to turn up when you say you will get the job done. When you say, well, get the job done well, they often correlate together. So it's a sign to the customers you're the kind of person I want to do business with. So it's a very powerful speed of that call. What happens if you can't get through? This really is going to show who's done the research. Send a text, a good man, you're going to text. And this is an absolute rule when you cannot get through. You text. Why do you. What about leaving a message on the. On the answering machine? Is that. How about that one? Is that good enough? They do not listen. In fact, if anybody wants to ring me and I'm going to give you my phone number at the end of this talk, you will find. You will get a message that will tell you that I don't listen to my messages, because I don't. But I don't ignore text. And that's the same with most of you and most clients as well. If I ring a franchisee, I want to get through them. I can't get through. I will text them, say, hey, tried to call you back, whatever. So always text, okay, why do we want to. What do you want? What do you want to do in that return phone call? By the way, there's a program we're developing called Jim's Job. Some of you may be using it. It's a little bit rough and ready right now, but hopefully by the end of the year, if you wish, we'll be able to book the job straight into your diary. If you want to, there'll be an option there. It'll actually know where you're going to be, roughly speaking, and put the time, which you can change. But it means if you have that system, you won't need to call that. You can just have them book it in, which actually should dramatically improve conversion rates, because the client's already got an appointment that's coming, but later on, probably towards the end of the year. What are we trying to do in this conversation? What's our aim? Book an appointment? Yes, we want to go and see the client. We don't normally want to give them an hourly rate, a price. Why not? What have you signed? What if you're slow? Yes. They're just not going to appreciate the hourly rate because it's going to get calculated to be more than a GP or someone of the highest skilled nature. It will sound a lot to clients. People have this idea that because we work with their hands, we're going to get paid, you know, 30, maybe $35 an hour. That isn't the case with every division in gyms, a normal operator ought to be able to make at least 60 bucks an hour. Based on our surveys, the average franchisee turns over just under $3,000 a week. You can't do that if you're working for 30 bucks an hour. So it sounds a lot to clients. The other problem is, I think what you were referring to before was that it causes a Lot of problems. What if you're slow? What if you don't get an amount of work done? Because when you say I'm going to work even for 60 bucks an hour, the client doesn't know how much you're going to achieve. So it tends to cause a very high level of complaints. A fixed price quote doesn't you give a quote, it's clear that's how much it's going to cost you, that's how much it's done. I had clients complain to me after I finished the job way back and they looked at what I charged and what was done and they were happy with the job. But they said, you realize you're charging more than my doctor? That was this lady's complaint. And I said, well, yeah, would you be happy if I took twice as long to do the job? She said, yes. We're in business for ourselves, people. We want to charge good prices. So we don't like hourly rates for those reasons. So you want to go and see the client, you want to give a price. Sometimes you can give a bit of an estimate on the phone. The trouble with that is that when you turn up and you find out the job is far, far worse than it was supposed to be, which is very often the case. You know, like the grass. Oh, it's in pretty good condition, the grass is there. I mean, that kind of thing causes problems. So we do want to go and quote. Okay, now, when you make an appointment, very important. And I'm going through all the things that go wrong now. So if you can get this right, you'll avoid complaints, have very happy clients, high conversion rate. One of the things that goes wrong is that it's very difficult for us to turn up at a precise time. Now, if you're going to see your doctor or your dentist, how often do you get in exactly on the dot on time? Very rarely. Well, we run a much more difficult situation than that because our jobs are far more variable. So you cannot be precise. You're never precise. So what you actually say is you give a time scale. You don't say, we're there at 10, understanding, hoping the client will understand. You could be early or late. You say, I'm going to be there between 9 and 11. Give yourself two hour time spoke. If you can't make it in that time, if you find you're running late, and I don't mean at 11 o', clock, I mean like at 9:30 or 9 o' clock when you recognise you're not going to make it what do you do? Call the client if you can't get through? Text. Okay. Always text