Recently I have experienced more frustration with companies that I do business with.

Both Ron and I had recent flights on Northwest Airlines. We both had separate and deplorable customer service experiences. Ron can tell you about his if you ask him to, I think it is even worse than mine.

Let me share with you what happened on a recent trip back from visiting a client in Minneapolis. I needed to leave a little earlier than expected to tend to some work at our Chicago office. So I called Northwest’s call center and the agent told me that if she did the flight change it would add fifty dollars to the cost of my ticket. She advised that if I went to the airport and flew standby (she assured me their were plenty of open seats) their wouldn’t be any additional charge.

Guess what happened! When I got to the airport the agent told me I still had to pay the $50 per seat. Oh, I forgot to tell you I was traveling with my significant other and soon to be wife Sandy. Now for those of you who know me I wasn’t going to the electric charge chair without a fight. So I went to talk to a supervisor who hit a bunch of buttons on a computer with no better results except a rude explanation that the phone agent stated an incorrect policy.

Simultaneously I was on the phone trying to get a hold of the agent who gave out the bad information. Again to no avail. So I paid the extra one hundred dollars for the ticket changes and the extra thirty dollars for the two bags that needed to be checked.

The ticket agent assigned Sandy and I different seats at opposite ends of the airplane and when I nicely requested for the gate agent that we be able to sit together they put us in those two seats in the last row of the plane that don’t recline. I guess they think they were punishing me for complaining. Since I travel over 200 days a year I wonder how much business they will loose from me alone in the next several years, not to mention Ron and everyone else I tell. Remember bad news travels fast!

It is no secret that Southwest Airlines will soon be serving the Minneapolis market. Much better prices and friendlier service. No charge for extra bags or switching flights. Guess who will get my business? Not honoring a promise would force me to drive an extra fifty miles in the future to another airport just not to have to fly Northwest again! In matter of fact I hope they rename the whole terminal. They only have to eliminate the name North and add the word South instead.

In these tough economic times it is important to keep or raise your level of customer service. Strengthen your customer relationships so clients fly your contracting company. Bend over backwards to keep your word, honesty and trust are huge deciding factors today. Continually ask clients what you can do to serve them better and implement reasonable suggestions. Communicate this to everyone in your organization from field to office personnel. This will separate you from the rest of the pack

And by the way if you haven’t guessed it please don’t fly Northwest Airlines, If you must, the first person that asks can have my never fly that airline miles.

Attention Contractors, Developers, and Home Owners:

Keep an eye on the blog. As soon as I get the green light, I am going to be telling you about a new service that is very, very cool and way over-due.

The service is going to eliminate many of the payment headaches contractors and suppliers suffer while giving the client far greater security and support. The service is not quite ready for full roll out. The team who has dreamed up and deployed the online tool is still beta-testing the user interface.

It’s going to be a service you’ll want to use as frequently as possible. It’s that good.

Stay tuned.

Ron

Recently, while trying to explain what my client and I had already achieved together and why we were getting ready to focus on something that didn’t appear to be a pressing need, I stumbled upon a concept that you might find helpful with your business.

What I knew, and my client was about to find out, was that despite having a six month backlog of work he didn’t have any systems in place to ensure that he would have plenty of work at the end of the six months.  He didn’t understand why it was so important to address the situation now.

After stumbling around making various points and observations, it finally dawned on me that his business was straddling two different plateaus of performance and neither where the plateaus we are gunning for.  I hopped over to the whiteboard and drew a little chart that showed the four possible stages of business.

1. The Threat Stage

2. The Stability Stage

3. The Freedom Stage

4. The Great Wealth Stage

A business will never reach the Freedom Stage while still facing serious threats. Another way of saying it is that a business must be fully stabilized before freedom is possible.

Proven systems are what bring stability and eliminate threats.

In my client’s case, we had just put the finishing touches on his operations management to reduce the odds of blown budgets and negative surprises.  So we had stabilized his operations.

What we hadn’t stabilized was his sales and marketing.  Hopefully you realize that ineffective sales and marketing systems are far more threatening to your financial health than are operations systems.

