Jim Hinshaw
Just finished a Service Nation Premier Tour at Just in Time Air Conditioning and Plumbing Heros. They are in Sandwich Illinois, just west of Chicago, a town of 7500 approximately. Don’t let the small-town concept fool ya, they are doing over $6 million/year in that sleepy town. We offer our members a chance to see other members’ operations with a tour of their facility and a complete overview of how they do business. We sit in tech meetings, watch how they dispatch, get samples of all their collateral and paperwork, in one day we see how they do business.
This tour started with a dinner at a great restaurant, where 18 of us met Justin and Janeen Norquist and enjoyed catching up, we had contractors from Seattle to Pennsylvania in this group. The next morning, we started at 7:45 with a technician communication meeting. We were not sure what that was, but we soon learned it was 45 min of role-playing. Role-playing is not fun, but this time these techs had to present to someone they had never met before, and in front of 18 strangers who knew the correct response. Intimidating! They did well, even with the owners of contracting businesses watching and listening. At the end of the session the owner remarked that they saw a definite improvement by the techs, they were able to respond to real life objection (I can’t afford it, got to talk to my husband, etc.). He went on to say, this was practice, safe place, no money on the line in this room.
We moved to the warehouse to see what a service van looked like, how they were laid out a plumbing van as well as an install van. Each install van was a box truck (they purchase from Penske!) complete with a sheet metal bench, they make all their transitions on the job. They use Milwaukee Packouts for the materials, separate ones for furnace, ac, heat pump, etc. and when the install teams come back, they set their Packouts at the entrance to their parts area, and an apprentice restocks the box. It is labeled with the materials needed for each type of install, so easy to replenish.
We had the managers share how they worked with the teams on service and installs, how they did training, how the team was paid (some sort of performance pay in most cases), how they handled after hours (restricted to emergency calls only), how they paid after hours and who was on standby. The dispatcher controlled her board, connecting up the correct tech to the job as much as possible. We had the chance to talk to installers, they had the ability to do some installs in 4-6 hours, if it was a rush season due to weather, sometimes they could get two installs done same day.
Justin and Janeen shared all their collateral freely, samples of flyers for IAQ, maintenance and lots of handouts for the service techs.
They had an interesting concept on dispatch. The dispatcher owns that board. No one is allowed to move a tech unless they have shared the reason with the dispatcher, she is responsible for that board and successfully helping homeowners with HVAC and plumbing problems. Not even the owner!
At the end of the day, we sat in the conference room and went around the table and shared “something good”. It could be something personal or about the tour or about the business, just anything good. Everyone got to share, in fact that was a high point on the tour, the first time I saw that. I should go ahead and take credit for that amazing idea, but it was actually Janeen! My plan is to use that as a closing session on all the next tours.
Thanks for listening, we’ll talk later.