RSI: Recap of Your Phoenix Expo

Your Phoenix Expo came to a rousing conclusion just a few weeks ago—it was an incredible event full of new information and insight to help you build even greater success in your business. Below, enjoy a brief synopsis of each session—and if you see something that strikes your eye, watch the video of the presentation! It’s now available on your organizational website.

Although watching the sessions will certainly be helpful, nothing can replace the experience Expo provides. That’s why you’re urged make plans to join us at your next Expo in Las Vegas, March 29-31! Expos are something that are best experienced—not watched. Being in the meeting rooms and around other contractors is the best and fastest way to become successful.

In the meantime, here’s a detailed breakdown on what transpired in Phoenix:

Wednesday – Day 1
The new tradition of your fall Expo including an assortment of fun and social events on the first day continued in Phoenix. You had a variety of activities to choose from, including: the Sunrise Hot-Air Balloon Ride, the 3rd Annual SGI Expo Classic Golf Tournament, a Cattle Drive, Desert Off-Road Jeep Tour, High-Performance Driving, and a Taste of Old Town Food Day Tour. These activities were meant for you to cut loose and take your mind off business for a day, but they served a much greater purpose: You had an opportunity to meet other members. This was a time to connect with someone you might not otherwise would have. That interaction and networking is what makes Success Group International such a special organization.

Thursday – Day 2

SGI “State of the Union”
SGI President Rebecca Cassel had much exciting news to share at the introductory session—in fact, there was so much exciting information to share it took the entire morning! As you heard, SGI is rapidly growing—expecting 165 new members in 2016. Members are reporting great success, and member interaction is better than ever. Among the other updates:

  • Learning Alliance continues to expand its offerings, as well as its campuses. Training has never been more accessible. Members have responded, as your training arm has already instructed over 1,000 students in 2016.
  • SGI will have a new buying group in place once our agreement expires with BuyMax in June of 2017. The new organization will be called SGI Partner Network, and it promises stronger rebate programs, deeper discounts, enhanced programs, and a greater member experience. In the meantime, please continue reporting your purchasing to BuyMax to receive your money.
  • Our new, proprietary software ServiceLine has evolved greatly. Here’s what it can do for you:
    • Field Debriefing: Techs can debrief from the field; you can immediately know what tasks were performed and materials used. And it allows you to invoice quickly.
    • Form Management: It’s completely customizable, and makes it easy for techs to access documents in the field.
    • Permit Request: Techs can pull permits from the field.
    • Day Off Request: Techs can request time off while in the field.
    • Supply Houses: Find the closest ones to your techs, to help ensure trucks are properly stocked.
    • Customer & Job History: Your techs can arrive knowing exactly what your company has done for that homeowner.
    • Mobile Admin Panel: You can manage your entire company by phone.
    • Call Center & Dispatching: Simple and flexible call-center management flow, allowing you to easily record customer information.
    • And much more: Invoicing to be added early 2017; Purchase Orders to be added spring 2017; Time Cards to be added by summer 2017; QuickBooks will be synced by spring 2017―and other features are being developed.
    • For more information on how to sign up for ServiceLine, reach out to your Client Success Manager.
  • Rebecca also announced a new relationship with vendor PulseM to further enhance your customer engagement. They provide the following:
    • Can send a text and email to homeowners with your Tech’s bio, picture, as well as social-media reviews.
    • After the tech leaves the home, your business sends out a “pulse check”―a text that asks them to immediately rate the technician’s performance. Best of all, it only takes them 5 seconds to complete.
    • All analytics are done in real time. If you receive a poor “pulse check,” you are immediately notified.
    • You’ll have a dashboard showing all “pulse checks” within the last 12 hours and 30 days, including leaderboards for your techs.
    • Any positive remarks that a homeowner leaves from the “pulse check” can be pushed to your website.
    • You’ll receive a report every Monday morning via email showing you how everyone is performing.
    • Fellow SGI member Tim Boulden began using PulseM four months ago, and his reviews on third-party sites have soared and negative reviews have plummeted.
  • Rebecca also announced a new relationship with vendor City Communications, which provides a cloud-based phone system designed specifically for home-service businesses.
    • This technology is proven, and it will help you manage voice, data, and cloud services.
    • They will design a system that fits specifically to your needs, and they will stand behind you after developing the system.
    • It offers Virtual Hold, Screen Pop Help for CSRs (providing customer information), Call Recording, Real-Time Monitoring, and more.
    • No more onsite equipment to maintain or support. No additional cost for maintenance, support, or training. No more annual contracts.
    • By perfecting your call center, City promises to help ensure that you’re capturing more service calls from the phone calls you’re receiving.
  • Lastly, we announced that we are in the process of New Member HUB or portal. (Put plainly—new member sites!) It will be far more user-friendly and appealing to the eye. It will include:
    • All your SGI Materials will be refreshed and linked within the site. No more bulky binders! Instead, all the information has been stripped down of its fluff, is bullet pointed, and easy to navigate…
    • The site’s search functionality will be greatly enhanced.
    • You’ll have KPI input and comparison right in front of you.
    • Easier access to the HR portal.
    • Easier information on all upcoming events.
    • Registration for events will be much easier!
    • And there will be so many more features to this new site, which will be available by mid-December!

