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Articles by Al Levi
Farewell to My PHC News Family
It’s a bittersweet moment that I must share with all of you. After 20 years of writing in trade magazines and sharing the lessons I’ve learned along the way — both as a contractor in my own family’s plumbing, heating, cooling and electrical business and then in this great second career of consulting to contractors — I will no longer be writing for them. First, I want to say how much I appreciate PHC News allowing me to reach you, the readers.
Should You Add Another Trade?
Should you add another trade? Well, that’s the second question you should be asking yourself. The first question you need to ask (and answer) is, “Are we paying attention to changing market conditions and monitoring how well our company is functioning with the trade or trades we already do?” One of my clients was debating the value of whether to add weatherization products and services to the work he already did.
Why You Should Become a Better Trainer
I had a lot of goals when I worked in my family’s plumbing, heating, cooling and electrical business, but I guarantee you, becoming a great trainer was not one of them. Until one day, I’d had enough. I was so tired of feeling like a hostage to our employees who were doing things in whatever way was convenient for them. I wanted to be able to take willing apprentices with no skills and turn them into willing techs with great skills who would do things our way.
Count Loaves of Bread, Not the Slices
Hey, I’m not in the bakery business or a supermarket owner, so what’s with the loaves of bread and slices reference? Ah, as owners, we are far and away perfectionists, so we like to get it down to every little detail. However, after a while, we can’t see the forest for the trees — oh, sorry, another analogy. The point is, when it comes to running your contracting business, you need to know the numbers you need to know if you want to be successful.
Can I Expect Techs to Sell A Lot Ethically?
Are you old enough to remember when the only thing you expected your technicians to do was to show up at a customer’s house, do only the work requested, and let you know what that was so you could send the customer a bill in the mail at the end of the month? Selling? There was no selling, only what customers said they wanted; no more, no less. Ah, the bad old days … Why bad? Because customers don’t know the systems in their homes the way your technicians do.
What is your Contracting Business’ ‘Unfair Advantage’?
Imagine you get in an elevator on a high floor of a building dressed in khakis and your logo shirt. There’s one other person in the elevator. He turns to you and asks, “Why should I use your company at my home?” You’ve got that 90-second elevator ride to give him at least three great reasons he should give you a try. Go! A good starting place is to look at your positive Google reviews. What are customers saying about your service?
Small Companies and Smart Acquisition
If you’re trying to grow your company primarily through marketing (or what I call organic marketing), you’ll be pleased to learn there’s another tried-and-true way to accelerate the growth process, especially if you have the right stuff in place. That way is to acquire other companies. In other words, you buy your way to growth. Why acquisition?
Hit the Reset on Your Business
The business you’re running today isn’t necessarily the one you need to achieve your goals. I know this is a hard pill to swallow. In fact, most people in this situation will defend the status quo, even though their business may be like a boat full of holes and rapidly sinking. If this is you, you probably need a way to release your emotional attachment to the situation.
Building Credibility and Visibility in Your Community
I once asked a great client about what he was doing to build credibility and increase his visibility in the community his company served. “We’ve sponsored a giant community carnival,” he said. “One of our many giveaways was free ice cream; we also gave folks discount coupons for our services. It was great! It was a big hit for the community, who loved our supporting them. The event benefited us as well by generating trackable lead-source quality calls that increased our revenues.
Creating Trucks that Work
The last thing you need to do in these uncertain times is stock your trucks too heavily. You don’t need to pay for excess inventory, things that get damaged or go out of warranty sitting on a shelf. Just as bad are trucks that aren’t stocked well enough to give your technicians a good chance to make an immediate sale and do the work. Always needing to chase parts is a waste of time, damaging billable hour efficiency and can lead to lost sales.
Do You Extend Services 24/7/365 to Customers?
“We’re a 24/7/365 business because we made a promise to our customers to treat them like family, and that means we’re there when they need us,” my dad said to my brothers and me as young boys. We ran calls with my dad as little boys in the middle of the night. We loved it! My dad, not so much, as he had finally gotten to bed after an exhausting day of work.
Creating an Effective Referral Network
I was waiting to meet my new client, the owner of a Chicago plumbing company, and I happened to be standing in the customer service representative area on a freezing cold day. This is what I overheard one of them saying, “I’m sorry, we don’t do heating work; just call XYZ company.” When I was conducting one-to-one consulting work, I’d make it a point to be as invisible as I could in order to look, listen and better observe what was actually going on.
Lessons Learned as a Contractor in a COVID-19 World
When COVID-19 first hit in March 2020, many of my one-to-one contractor clients had to adjust how they worked — and fast. The good news is they had operating manuals and staffing programs in place. So, it was only a matter of some tweaking of procedures and training that enabled their businesses to continue pretty well — especially compared to their competitors who lacked systems to lean on.
Reasons to Change Your Company Name, Part 2
Home » Reasons to Change Your Company Name, Part 2 7-Power Contractor Reasons to Change Your Company Name, Part 2 As I had promised at the end of Part 1, I’m going to share a sample of the letter you should send to customers announcing your company name change, plus a bunch of great tips for executing the name change the right way. This is also the same letter you will need to reformat a little to do an email blast to your customers.
