By David Crary  

It may seem counterintuitive to think about the quality of your workplace environment for your green industry business, mainly because unlike so many other businesses, most of your employees are out in the community 95% of their workday. This can present a real challenge when it comes to boosting employee morale. How do you let your workers know that their work is appreciated and that their concerns are being heard if you only have 15 minutes a day in the shop with them? I run into the same problem with my company, HindSite Software, because our schedules are all different and I am frequently out of town with customers.

By David Crary  

According to Walter Isaacson’s excellent biography of Steve Jobs, Jobs was not exactly the world’s friendliest boss. As recounted in the book, Jobs once gathered the team responsible for MobileMe, a cloud-based solution that, when introduced, was panned as an unfinished product. To address the problem, Jobs gathered the entire MobileMe team in Apple’s auditorium and asked “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” After hearing the responses, he asked “Then why the F doesn’t it do that?” Then, he fired the MobileMe boss on the spot. 

Firing people in one of the worst job hats an owner of a field service business must wear.  It is an uncomfortable process but at times must be done for the greater good of the company.  So you have decided to fire someone…now how should you do it?

It’s Halloween!  You get to dress up as whatever you want!  You get to carve pumpkins and enjoy delicious things like pumpkin seeds and pumpkin pies!  You get to take your kids trick-or-treating and then eat their candy after their sugar comas hit!

And this is all awesome, don’t get me wrong!  But what are you doing at work for the holiday?  Did you know that holidays can be a great time to boost you field service management company's morale?

Our fearless leader, David Crary, sat down last month with Ruth King of turnonmyfinancialightbulb.com and Mike Ratchford, an expert in the marketing field.  The three did a program focused on marketing touch points (you can read other posts about this session on our blog, or check out the entire program here). 

This trick may not be so useful for the field service management system itself, but it is very important for the people behind the system.  The trick is to eat a healthy, full balanced breakfast!

These blog posts normally aren’t for personal stories to be shared, but today calls for a special exception.

The title basically says it all.  You, as an owner, balance many hats in your company.  One of those includes staying up to date with current ideas.  How will your business thrive and improve in the future?  We don’t doubt that you don’t know how to manage your team, but there is always room for improvement.

Okay so maybe his intentions for the quote weren’t aimed towards the field service industry, but the quote does apply so bear with me:

We have all been the “Mr. Fix-Its” around our homes at least once in our lives.  Sometimes the jobs are finished, and it just turns out perfect.  Other times we simply shrug our shoulders and say, “good enough.”  If you are fine with just doing a good enough job on your own home, then good for you!  But what if it’s a person you are paying to work on your home?  Would you want them to just shrug their shoulders and say “good enough”?  We didn’t think so.  And we can bet your customers wouldn’t appreciate it either.