Industry Blogs

By Jeff Atwell, Nexstar Network NexTech Academy Coach

 

 

 

Wait, what did he just say?

I was sitting in on a management meeting at a business owner’s invitation. The information he’d been sharing with his team had, up until that moment, seemed straightforward – you know, staffing for the day, inbound calls, calls converted to demand service appointments, the usual. Then the owner tossed out a metric I’ve never heard before: lost calls for the day.

Lost calls for the day? He had my attention.

I had so many questions. Were those today’s numbers? How could there be a metric for today when the day wasn’t over yet? What was considered an acceptable loss in this category? How could the lost calls be such a large percentage, based on the booked calls? How many calls did the techs run on an average day?

The owner explained that eight of the 40 demand calls (20%) on the board were being written off for the day, with no hope of getting a technician to the call. Naturally, an attempt would be made to reschedule those calls, but the odds of a recovered and rescheduled appointment were poor.

I couldn’t wrap my head around this. How could 20% of the calls on the board just be written off, as if that was normal? I needed more information.

The owner told me it wasn’t uncommon in his business to have callbacks, warranty calls, and jobs that went over on their allotted time; these jobs all became a scheduling priority the following day. This created a domino effect that had become the status quo. The practice was so accepted that lost calls were an everyday metric to track in the managers’ meeting!

This was a vicious cyle that had grown into a problem affecting nearly 20% of this owner’s daily business. And it was all completely avoidable.

Callbacks or warranty calls (technician warranties) are the most frequent and expensive kinds of calls for any home service company. They have a profound impact on revenue and profitability. The direct cost of returning to a customer’s home is nothing compared to the lost opportunities and subsequent income of the calls you lose because you’re scheduling callbacks. Furthermore, as if they weren’t expensive enough, those lost opportunities cost a small fortune in advertising dollars spent to get them in the first place.

If this is happening with your business, it’s time to take control.

Callbacks or warranty call are usually caused by one of the three “P’s”– people, processes, or products. So what’s the solution?

Training! Yes, training. You can reduce callbacks and increase your revenue by providing your team with on-the-job technical training. Here’s how you start:

1. Perform a historical review

In the past 6-12 months, what kinds of warranty calls or callbacks have you received? Thinking in terms of people, processes, and products, what do many of those calls have in common? Make a list of traits or topics some of your callbacks might share (e.g. warranty calls, time management issues, etc.) Once you have a list, prioritize those traits or topics by impact, meaning that if you were to put forth a training effort on a few of those topics, which ones would have the most significant impact on your business?  Congratulations: you’ve just developed your first training plan.

2. Determine your approach to training the topic

What are the main things you want your employees to understand, fix, or learn? What will your team members be able to do after training that they couldn’t do before?

Once you determine the ‘what,’ you can focus on the ‘how.’ There’s no need to go it alone! Lean on your senior staff or senior technicians – the people who regularly deal with the issue you’re going to be training on. There is a particular brilliance in collaboration.

Don’t forget to use outside resources, too. Many manufacturers offer training on their products. In some cases, the local representative can come to you and help with your training efforts.

3. Develop your plan to teach the first topic

Schedule the training and don’t postpone or reschedule it. Training that never takes place doesn’t help your customers or your bottom line.

4. Keep your eye on the ball

It’s vital to monitor everyone’s progress after training to see the effects of your training initiatives. Using key performance indicators (KPIs) is generally the easiest way to see those effects. What KPIs do you track? Calls run, conversions, average ticket totals, closing rates, turn-overs, warranty calls? Whatever you track, successful training will move those KPIs in favorable directions. Paying attention to these numbers will also help you get ahead of unfavorable trends. The numbers matter. Keeping tabs on warranty calls and callbacks also provides a wealth of information and helps to highlight your team’s training needs.

Technical training may seem intimidating at first glance, but you can do it! Identifying training topics and hashing out the key takeaways will help develop technical training that will expand technician skills and the overall abilities of your team. Training will also help you move closer to eliminating those pesky warranty calls and callbacks that fill the calendar and empty your business’s coffers.

Jeff Atwell started in the plumbing trade the first business day after his high school graduation. He has more than 30 years of experience with residential and commercial service, as well as with residential new construction, and discovered a passion for teaching as an instructor at his local apprenticeship school. Jeff was the first technical coach hired to work on Nexstar Network’s NexTech Academy program. Since then, he has been working to create the best program focused on residential plumbing service. He can be reached at jeffa@nexstarnetwork.com.