when you can't get through. If you text, you've done what you can. We'll disregard any complaint if you haven't texted. It's a valid complaint. Okay, we turn up. What happens if we turn up and the client's not there? That might be surprising. They made an appointment with you and they don't turn up. What do you do? Call the client if you can't get through? Text. All right, we're getting there. I can hear this text coming out from everywhere. I love this. Believe me, it's better to learn it now than to learn it when you've had a mistake. When you've had a complaint and you've blown a client and you've got a complaint and you've got a bad survey. That's not the thing you want to hear about. Text. You want to hear about them now and get them drilled in again. Shortly. Down the track a bit, we'll have software which will make it a lot easier, where the texting will become really, really, really easy and automatic. At the moment, you've got to do it manually. Very, very simple. Okay, so everything being good, we turn up the client's doorstep. We're parked outside, we're walking towards the door. What's impressing the client now? Look. Appearance. Uniform, signage. Very, very important. One of the questions I often ask women in these courses, I won't do it today because I tend to run on a bit long sometimes, is what would your attitude be if you were approached by two separate contractors, very, very similar in terms of their looks and their manner and everything else, but one wearing uniform, one wearing a knot, but the contractor wearing the uniform is 10% more expensive. Who would you pick? Uniform. Uniform. Overwhelmingly, most women would say uniform. If I said 20%, my experience is it becomes a bit more iffy. So we think the value of having the right coloured shirt on is round about the fact that you can charge 15% more, which means instead of making, say, clearing $100,000 a year, you're clearing $115,000 a year. Actually more, because costs are the same. Maybe 120, massive difference just by simply having the right coloured shirt on and having properly signed vehicles, which we insist on anyway, has a huge, huge impact. So being dressed correctly and properly, when you go and give a quote, particularly because the brand that you'll be carrying, or some version of it, is this one, which is very well known, very respected and very good reason, because we stand behind it. They know who you are, you've been police checked, you're backed by warranties, you're backed by Jim's group. Makes a big difference. Okay, now, interesting thing, what have I said so far? We need to ring back promptly, text if we can't get through, make an appointment within a couple of hours, text if we can't get through, turn up if they're not there, phone them, text if we can't get through, look in uniform, look at the vehicle signage. Now if I'm asking about all these things, I have a 13 year old son about to turn 14 and he would have no problem with any of these things. He's very good at appointments, he puts his uniform on for school in the morning, he understands about returning phone call, he's good at texting. This is 13 year old stuff, people. And yet would you believe that we have people, mature people, often with good job histories in the past, who fail because they don't do what a 13 year old do. At least they don't do it consistently. And it's tragic, it's horrible. There's nothing sadder than to see somebody fail. You never get over the angst of it, you never get used to it. But it's for doing these simple, simple things. And most complaints are not to do with quality of work, even though people think they are. Most are to do with very simple communication issues like these. We need to get these right. Once again. We've got software. We're spending something like $4 million a year developing software systems. With time later on in the year, by early next year we'll have systems that will make it a lot easier to do the right thing. They'll think, they'll remind you, they'll prompt you, they'll automatically do all kinds of stuff. It's coming, we're working on it. We want to help you with this, but you need to do your part. Okay, You've now faced the client. Now in this situation, this is, we're getting past what a 13 year old do because you've got to communicate with the client. You've got to show them that you are the kind of person that's going to look after them really, really well. You've got to impress them, you've got to understand what they want. You then got to estimate how long it's going to take you, which will be difficult in the beginning. You'll get pick it up pretty quick. Mostly when you make shocking mistakes. I mean when I first started doing rubbish removal, I wasn't very familiar. This is back in the 70s. And I saw a big pot, remember seeing a big pile of branches on the driveway. And I said oh, that'll be so and so, put a price on it. And then I started digging down and there was concrete there. Listen, I was working for about two bucks an hour for half the day. That was a really, really, really bad quote. But you know