Reasons to Change Your Company Name, Part 1
Home » Reasons to Change Your Company Name, Part 1 7-Power Contractor Going about a name change or rebrand in the right way can increase awareness of your brand and reduce confusion in the marketplace. What makes me an expert on when and how to change your company name or rebrand? My family business was originally in fuel oil heating (think propane heating). My dad and my uncle were always acquiring companies because urban renewal had chased our customers out of our service area.
Harder to Get Great or Stay Great?
The original location of my family’s plumbing, heating, cooling and electrical company was in Rockaway, Queens. My dad, Irving Levi, and my Uncle Morty started it out of my grandfather’s gas station. My two older brothers and I showed up to work full time in the business in the 1970s; crime in the area was rampant. People were constantly breaking into the building, so all the windows, doors and skylights had been gated or blocked off.
Mastering Dispatch from Beginning to End
One of the questions I get asked all the time by clients and customers is, “Why can’t my customer service rep also be my dispatcher?” My answer is CSRs can and often do take on that role, especially if it’s a small company. But if I ask more questions, usually I discover they’re struggling to be good with one or the other, maybe even struggling to be only OK. The reason?
Systems Freed Me Up to Help My Daughter
Every winter, my daughter Pam, her husband and my grand dogs come to visit my wife Natalie and me in Phoenix. Now I’d like to think it’s because she misses us — and she does — but it does help that she lives on the East Coast, where it gets just a little colder than here. While she and her husband are RVing across our great country (she wasn’t new to the club as she’s been RVing for years now), they still have to work. Her work is at a summer camp in the Poconos in Pennsylvania.
Will they all quit if you put in operating manuals? The short answer is, “No!” I say that because I did it decades ago at my plumbing, heating, cooling and electrical company. We were a New York City union shop, and we didn’t lose anyone. And I know this is a fear of some contractors as many prospective clients shared this fear with me. To help them, I’d share the following story: One of my many different jobs at my very busy shop was the install manager, where I ran five install crews a day.
Two Roles You Can Never Leave as an Owner
“I fired all of them,” said the Canada-based condominium developer I was helping to optimize his business. “Wow,” I said. “What happened?” The developer continued, “You said you wouldn’t work through a bunch of layers, so I fired all my vice presidents. And you know what I found out? They were keeping things from me. If I hadn’t done that, my business would have been out of working capital within six months.
How to Get Your Life Back and Have the Business You Want
“I just wish my dad was around more,” said my daughter Pam to her 7th-grade teacher. When my wife, Natalie, heard this during a parent conference, she said, “My husband is the only dad in the back of the room doing things like videoing her shows and recitals.” But when Natalie told me what Pam said, I thought to myself, “Ouch.” The reason is I thought being at every dance recital with my big camcorder was enough. My daughter saw through me, though.
Al Levi: New practices for COVID-19
There’s an ancient proverb that says, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.” I know many of you have taken steps to put additional systems and processes in place to keep customers and employees safe in the midst of this pandemic.
Al Levi: Marketing needs great testimonials
It’s not that potential customers don’t trust what you’re saying about yourself in your marketing, it’s just that … they don’t! They figure you’re just saying what you’re saying to sell them something. You do want to sell them something, and that’s OK — you’re typically there because they have a problem or a need they want addressed. The thing is, the saying, “Perception is reality” holds true here. They need to trust you first, and to do that, they need more than the words you’re saying.
Al Levi: Fleet management done right
Would you drive your personal vehicle 100,000 miles and never do an oil change? Ignore the flashing red engine light on your dashboard hoping it will go away? Continue to drive it after you dropped the front wheel into a deep pothole at 70 mph? Of course not! You would take steps to maintain and fix the vehicle as soon as possible. That’s because you are the manager of your personal fleet of one, two, three (or more) vehicles, and you know waiting will only end up costing you more in the end.
Al Levi: The goal writing is on the wall
By the time you read this, most people’s New Year’s resolutions or goals will be a distant memory, and they’ll be back to doing the same things they said they weren’t going to do. Maybe you even have a few yourself. Here’s the thing: Setting goals is easy; it’s the follow through on the plan of action that will create the change you want that’s the tough part.
Al Levi: Distance learning works
I’ll admit it. I was skeptical that distance learning could be a worthwhile experience for service contractors. I grew up during a time when distance learning meant taking correspondence courses through the mail! I’m dating myself, I know. Today, the availability of increasingly powerful web-based applications, such as GoToMeeting, Join.Me, Zoom, etc., have enabled distance learning to evolve into a highly effective way to transmit knowledge to contractors farther and faster than ever before.
Al Levi: Do what’s in the book
I’ve been lucky enough to work in a lot of different places in my travels across America. One of my favorite places to work is the Midwest. That’s because growing up a New Yorker, I appreciate straight-talking people. You know, the people who say what they mean and do what they say. And I’m pleased to say that has been my experience pretty much with every one of the business owners I have had the privilege to work with.
Al Levi: How are you judging your staff’s performance?