If you’re not creating a continuity plan then it may be best to begin formulating an exit plan for your plumbing business.   Even if you’re not ready to permanently park your service van, it’s always handy to create a plan on how you plan to exit your business. This could include ending it all together but even taking the steps to look into selling it if your plumbing success has created a successful brand within the community.

You’ve worked so hard to build the plumbing business so why not try to profit when it’s time to make the exit? As uncomfortable as the idea is, it can be very helpful to just let it go and sell it to someone else. These tips will tell you how to do just that.

What Is The Process Of Selling My Plumbing Company

The process of selling a company is long and complicated. It can take up to a year or but you can expect it to take even more. Whether or not you’re selling a business that is not profitable, the whole process itself will be stressful. The first step is to find a buyer, which is almost always difficult to do. You will need to find a company or an individual that has the same values as yours and has the right size for your company. Sometimes companies who buy businesses will still want to keep the branding since it’s familiar. So you shouldn’t want to feel the need to sell to just anybody.

Don’t Forget About the Legality

Once you find someone or a company that would be suitable for selling your business to, you’ll then need to come to the next step which is the whole legality of selling your business.  Then you have to go through the legal process of transferring ownership of your company to the new owner.

 In order for this process to go smoothly, you will need an experienced business broker who understands how this process works and can help you with all of the steps in between. But sometimes a lawyer will have to step in as well to ensure the entire process is smooth. This could include each party having their own lawyer or the party that is making the purchase will hire one.

How to Create a Solid Exit Plan

A solid exit plan is a necessary part of any business. It ensures that the business and its employees are prepared for what could happen if the company is sold or closed down. Even if you’re going to sell your company to someone one or another company, there still needs to be an exit plan for your plumbing business.

This exit plan will need to be updated as more information is revealed about the state of the company such as when there will be a rebranding (if there is going to be), plus when the services of your plumbing business will be terminated. . When creating an exit plan, there are a number of things to consider, including:

• The type of exit you want to have
• The financial situation
• The time frame
• Who will be responsible for what tasks

While the idea of having an exit plan sounds straightforward, it can be a tad difficult as you don’t want to skip over anything necessary.

For the vast majority of businesses, the pandemic has been a major wake-up call in how businesses are run. One of the major lessons taken is how to prepare a business to survive in times of great change or crisis. 

A business continuity plan is vital for businesses of all sizes and in any sector and it’s something that you should be putting in place now. 

What is a business continuity plan? 

Business continuity is a term you’ve probably heard before, even if you don’t quite know what it means. Simply put, a business continuity plan outlines how a business will continue to provide key services at an acceptable level during a time of disruption or disaster. 

What triggers a business continuity plan can be any of a wide range of situations. It could be a natural disaster, a fire or flood in your building, data theft, the loss of key personnel, political matters or something like a pandemic. 

Who should be involved?

While it is usually the leader of a business and any outside consultants that develop the disaster recovery plan, all employees need to be aware of it and what their roles are when a business continuity plan is triggered. 

Ensure that everyone knows the plan and what to do in an emergency. Put training in place such as medical training from MyCPR Now or cybersecurity and data protection awareness from your IT company. 

Why do you need one? 

Well, do you want your business to be able to operate in the event of a disruption? Overwhelmingly, the answer should be yes. Not being able to service your customers can cause huge reputational and financial damage and could put you out of business. Many business insurance companies will not be able to provide you with insurance if you cannot show that you have a business continuity plan in place. 

What should be included?

No matter what business you’re in, or how big a company you have, the structure of your business continuity plan should concentrate on three particular areas. These are resilience, recovery and essential contingencies. 

Resilience is working to identify your business-critical systems and personnel and working to arrange these with possible disruption in mind. This can include the distribution of key personnel, data backups etc. Can key systems be accessed off-site should something happen to your premises? 

The second part of your plan should focus on how fast you can restore your key systems in the event of a disruption. 

The contingency element of your plan should put in place a number of options that deal with different potential situations. For example, what would you do if certain key managers were unavailable or a key supplier was also affected? 

Key points

A business continuity plan is important for all businesses. Even if you are a sole trader with no employees, you should think about all of the potential disruptions that could face your business and put measures and plans in place to protect your business. 

Solvent welding in a cold environment presents challenges that have to be counterbalanced. Why? Pipe and fittings take longer to soften in colder weather. The pipe is also more resistant to solvent attack, so softening it with an aggressive primer is important during cold weather.