what I learned? To put my foot into a pile of rubbish. After that, I never made this time mistake again. So you'll learn how to quote, you'll learn how long James take you very quickly and you'll develop that skill. But even when you give the quote the way you give it can actually matter a great deal. For example, many years ago my brother in law, actually ex brother in law, used to be married to my wife's sister, wanted some trees taken down from his, from his yard. And this was a big job and the trees, some trees were quite near the house. So he said I want a reputable company. I want somebody that you know, I've seen around the streets. I know that they're well established. I don't want some backyard or drop a tree on the house. Oops, sorry. Scarper off. No insurance. Okay. So he chose two name companies came and give him a quote. Both jobs quotes were over $1,000, both were $10 apart. How did he choose? He showed me on the kitchen table the two quotes. One for a company called Complete Garden Care. A four sheet with letterheads. So much with stumps, some it's without the other one. Originally the guy gave it as a verbal quote. It'll be so and so. Then he wrote it down on the back of a business card. And that business card quote cost him a thousand dollar job. Sad point about that. It was the Jim's Trees business card from a franchisee no longer with us. But just even writing the quote correctly, think about it. This time we've done everything we can so far to make the client really want to use it. Is that right? Can you see that? Answer the phone call fast, recognizable accent, somebody easy to talk to, promise a callback. Somebody calls back, ideally within two minutes of the call, makes an appointment, makes a time scale, turns up within that time, dressed to the part, looks responsible, decent looking, quote communicates well, okay, we've done everything possible to actually try and convert that lead into a job. And now we're going to do something that may in fact should turn some clients off. It's the only thing we ever do that has the effect of turning clients Off. What is it? This is the key to the way we think about everything. What are we going to do that could actually cause the client to say no, even though we want you to do it? Charge too much. Charge a lot. Charge a high price. I wouldn't say too much because too much will lose you the job. But your conversion rate is a very good sign if you are converting too many jobs. If you're getting too few knocked back and you are busy, which most of you will be if, if not initially, you will be within a few months. If you're not getting a significant number of knockbacks from clients, you are too cheap. And it's actually. Sometimes franchises complain about surveys where there's a price, you know, too expensive, it doesn't affect their ratings for customer service. And they say they feel really bad about being criticized. It's not a criticism. I actually wrote back to a guy at the weekend, the same thing. He was complaining about the surveys. It's not a bad thing. You've got a fantastic rating. You. You're a 5.0. It's the best you can possibly be. The fact is a matter getting some price knockbacks is a good sign. It means that you're charging properly. See, there's a very key principle behind the way we think about business. We are not cheapest chips. Has anybody heard of cheapest chips? Yeah, we are not cheapest chips. That's not our market. In fact, I had a. Not a franchisee. I had somebody who actually emailed me directly and he said, look, I really want a service done, but I haven't got very much money and I want to get a really good deal on it. And I said, okay, there's a company I can recommend you to. It's called High Pages. You ring them, you'll get. Or actually, you don't ring, you book online. You'll get five different quotes, and you can choose the cheapest. All right? That's their market, it's not ours. We're interested in the quality market for people who want great service, reliable service, quality job, reliability conscience. We want to give great service, but we charge for it. And your aim, as I said before, is to make at least 60 bucks an hour on every job. Now, you'll hear some stories, particularly tomorrow morning with Dan Carl, about people who are charging double and treble that. And you'll see people in your own regions that you'll meet at meetings who are charging a lot more than that. And they'll tell you the reality rates. They'll tell you how they get them. But we are not cheap as chips. We want you to give fantastic service. We want you to bowl the clients over with great service, but we want you to charge a very good price for it. And you know what, there are some occasions when I will advise a franchisee to lower their prices. A franchisee is fairly new, getting a lot of knockbacks, not having enough work, complaints from clients that he's charging three times anybody else. And I will say to them in these rates, you will need to moderate your pricing. You're charging too much. But do you know what? I have the opposite conversation