Mike Andes argues that home-service businesses obsess over customer churn while ignoring employee turnover, which destroys profits and culture. During spring rush, companies deploy inexperienced technicians, forcing expensive training that eats payroll. Retaining experienced field staff is what actually protects margins and morale.
How long your employees stay with you is the most underrated metric in business. When I look at the great entrepreneurs of all time, most of them had a core group of people that stuck with them for decades. Everyone talks about customer churn, but employee churn is slowly eating your profits and your culture. My name is Mike Andes. I started a 200-location franchise and employ over 120 team members. So why is it important to retain great technicians out in the field for your home service business? Because you start every spring rush when you're going to get this influx of new leads and you have a whole bunch of newbies out in the field, it is very difficult to train new employees. It is also very hard to keep the standard of service high when you're teaching everyone how to do the job. Training costs for new team members is one of those things that it just wraps up into payroll. It is not only costing you a lot of money to train new team members, there's a lot of morale and culture issues if you have a whole bunch of churn and it feels like a dead-end job.