Marketing-Management Essentials Using Social Media
Social media can be a perilous marketing vehicle for small businesspeople. How should it be handled? Marketing Type Guys founder Greg Guenther shared the essentials at Expo. He said the three sites you must have a presence on are Yelp, Facebook, and Google. When you get a review on any of the three, it’s critical that you immediately respond—whether negative or positive. When you face negative comments, always take the high road. Greg also provided extensive paid advertising information on all three social-media sites

Facebook by far is the social medium where you want to be sure to keep a consistent presence. To do so, create a social-media calendar and assign one person to routinely post. Creating content doesn’t have to be difficult. Share third-party articles with a comment. Answer routine customer questions. Post trade information or conferences you’re attending. Post funny stories, pictures, and videos! The key is NOT to be constantly selling. Instead, you want to be interacting―be a member of the community.

Strategies to Running Daily Technician Meetings
Patrick Somers, General Manager of The General in Palm Springs, offered his extensive knowledge on daily technician meetings at Expo. He shared that while you, as a manager, always see meetings as a benefit, your technicians may not feel the same. That’s why each meeting must have purpose.

Should you run meetings daily, Patrick offered a sample weekly schedule. Monday is meant for reviewing tickets, identifying issues, and celebrating. Tuesdays are technical days, and Wednesdays are only for those techs struggling to meet their KPIs. Thursday is role-play day, and Friday can be meant to focus on one challenge, show a fun video, or cut them loose.

Patrick explained that when possible have others run the meetings. He also emphasized the need to have a tight, detailed agenda, and remember who your audience is—most techs are hands on. Don’t have them sit still every session. Lastly, always evaluate how your training impacts the team by monitoring Scoreboards and your KPIs. They will reveal if you were effective.

Call-Center Management Essentials
Missy Jones, Call-Center Manager of Milestone Electric & Air, revealed that all successful Call Centers share one common thread—structure. Every CSR must provide the same experience for the caller: They must set and manage expectations and present a unified front. Missy provided the SGI Telephone Service Model Roadmap for everyone in attendance to assist them in creating such a structure.

Missy stressed that a strong Call Center must also excel in prioritizing calls. You must know each type of call you receive, how long it traditionally takes, and the profits it generates. Those most profitable calls must always come first; the rest of the calendar should be filled around them. The key to a successful Call Center is to maximize profits without overworking the techs, Missy explained.

To manage your Call Center, Missy shared a CSR Checklist. It must be completed by each CSR every day and turned in. The Call Center Manager must review the information, as well as spot-check calls, and constantly provide feedback. And it’s important that feedback offer some positives, along with any negatives.

Cultural Transformation: Understanding the Plan of Action
The incomparable motivator Krish Dhanam shared with members in attendance his keys to culture transformation within any operation. Krish explained that a strong culture is built on strong coaching. When coaching, the goal should always be toward improving future skills and attitudes.

Krish further explained when crafting a company culture, you must plan, prepare, and expect:

  • Plan: Understand what you want to change, understand what you must do to facilitate change, and explore how to stimulate that change with training.
  • Prepare: Create a mission and vision statement along with benchmarks. Your team should understand the company’s beliefs, and you should push your team to set goals and help them achieve them. Above all, remember people matter.
  • Expect: Expect a dynamic shift on how your people treat each other. Know that you will have an uplifting, positive team atmosphere. Your customers will sense that positivity with each interaction they have with your company.