where I tell a franchisee that you're really not charging enough. And you know What? It's about 20 to 1. I'm far, far more likely to encourage franchisees to raise their prices than I am to get them to lower them. We are the elite service. We are gyms. We are not high pagers. We are not cheap as chips. Does that make sense? Because this is the way that you're going to make great money. Believe me, the cheap end of the market is not worth having. It's garbage. We had a guy who actually, he decamped to one of our competitors and, and I won't say which one, but he was one that he just didn't get on with his franchisor, went to one of our competitors, started getting these kinds of high pages type leads, which is what you were providing for them. And his income dropped by 2/3. It was shocking. He actually came back, he was at the last training bringing one of the other guys from the same network, which I won't give their name, but the point of it is our system is great service. And you will find that to be a pressure at times. I'm going to warn you about this too. You're going to hear down shortly some of the reasons why you might get upset about our systems. It will upset you, it will put pressure on you. But the upside is we can charge very good price prices and help you to make very good income. Far, far more than you could make as an independent. As well as getting off the ground faster. That's the plus. You're going to hear the minus shortly. Okay. Now sometimes we actually can't give a quote on the spot. We need to go away, give a quote somewhere else. Let the client know when you're going to give them the quote, tell them when, give them a date. I'm going to get it to you by Saturday and make that time, make sure you make the time that you give it to them. Very important too. When you email a quote to a client, what else do you need to do? Follow up. Yes, but also text. Text the client to say you send the quote. Why can't you just send an email off? Emails go straight all over the place. They go to spam filters. The email address is wrong. And I might say it's most often wrong when a client puts their own email in on an online form. So you're going to you. Whenever you email something to a client, you always follow up with a text and then it's a good idea to follow them up. And it's not difficult to follow up a quote too. You just simply bring them up. You don't need to be pushy, you just say, hi, Betty, this is Matthew from Ingenious Mind. Just want to. Do you have any. Did you get my quote? Do you have any questions about the quote? Just that kind of thing. Follow up. It's worth spending a little bit of time on that. Don't just send it, email it off into the blue one. Because often people just don't get it, even with the text or something, they ignore it. So follow up now. I've been talking for nearly half an hour. Haven't mentioned quality of work, have I? Why? Because most problems are not quality of work. It's only about one complaint in probably eight would be to do with quality of work. The rest are all to do with communication issues. Not turning up, not phoning back, not sending quotes, these kinds of issues. But obviously quality of work matters. That's what they're calling us for. What's the measure? How do you measure whether your job is good enough? Client satisfaction. There is no other measure that matters in the end, is it? Now, if you have a good sense yourself of what looks good for you and you've got a high standards that will tend to satisfy the client in spades. But what really matters is the client is happy. There is no other measure. I don't care how good your job is, if you haven't satisfied the client, then you've done something wrong, you've made a mistake of some kind. What kind of reasons could there be for you doing a job that is by the book, perfect but doesn't satisfy the client? Yes, that's right. Well, if my standard is to go to here and the client wants there, that's going to be a problem, isn't it? What's the problem? My standards are too low. Many years ago I had a franchisee say to me something I found quite disturbing, actually. He said, you Know, Jim, I really hate Jewish clients. And I said, why do you hate Jewish clients? And he said, they're so fussy, they're so picky, they're so hard to please. And I said, that's interesting because when I was mowing lawns, which I did for about 15 years, I know what I'm talking about when I'm talking about. I don't know about cleaning or dog wash. I do understand mowing very well. Did it for 15 years. I said I had worked in the area, started off around North Bourne. A lot of Jewish clients there because there's a synagogue close by and I love my Jewish clients. I told him this and he said, why do you like Jewish clients so much? I said, well, because they're so fussy, they're so picky, they're so hard to please, that when you look after them really well, they're the best clients in the world. They really were. They would recommend me to their friends. I used to get wonderful presents. They often had businesses like coats. I can remember