Question: Can you recommend an inventory control program that works well, is easy to use and not excessively expensive?

Drew Cameron; President, HVAC Sellutions & Energy Design Systems, Inc:

The short answer is no, I cannot recommend an inventory control program. I say that somewhat facetiously in that there’s no real inventory control program that would be a standalone item. You want to control inventory, which is really just a part of accounting, if you will. It’s an asset and you’re tracking the dollars of the inventory, obviously you want to know the parts and pieces that you have in stock. But you’re doing so to read inventory, which hits your balance sheet and then gets expensed to the P&L for cost purposes.

So, it’s really an accounting function. What we’re talking about is having inventory as part of your accounting program. QuickBooks has a light inventory function, but if you’re looking for full dispatch, service control, a purchase order system, inventory control, as well as warehouse inventory, then all of that is going to be a part of your accounting program in the world of HVAC. The ones that we find are the most fully integrated are Successware, Aptora, and Cargas. There are probably a few others out there but those are the ones I have experience with.

One of those programs will give you everything you need to run your business – full-blown accounting, payroll, job costing (which includes inventory), as well as the service management and dispatch side of things. Are those programs easy to use? I think any program is easy to use as you train on it more and they’re not excessively expensive. If you have it and you use the full functionality of it, the system more than pay for themselves because of the control of the inventory, as well as the purchasing. Again, there is no standalone inventory control program that I could recommend.

This is the weekly Ask the Experts free excerpt. To listen to all of this or past calls, or to see the schedule and register for future calls, click here.

What gets measured gets done!

In part five of an ongoing series on service technician training, Weldon Long explains why accountability is an important tool to drive consistent and permanent results. Plus, Gary Elekes discusses performance reviews and the experts outline the challenges and opportunities involved in acquiring another company.

All that and more, on this week’s episode of Cracking the Code!

You can’t bring 100% of your sales calls to a close. What you can do is bring 100% of your calls to a conclusion.

In this “Clip of the Week” from Cracking the Code, Weldon Long discusses the final step in the R.I.S.C. process and how to “conclude” each sales call by asking for a “yes” or “no” answer before you leave the home.

Watch the clip below, and visit EGIA.org/Show to watch the full show.

Question: What marketing plans work best for a company that is flooded with competing companies?

Gary Elekes; Founder, EPC Training:

Every marketplace is well known for being unique and tougher than any other marketplace. If I had dollar for every time I heard that from a contracting client I had, I would be flying around on Wally’s private jet right now. The fact of the matter is, every marketplace has lots of competing companies. Every marketplace has contractors that are pretty good at pricing and also contractors that are unaware or uneducated about pricing. Those companies are typically low cost and make us all look a little overpriced in our pricing presentation.

I don’t care if that’s LA, Phoenix, New York City, Orlando, or Chicago, everyone’s got lots of competition. We’ve got to quit worrying what’s going on with the competition and start worrying about what’s going on inside our company. We’ve already talked about tuck-ins, that’s one strategy. But the number one strategy is club agreements. You need fifty percent of your customer database to be on a club agreement. You need to be at no less than one thousand per million or fifteen hundred per million, club agreements within your database. This creates an optimization for profitability. You have to work at that process, it’s an internal and external process. It’s both technician training and having a club program, but it’s also having a culture established that identifies that.

The third component of that is external marketing – lead generation – to be able to go out there to find and replace customers. I think the difference is a brand promise that’s strong enough and compelling enough that customers want to choose you. When I advertise and market, I’m in the marketplace against a lot of other people and there’s a lot of static out there. It isn’t just our competition, its competition around the holidays with retailers. There’s lots of other advertisements going on. The consumer, someone actually consuming in the marketplace, has to be willing to click on your ad or read your direct mail piece or they have to be willing to listen to that radio commercial.

So compelling creative is great but your call to action also needs to be great. You have to have some unique brand promise that makes someone actually want to call you. We ultimately sell four things: we sell ourselves, we sell our company (our brand and reputation, we sell our products or services, and the fourth thing we sell is the money. You’ve got to solve that matrix with respect to your advertising campaign. At the end of the day, being competitive in the marketplace is about controlling what you do internally first, and then going out in the marketplace and being unique.

This is the weekly Ask the Experts free excerpt. To listen to all of this or past calls, or to see the schedule and register for future calls, click here.

The majority of all sales presentations end without the salesperson formally asking for the order even once.

