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2002 2003

Breakthrough Article

March Madness by Dean Ferrara

So, it’s March and spring is in the air. The streak of arctic cold that has relentlessly tormented many of us this winter seems, (for the current time) to have subsided and maybe even gone away for good. March also brings for many of us, the pleasure of the NCAA college basketball tournament, referred to as “March Madness.”  

While many of us may not be basketball fans, it’s hard not to get caught up in the hype and excitement that this tournament seems to bring. OK, you are probably wondering where this article is heading, trust me I have a point.

When I was responsible for the day to day operations of a commercial service division, March Madness always reminded me of a different type of excitement; the type that comes along after you have just had a winter filled with emergency service calls, repairs and oh yeah, scheduling nightmares trying to get your maintenance agreements done on time.

What is unique about this situation is that for the time you now have on your hands, many of you will be evaluating your profit and loss statements for the work you performed this past winter season. Unfortunately, now is when you probably start realizing that you weren’t able to get the margins you were hoping simply because you always seemed to be one call behind, a part short, or having to pick up and leave a scheduled maintenance visit to put out a so called “fire.” Does this sound like I just left your office? If it does, don’t be concerned. I probably just described 90% of the contractors in our industry. For the other 10%, Congratulations! Enjoy it.

Where I assimilate “March Madness” is right now, when you are looking at how busy you were, and second guessing how you could have done things differently, better, or more profitable. This sick feeling seems to settle in your stomach when you realize all of a sudden there is a big window of opportunity and you don’t have much to do. Many of your spring changeover agreements don’t typically start until April, and yeah you could maybe start up some cooling towers, but what happens if another cold snap rolls in? Or how about emergency calls that have stopped coming in due to temperatures leveling off? The madness comes when what started off as a busy year, and lots of hard work, has now slowed down to a crawl, and margins to date might not be where you had hoped; so what’s the solution?

Well, solution number one is simple. You can go out and rent a big screen TV and in your down time, have all employees watch the NCAA basketball tournament as a team building process. OK, well that might not be the right solution.

Secondly, you can spend the time working on a plan for re-arranging your maintenance agreements. This plan should include 3-5 years worth of history. By using that history to determine “emergency hot points,” over crowded maintenance periods, and non-seasonal specific service agreements, you should be able to develop a game plan for efficiency for the years ahead. And by the way, it took me a good year to develop this plan. It was so effective that I would give my customers the following guarantee. “If your maintenance inspection isn’t performed in the month stated on your agreement, you don’t pay.” Let me tell you, my staff on the service team wasn’t at all happy about this, they seemed to be watching the year end bonus get delivered with each new, or renewed agreement that went out the door. But are you ready for this? We never credited one penny under that program. Actually, because we were more organized and better prepared, we were able to increase our gross margins by better planning. We were also better able to schedule repairs and replacements. This tool took into effect man hours, vacations, sick days, call backs and the usual. By having this road map, it allowed us to hire when we needed, and schedule some time for education. I strongly recommend you consider something like this.

This leads me to my third point. Scheduled learning, what a concept! Knowing that we were going to have some down time, we would schedule learning, training, and education, what ever you want to call it. What I called it was “absolutely necessary.” After all, “you don’t have to be sick to get better.” You have probably heard me say that before, but how many of you have your educational or training schedule set for the upcoming quarter? One of the biggest challenges many managers or owners face is, having the content to use for in house education. Imagine if there were a place that you could go, look under different subject headings like, Technical, or Sales, Management or Ownership and pick an exercise designed to educate you or your team. Imagine if that information was real “Impact Information,” meaning; you could use it to impact your company’s bottom line, or performance. Sound too good to be true?

At ePL, that is exactly what an annual membership provides you. Access to learning materials that make a difference, it’s as easy as going to our web site, clicking on the Learning Center, choosing the information you want, entering your username and password, and that’s it, the information is now on your computer, you can print it or project it, which ever is easier. You could actually plan a meeting for each of the next 52 weeks and never be at a loss for learning content.