The chairman of Higgins Coatings (John Higgins) has some great sayings, but one of his sayings that stuck with me was "Painters and customers. That's all you need."
It's a simple way of looking at the contracting business, and I didn't really understand what he meant until I left and started at First Response Maintenance Solutions.
In essence, as businesses grow, staff are hired to get the jobs done. Then staff are hired to manage those staff. Then more staff are hired to manage them, and so on. This is often called "middle and senior management".
After a period of time, margins need to increase to pay for all of the "managers", and service is often reduced because of all the layers of management confusing key values. Customers are literally paying more, and getting less.
We wanted to make sure that no matter how big our business grew, we keep the mantra "customers and painters" to continually remind us about keeping business simple, but provide the best service we can.
One way we think we do this well, which is echoed by our customers, is by utilising technology to provide efficiencies as well as service improvements.
Being a new business (established in 2017), we felt that we had the perfect opportunity to implement key IT systems that would help us deliver the service to our customers they expect, but also help our site teams have access to everything they need.
Being a maintenance builder, painter, carpenter, or any other trade service provider isn't just about turning up and getting the job done.
Generally, our customers need to know:
- what we are doing and how much it will cost
- when we will start and finish
- who is working onsite and are the police checked
- is everyone working onsite across the potential safety risks and what the controls are to eliminate them
- what were the products or colours that were used for future reference
- has the work been completed and inspected
- were there any accidents or near misses
From our previous experiences, we knew what we wanted the end to look like, so we went about reverse engineering and evaluating systems that could meet our expectations.
- We wanted to be able to have a mobile team, not limited to working in an office, that can respond quickly and get to as many projects as possible to quote, review and supervise.
- We wanted to be able to communicate effectively with our customers and provide them with the information they need when they need it.
- We wanted to limit the amount of paper we use, and also have really good records that can never be lost.
- We wanted to make sure that as we grow:
- we improve our service while reducing our pricing,
- we listen to what our customers need and react quickly
- we listen to what our teams need and react quickly to support them
We use alot of systems to achieve our goals.
We have a job management system that is central to everything we do, we have an accounting system, a document storage system, a proposal system, a marketing and customer relationship system, and a reporting/KPI system. Like I said, alot of systems for a local building maintenance business....
We have invested so they all integrate with one another so we only have to enter data once. We can access all of them on a phone or tablet, meaning anytime a customer needs something from us, we can send it straight away.
We think we are on the right track, but the only real way of knowing for sure is hearing from our customers.
Please keep a look out for First Response Maintenance Solutions on your social media and provide us with feedback on how you think we are doing.
We welcome all constructive feedback, we won't improve unless we know what needs improvement.