In part four of an ongoing series on service technician training, Weldon Long introduces the final steps of the R.I.S.C. process to show you how to provide solutions and more importantly, conclude your sales presentation by securing a yes or no answer. Plus, Gary Elekes shares his approach for tracking digital conversions.

All that and more, on this week’s episode of Cracking the Code!

Customers rely on your expertise as a home services professional to solve their problems, even if they’re unaware a problem exists.

In this “Clip of the Week” from Cracking the Code, Weldon Long introduces step two of the R.I.S.C. process and how you can utilize the “investigation” stage to diagnose problems and deliver solutions.

Watch the clip below, and visit EGIA.org/Show to watch the full show.

Question: I’ve seen a huge influx of companies using subcontract workers for installs. Do you see this becoming the new norm?

Weldon Long; New York Times Bestselling Author

I have not seen a huge influx of that. I’ve seen it here and there. Maybe it just depends on the part of the country but personally, I haven’t seen a ton of it. It might be the plan of the future for the Amazons of the world and the big box stores that are looking to sell equipment and partnering with someone to install it. I guess you could look at that as a kind of subcontractor relationship.

I don’t see it as the new norm. I think there’s always going to be big players who try it because it sounds easy to 1099 somebody and just have them take care of it. It never really works out that easily. When you have people that are subcontractors, they don’t really have the passion for the customers or the passion for customer service. Obviously, they’re not going to do as great of a job.

I was having a conversation this morning with an owner of a really large company and he was talking about his company’s purpose. Their purpose is to take care of their people, provide training and professional development opportunities, take care of the customers, and make a profit. The team. The customers. Profit.

When your people know they have value and they understand the company’s purpose, they’re obviously going to give a higher level of service to the customer than some guy who’s a subcontractor who has no relationship with any type of purpose or the company. If they’re just there doing a J.O.B., you’re probably not going to get the same type of results.

In my estimation, I don’t see it becoming the new norm. I think the new norm is that the people buying equipment from the Amazon’s of the world and then Amazon outsourcing that installation to a company, which could be seen as a type of subcontractor relationship, as I mentioned. That could be something that disrupts the way we’ve been doing business for a long time.

The one exception I might make is companies that have their own people that restructure the way they compensate them. In other words, they take them off of a W2 and move them to a 1099, now that same contractor is a technically subcontractor. I’ve seen that happen here and there. But I don’t see that being a massive trend.

This is the weekly Ask the Experts free excerpt. To listen to all of this or past calls, or to see the schedule and register for future calls, click here.

Customers rely on your expertise as a home services professional to solve their problems, even if they’re unaware a problem exists.

In part three of an ongoing series on service technician training, Weldon Long introduces step two of the R.I.S.C. process and how you can utilize the “investigation” stage to diagnose problems and deliver solutions. Plus, Gary Elekes helps you understand which questions to ask during the different stages of the in-home sales journey.

All that and more, on this week’s episode of Cracking the Code!

A successful selling process begins by building a relationship of trust with your customer.

In this “Clip of the Week” from Cracking the Code, Weldon Long tells a personal story about a time where going above and beyond for a home owner resulted in a sell.

Watch the clip below, and visit EGIA.org/Show to watch the full show.

In the March 2019 Snapshot Survey, we asked contractors all about employee retention. Here’s one survey question and its results from the summary report, which is now available in its entirety to EGIA members.

Question: How long has the average technician been employed at your company?

Turnover can be disastrous for a business owner, with an estimated cost of 200% of a year’s salary for highly-skilled positions. So once you’ve acquired new talent, it’s even more vital to keep them onboard. According to the contractors who took our survey, the most common term-of-employment of technicians (37%) is between two and four years.

It’s encouraging to see that nearly half (47%) of reported technicians have been employed four or more years. Contractors also communicated similar employment durations for office workers, with the majority having worked for their respective companies for two to four years.

Here’s what an HVAC contractor from Texas answered:

“We pay 75% of employee health insurance cost, we provide life insurance, we offer optional long-term disability and dental. We have a 401k where we match up to 10%. We seem to lose employees to companies with less or no benefits but higher pay. It seems that employees are not interested in long term benefits but in more cash in their pockets immediately.”

Login to access the full research report on employee retention.

For a deep dive into recruiting and retaining talent, and other related concepts, access training materials, recommendations and education pieces in the Contracting Best Practices Library, available in your EGIA Member Dashboard.