amazing stuff. They just got the greatest Christmas present. My Jewish clients, they do tend to be quite generous too. We have them at the conference center here. They're very generous people, but they do have very high standards. So his problem was not so much that his clients. His problem was him. Because clients can vary from rough and ready to very meticulous. So where do our standards need to be up there? Right. What else could be a reason why a client's not happy with the job, even though it is a good job by normal standards? Your attitude. Yes, you could be used. Come across as rude, for sure. Miscommunication. Yes, exactly right. You go in, you promise to do a vaccine clean. Just vacate clean like that, get your bond back and the client comes to the end of it. And you've done a perfect job on the floors, on the windows, on kitchen benches. But you haven't scrubbed the walls. Okay, see, what does vacate clean mean? It's too vague. Which just means you're doing a vacate clean. You're going to go and do it properly. I'm going to do the floors, I'm going to do the windows, I'm going to do the benches, I'm going to do the bathrooms. Use. Sorry, Use. You precisely specify what exactly you're going to do. So there's no understanding. So if the client says, well, you haven't scrubbed the walls. And I say, look, Betty, happy to do it, be so and so. But you see, it wasn't in my quote I specifically said what I was going to do. This was it. If you want more, very happy to do it. Now, that is a completely powerful argument because you specified the job. Another particular example, let me give you, is a franchisee is a tree guy this time, not the same bloke as before. He was asked to quote on a tree that was near the front of a house. Once again, the problem they called Jims because you don't want a tree being fulled on the house. It's very well you don't. So caught up. Now, he wasn't. The client wasn't going to be there at the property, but he described the tree to the franchisee very clearly on the phone. It was, you know, near the front of the house here. Described it very clearly where it was. Franchisee goes, has a look at the tree, sends a quote back to the client, Client accepts it. Now he goes there, this is a very good tree guy. This is a classically good job. This is by the book. Have you ever seen these guys in operation? They actually have climbers. You know, you go into, like lumberjacks, you go into it, you go, timber. And it crashes. You don't do that with domestic trees or you'll crash on the house. So what they do is they go. They go climb up the tree. They've got carabiners, they contact themselves, they attach a rope to the branch, they cut it off near the trunk and they lower it like that. They do it bit by bit. It's a really quite an impressive job. We had some work done at our place by one of the Jim Shreve guys last year. And this job was beautifully done. This guy was a real professional. He'd lowered things down. There was bushes underneath. They weren't even damaged. Not one branch was done. And then he went down, got the tree to the ground level, dug out the stump, which is part of the job, and put the bark back. You would not have known the tree was ever there. So this was a perfect, absolutely by the book job. Only one problem. Wrong tree. Okay, Now, you might not believe this. I spoke to this guy about this. He's a lovely bloke. He's really a great operator. He kind of laughed about it in retrospect. You know what he said to me? He said, jim, I said, what did you do about that? He said, jim, I just had one question for the client, which I asked him again and again and again till I got what I wanted. I said, what can I do to make it right? He actually managed to satisfy the client. Amazing guy. But the point is, no matter how good the job is, if it doesn't meet the client's expectations, it's not a good job, is it? All right, so communication is it. Now, let's assume something goes wrong with the job. If it's not what the client want, what are we going to do? Normally? What's our normal response? If something's not quite right about the job, go and fix it. Yeah, overwhelmingly, that's what you would do. Even if there's been a minor issue of communication, you will go and you will fix it and you will make that client happy because you want a delighted client. Even if we have to bend a bit, even if we have to interpret the wording that was a bit, you know, going beyond what we want. Now, there's a limit. If they want an extra three hours worth of work done because they want a whole lot of stuff done, it's not in the quote. You can't do that. And it's not fair or reasonable that they. They do. They are such a thing. And we will back you in that case. But generally speaking, we want to fix the job. Now, if you believe the job is good and the client's still not happy, you need to get your franchisor involved and they can inspect it and have a look at it or get somebody else to do it. If there's anything wrong with that job, you'd have to fix it.
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