Mike Andes says callbacks, customer disputes, and employee turnover in home service businesses point to broken systems. To scale, owners need to standardize processes, diagnose repeated failures, and sometimes drop services entirely, even profitable ones, to remove growth constraints.
Anytime there's a callback, a customer dispute, someone's mad about the service, an employee walks off the job. Those are all system failures. And we can identify them as system failure, but then we need to take the time to step back and actually create a system to prevent that from happening again. If you're going to delegate, if you're going to get off the truck, if you're going to get out of daily operations, your job is to create systems. And you might be like, well, what's a system? Think about like this. Simplify and standardize. So if I get those three callbacks at the end of the week, and then I'm assessing them as the architect, I'm stepping away from the business, thinking about what went wrong and how do I fix it. If all three of those callbacks were one specific service, in order to simplify and standardize and create a system, I might actually remove the service from my service offering, and it might only be 4 or 5% of my revenue, which kind of hurts. But if I was to do that, I would eliminate the constraints to growth, which are those three callbacks causing my business to flounder.