If you believe and expect in the change, if you expect it, and you test it, you will see that cultural transformation.

Using the DiSC Profile in Your Business
The DiSC Personality Profile was first introduced to all of SGI at the Expo in New Orleans. Learning Alliance’s Kelly Robichaud further shared the benefits of DiSC in Phoenix. DiSC explains why people act the way they do based upon their personality. In most cases, if you carefully evaluate a person, you can tell which of the four styles he/she can be classified: Dominance, Influence, Conscientiousness, and Steadiness. When trying to determine a person’s type, look at their body language, tone of voice, facial and body expressions, and choice of words.

Kelly carefully pointed out, you should never label a person due to their personality; instead, it should be a way to understand their needs. There are no good or bad styles. All have strengths. Furthermore, everyone has a blend of all four types.

Mind Capture: How to Burn Your Brand into Brain Cells
SGI President Rebecca Cassel spearheaded an exciting discussion on the topic of branding. She shared the success of your business can be broken down into a simple formula. Your company = identify + operational excellence. Even if you are operationally excellent, to truly thrive, you must have an identity in your community. You must be branded.

To be branded into brain cells requires Top-of-Mind Awareness (TOMA). Rebecca said that means you need a name that’s commonly known but uncommonly used. You need a logo that’s attractive but simple—something that makes people double take. Your company message must position you differently from the competition and tell a story in just a few words. Lastly, to be properly brand requires a uniform color. Your techs, uniforms, trucks, advertising should all look synonymous. Master all of these elements and you will have yourself a solid brand.

Generational Leadership: How to Attract, Recruit & Retain Millennials
Dr. Bill Moskal led a discussion on how to target and attain Millennials in today’s workforce. Dr. Bill explained that it is to be expected that Millennials are different that most Baby Boomers because they’ve had different life experiences that have shaped them. The majority of Millennials are between the ages of 22 and 27, and they’re soon going to make up 48% of the workforce. It’s imperative you, as a business owner, learn how to work with this generation, even more so because Millennials have been proven to job hop more than any other generation. If you have a good Millennial employee, you better know how to keep him/her.

Dr. Bill broke down some truths about Millennials. Yes, they’re different, but that doesn’t mean they don’t work as hard. Millennials are motivated by purpose, not just paychecks. They want coaches, not bosses. They want regular feedback on the job they’re doing, not annual reviews. Most interesting, Millennials look at their jobs as a huge part of a life―it’s not something they simply do for a living. Dr. Bill then invited longtime SGI members Gus Antos and Trent Urban onto stage to share with members their real-life experiences of attracting, recruiting, and retaining Millennials―something both have excelled in doing with their large operations. The two men were a bounty of information—so much information that we can’t recommend enough that you review the footage from Expo.

The Art of the Service Technician Ride-Along
John Kuykendall, Operations Manager of Milestone Electric & Air, gave members an in-depth look into the world of ride-alongs. As John shared, ride-alongs are a critical part of your training strategy and should be done continuously, as they verify your team’s consistency. When going on a ride-along, it’s important to use a “Commend-Recommend-Commend” approach, which is to say compliment your tech, then explain an area of improvement, and then conclude with another positive remark. It’s best to offer this feedback in a social setting, so take your tech to lunch or breakfast. During the conversation, ask your tech to evaluate his/her own performance first.

Follow-up to the ride-along is just as important. You need to set straightforward goals for your techs’ improvement. Recommendations should be clearly listed and each tech should know that there is an improvement award. This is key to keep them positive and motivated. You or your trainer should follow up each week with the tech and at the end of 60 days, conduct another ride-along to see if his/her abilities have improved due to the ride-along process.

 

Friday – Day 3

Marketing 20/20: The Right Questions to Bring Our Big Picture into Focus
Developing a winning marketing strategy isn’t easy. We hoped to clarify your key advertising questions in this session. Here are some basics you should have to succeed: A clear brand (name, logo, and message) and you must know if you have any operational deficiencies that will negatively impact your marketing dollars. If so, those should be addressed first and foremost.

