Phil Risher shares three lessons from seven years at a $35 billion family business: don't cap pay, listen to customers and employees instead of defaulting to how things have always been done, and hire and serve your neighbors to strengthen local communities.
I worked at a $35 billion family owned business for seven years. Here's three things they taught me about growing a home service business. The first thing is we work hard and we reward hard work. If you don't want to cap your team's performance, don't cap their pay. This was very important in home service because a lot of times we just hire people, stick them in as cogs in the wheel, and we don't actually think about are they going to be getting more money by the work that they're actually doing and how can we incentivize them? Can we incentivize them to generate additional estimates, to get reviews, get referrals? All these things are ways that you can grow your business and also help your team make more money. The second thing is that great things happen when we listen to our customers and to each other. A lot of times as home service businesses get bigger, they start to default to this is our policy. And their customer service representatives get stuck in this is the way we've done it. This way we do things. You have to constantly be changing and the way that you change is by listening to the questions and the issues that your customers are having and solving them for your customers, not just falling into this is how we've always done things. And the third thing is we strengthen our communities one neighborhood at a time. Running a local service business is truly about building employees in the community as well as serving your neighbors. And if we look at what you do every single day as helping your local community, it's all about building the local community. It's not this huge conglomerates that are coming in, rolling up these businesses. It's the heartbeat and soul of the community. My kids go to the same school that your kids go to and I'm here to serve you and help you solve your problem.