The point I’m trying to get across is that you can look at each one of the areas of your business and ask yourself “Have we put in place a system that greatly reduces our risk?”

If not, invest time to implement those systems. Working on the systems that are completely broken or missing  will pay far bigger dividends than working on systems that are already functionally okay and realistically pose minimal risk.

Food for thought.

Wishing you great success.

Ron

Good Morning All,

How about a few thoughts from the road?

I am sitting in the Houghton County Airport in Michigan’s UP.  If you ever get the chance, visit this area. It is absolutely stunning!

Kayaker’s paddling up and down the lake. Water front homes sitting along side restaurants and businesses. Hills with winding roads. Old copper mines dotting the landscape.  Amazing.

Spent a long day with my client who is headquartered here. We were both excited to see that his financial position is very, very sound. His banker must be thrilled with his balance sheet. Seeing a contractor who had actually significant wealth in the business was quite refreshing.

As usual, once I got face-to-face grilling my client on the position his business was in, the real threats were not the ones he thought they were. We had already put in place the systems needed to assure efficient field performance. He believed operations was his biggest threat. Turns out he needed to redirect his strategy and turn up the heat on his marketing and sales efforts.

He’s off and running. Back to KC.

Hope you have a great week!

Ron

A couple of months ago, I attended the annual trade show that many of my former employer’s clients go to. It was great to visit with several old friends and meet several new ones. It also brought Guy Gruenberg (Grow Consulting) and I together which is something you will be hearing more about in the near future.

Several of these individuals are avid readers of my newsletter (thank you for the support). Each mentioned he or she was surprised at the frequent focus on sales, marketing, and people management. I was surprised they were surprised. So, being the curious sort, I asked why they were surprised.

They were under the impression my only expertise was data analysis and performance review systems. That perception cracked me up but it did make sense.
The owners of my the consulting practice were SUPERIOR speakers. I mean these two gentlemen were about the best in the industry. Before starting the consulting practice, both had carved out highly successful livings traveling the country delivering seminars. Both were featured speakers at the World of Concrete for years. Both tended to focus on and speak about leadership and management.

So, being the engineer I am, it only made sense for me to slide into the data analysis and system design role while working for them. I was brought on board to balance out the team. And it worked quite well.

It also left our clients with the perception that numbers were my primary interest, focus, and skill.

That is the danger of perception. It can lead you to draw an incomplete picture of your staff’s capabilities and cause you to overlook one of the greatest resources for competitive advantage…the people who are already working for you.

Many of your workers could probably excel at several different types of tasks and in several different roles. Just because a worker is great at one role doesn’t mean he can’t be great at a completely different one.

Be careful making a final judgment on one of your employee’s skills and abilities when you have only seen him in one job. Frequently, employees are either miscast in the wrong role or they are capable of performing many roles equally well. Moving them to a new job often reveals starting new results and alters your perception of the talent you have working right under your nose.

So sad but true.

“I paid for new. It should be perfect.”

Bet you’ve heard that one more than once.

The expectation of perfect quality is a plague that’s been thrust upon commercial contractors by design teams. They got away with it for years but lo, the boomerang came back to knock them senseless. And boy are they paying for it financially.

Home owners came to their expectation of perfection all by themselves. They are paying hard earned cash for work around the house and they want to make every dime go as far as it can. They don’t understand how darn near impossible perfection is and few contractors have the backbone to tell them.

I saw this coming back in the early 90s when I was working as a design engineer at an MEP consulting firm. Unfortunately, it has come to pass.

When designers (primarily architects) pitch their services to developers and owners, they try to convince them that if the owner hires their design team, they will create comprehensive construction drawings and specifications that will force the contractor to build the building properly (i.e. perfectly). The ids have been doing this in their never-ending fight against the design-build model.

All that it has achieved is to convince owners that they DESERVE and are paying for perfection.

Naturally, the boomerang that came back to knock design teams out was when the owners starting charging them for the cost of errors and omissions (that’s the exact trend I saw developing and ran away from like someone yelled “FIRE”).

Here’s the message contractors should learn: competing on quality is almost a waste of breath. Perfection is EXPECTED. In this day and age, nobody would hire you if they thought you would deliver anything less.