Marketing budgets vary, but as a base line, it was explained that you should at least be spending 10% of revenue. You may choose to be more aggressive if you’re looking to grow aggressively. Your advertising mix must include a combination of web tactics—for example, you must have a website and you should have it optimized and consider PPC and other tools to enhance your web presence. There’s also a need to keep with some traditional marketing tactics—for example, you should have a referral program, wrapped trucks, sponsorship of local events, and do outbound calling.

The best way to truly grow your business is mass media—radio and TV. But it can also be the biggest waste if not done properly. Before buying time, you should ensure that your previous year’s sales and the population of your market are at a 1:1 ratio. If your community has 2 million people, you should be doing $2 million in sales before spending the money necessary on mass media. You should also ensure that the mass-media outlet you choose closely captures your service area. You don’t want to waste money targeting people an hour outside of it.

The main take away from this session is every marketing plan is different because every company and community is different. That’s why it’s imperative you work with your Client Success Managers, network with your fellow members, and use SGI preferred-vendor partners when deploying your marketing strategy.

StraightForward Pricing Update
During this presentation, we looked at two major pieces of work listed in your StraightForward Pricing® Guides—skylights and chimneys.  To provide some insight from the field, RSI Members Kelly Good (Good’s Roofing) and Jesse Holencik (Holencik Roofing) took the stage.

The inclusion of the chimney and skylight pages to their StraightForward Pricing® Guides added a nice boost, the two said.  It simplified the work and generated more of it.  Jesse mentioned that you should consider Velux on skylights.  In fact, they created an insert with Velux material to help sell skylights.  Kelly added that they use multiple suppliers’ books to help present skylight options.  He also had Velux come to his office to provide training.  In addition, he pointed out when selling skylights, you will need a carpenter to do inside trim work, and that must be priced accordingly.

Regarding paying their guys for selling the chimney and skylight work, Jesse prefers to pay his guys by hours.  Kelly pays his guys by the piece and subcontracts the chimney work.  Please, for more in-depth answers, review the video of this hugely insightful presentation.

3 Not Enoughs: What Happens When You Don’t Have Enough Money, People, or Work?
Assuming your company doesn’t suffer from a major operational flaw, the biggest challenges you will face fall within three categories: You don’t have enough work.  You don’t have enough people.  Or you don’t have enough money.  To address those issues, three RSI members served on a panel to provide insight: Dan Worstell from Pyramid Roofing, Dawn Gee from Bakeris Roofing, and Russ Noyes from Russ Noyes Roofing.

When seeking work, the three agreed that you should focus on providing exceptional service to each customer, making sure you’re offering them everything possible. Great service will lead to returns and referrals. They also mentioned posting flyers throughout neighborhoods, making outbound calls to past customers, and joining networking groups.

To find more people, the three discussed growing your own technicians. Hire for attitude and train them on aptitude. Be sure to have an employee-referral program and pay competitively. Recruiting should be an everyday thing. Should you be in need of money, the three men said focus on paying off debt, paying bills off early, and start a 3-month reserve when times are good, so you’ll be prepared when times get tough.

Guest Speaker: Clint Bruce
Clint Bruce was one of the most decorated Navy Athletes in the Academy’s history and one of the few service academy athletes given the opportunity to play professionally. His sense of duty motivated him to leave the NFL and become a Navy SEAL. Clint was deployed with three Platoons in direct support of Counter-Terrorism Missions and the Global War on Terror. Since leaving the Navy, Bruce has founded two companies, Trident Response Group and HoldFast, and he founded Carry the Load, a foundation created to help fallen public servants and military members. At Expo, he shared his incredible experiences and message with us all.

Guest Speaker: Walter Bond
Walter Bond, former NBA athlete, rose from being a reserve player coming off the bench to become the first rookie-free agent to start for the Dallas Mavericks. Walter’s astonishing journey provided the foundation for the principles he teaches to help empower people in their own personal journey. Today he is recognized as one of the world’s preeminent experts on personal accountability. Walter has impacted hundreds of thousands of people in his rapid rise to the top of the speaking industry. His message at Expo was gripping, memorable, and inspiring.