By following certain cold-weather solvent welding instructions, and demonstrating patience, you can successfully solvent weld pipe joints in sub-zero temperatures (as low as -15°F).

We’re sharing seven tips to ensure successful solvent cemented pipe joints during the cold winter months.

1. Prefabricate as much of the piping system as possible in a warm environment.

We recommend assembling as much of the piping system as possible in a heated work environment. If you can control the temperature, it’ll make for better joints.

Any joints that must be made at the assembly work-site should be protected by some sort of temporary or portable shelter.

2. Store cement and primers in a warmer area.

Colder applications will require storing your pipe cement in a warmer environment (above 40°F). It’s important not to leave solvent cement outside in the cold for an extended period because it will take on a gel-like consistency. If the cement has gelled, we do not recommend using it. Solvent cement should remain fluid.

If you have bulk items on the jobsite, be sure to store them in a temperature-controlled area so it doesn’t come in contact with the cold.

Maybe you keep your cement and primers on your truck dashboard while you’re traveling between jobsites. In that case, if you’ve been out for a couple of hours, we recommend bringing them inside after your last service call. That way, the product can get acclimated to the warmer temperature and reach the right consistency for your next project.

3. Remove moisture from the ends of pipe and surfaces.

Before starting the solvent welding process, take time to clean off pipe ends and fittings to remove any dampness, residual water or ice. If moisture penetrates the cement, it will cause it to gel.

Of course, wet or damp conditions are sometimes unavoidable. In that case, we recommend using a solvent cement formulated to cure in damp conditions, like Oatey Rain-R-Shine, a fast-set cement designed for wet conditions.

4. Aggressively apply primer to fittings and pipe.

Particularly in colder applications, be sure to apply and aggressively work in primer. Primer must be used to create a solvent weld on PVC and CPVC pipes. Oatey Purple Primer is an NSF-listed primer for use on all schedules and classes of PVC and CPVC pipe and fittings.

To understand the importance of applying primer, it may be helpful to think of the fitting and the pipe as your skin. Your pores are coated and closed tightly; working the primer more aggressively onto the fitting and the pipe will ensure that you open up the pores. That way, you are preparing the pipe to accept the cement.

While applying primer to fittings and pipes, be sure to re-dip between each application. Once you have primed the pipe and the fitting, you have five minutes to apply cement and finish the connection. Waiting too long will negatively affect the creation of a good solvent weld.

5. Vigorously shake or stir cement before usage.

Before every use, we recommend shaking the can or stirring its contents before application. That’ll help blend in the components of the cement, making sure you get an even consistency throughout.

6. Allow a longer cure time before testing or using the system.

Cure time depends on several factors: pipe material, pipe size, ambient temperature and humidity. However, solvent cement will take longer to cure in colder temperatures. Allow enough time for the solvents to evaporate before testing the system or putting it in service.

In temperatures between 20°F to 40°F, the joint may take up to three days to fully cure for higher pressure applications. However, be sure to refer to the average joint cure times provided by the manufacturer for PVC, ABS and CPVC solvent cement. For temperatures below 20°F, we recommend contacting Oatey Technical Services for exact cure time information.

Do not attempt to speed up the cure time by applying direct heat to the joint because that could deteriorate joint strength or affect the integrity of the pipe.

However, you can create a temperature-controlled environment to accelerate the process. If you have a temporarily heated area, you may close off the openings of the dwelling to help speed the process while leaving your pipe ends open so that airflow can enter the system and help the solvents evaporate.

View our overview document for more information on all our cement offerings and their cure/set times.

7. Follow all ASTM standards and steps.

It’s important to follow all ASTM standards and steps in the solvent welding process. Be sure not to skip any when preparing the pipe — for example, choosing not to chamfer the pipe.

If you don’t chamfer the pipe or bevel the outside edge, the sharp edges can scrape the cement off the walls of the fitting, as the pipe is being inserted. This could potentially cause blockage or leak paths.

In colder temperatures, it is especially important not to skip these steps because the cold makes creating a solvent welded joint more challenging. To ensure you follow all ASTM standards and create a perfect solvent weld, avoid these five common solvent welding mistakes.

With our application tips for cold-weather solvent welding, you’re well on your way to creating long-lasting, leak-free connections this winter.

Author’s biography: Sean Comerford is a Technical Customer Service Specialist at Oatey Co. He is a third-generation tradesman with nearly 20 years of plumbing experience, including serving as the lead plumber for commercial/residential new construction, service and fire protection jobs. He holds a State of Ohio Fire Protection License for Sprinkler and Standpipe.