With every new consulting client, I begin our work by asking the following: “How are you judging your staff’s performance?” The answers are pretty much the same, and they go something like this: “We think,” “We’ve been told” or “Because I’ve been in business for a while, I know who is and isn’t performing well.” To which, my reply is: “So, you’re basing your judgment of them either doing a good job or a bad job at the work they’re hired to do based on opinion or other subjective measures.
Al Levi: Attitude versus behavior: What’s the difference?
“That Tech has a bad attitude.” “I don’t like the attitude of our bookkeeper!” “What’s wrong with the attitude of our dispatcher?” Bad attitudes are everywhere, or so it would appear. In most cases, it is based on nothing other than your opinion. An opinion, by the way, that is colored by your attitude toward others. In fact, my new favorite saying is, “I see what I believe,” not the old (and incorrect) saying, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” That’s probably always been true.
AL Levi: What if I train them and they leave?
One of the most common things I see when I begin my work with a new contracting client is the resistance to train employees. This is mainly because they’ve been burned by people they’ve trained who have then left. My bet is it’s probably happened to you, too.
AL Levi: Fix things at your company
What is finally going to fix things at your company? Well, I’m going to start with what won’t fix things at your company. Putting out a daily fire without ever focusing on fire prevention is just wrong. That’s because that same fire is bound to break out again tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow until the day you finally lock the front door of your company and say, “Goodbye!” What is going to fix things? Becoming proactive about running your company instead of letting the company run you.
Hire willing people, provide skills or pay the price
“Hire willing people and provide them the skills — as opposed to hiring spoiled, experienced people with skills and behavior problems.” This has been my mantra since I was a contractor at my own Long Island, New York plumbing, heating and cooling (now, electrical too) shop. When did I latch on to this core business philosophy? Well, it was at 2 a.m. while standing in my office one night talking to my brother, Richie.
Al Levi: Hire willing people, provide skills or pay the price
“Hire willing people and provide them the skills — as opposed to hiring spoiled, experienced people with skills and behavior problems.” This has been my mantra since I was a contractor at my own Long Island, New York plumbing, heating and cooling (now, electrical too) shop. When did I latch on to this core business philosophy? Well, it was at 2 a.m. while standing in my office one night talking to my brother, Richie.
Al Levi: Urgent versus important
Everything in business is important! Not everything in business is urgent — thank heavens! The trouble starts when all your focus is on fighting fires — dealing only with urgent items — leaving no time to focus on any important, but not urgent items. When all you’re doing is firefighting day after day, how will you ever work on the importance of fire prevention? The answer is you won’t! This is the daily struggle we face as business owners, and even more so as contractors.
Al Levi: It was working when I left!
It was working when I left!” This was the sickening, sarcastic response I’d typically get from some of my techs when I would confront them the next day following their service call that was now a callback. Remember, I came from a New York City shop and sarcasm reigned supreme. But it was not always the customer who was the problem, as my techs would like to think, saying that the customer is “crazy.” I’m sure I’m not the only one who has dealt with this — am I right?
Al Levi: The secret bonus of documenting how you do business
There are only two types of companies I’ve ever worked with in my 18 years of being a consultant to the contracting industry. The first is a company that maybe has grown to five techs and the owners are finding out that they’re stuck. That’s because the business can’t run without them, and they’ve become the choke point. Plus, they’re running out of hours in a day, days in a week and weeks in a month to get everything they need to get done. What they crave is the power of cloning.
Al Levi: Mastering the master project list
Why is it that your staff isn’t quite as excited as you are when you discuss a new project, a new process, new policy or a habit you want to change? Because they feel it’s annoying! This is especially true if you have these divine inspirations in a never-ending and never organized fashion. It’s even worse if it’s always you who is doing the proposing of a new project or putting into place a new change to the work place that they have to live with.
Al Levi: Loaves of bread, not slices
I’ll admit it. I’m not a giant fan of reading financials and management reporting. I’ll also admit that I feel I can help any business be more successful through proven and repeatable systems, but they’ll still fail if they don’t know the numbers. That’s why I make sure they’re in good hands when it comes to mastering this particular power. Financial Power is one of the 7 Power Concepts it takes to run any business, and that’s why I write and speak about it all the time.
Al Levi: 10 things to think about company culture
One of the nice things about my job is I’m usually busy. I like when I look up at the end of the day and see that the day has flown by. It usually means time well spent. And time is the most precious commodity we have as people and especially so as owners. A bunch of my time has been spent on the road, and that too is a nice way to spend time. It gives me time to think. I can think as I’m driving down the road either to or from a client.
Al Levi: It’s a drug and we’re hooked: social media world company culture
"It’s a drug and we’re hooked!” is what I said to my brother, Richie, about the fix I felt we got from doing the really big monster commercial and residential jobs for what we felt were lots of dollars. The reality is once we learned to track these jobs better and better, we realized that they tended to generate little to no profit or sometimes even a loss. Some of that was because we weren’t as good at getting paid for change orders as we thought we were.
Al Levi: Money from the scrap heap
A client called me awhile back because he wanted to know what my family did with the scrap metal from jobsites, and he wanted to know what the other companies I work with do on this matter too. The reason he was asking is he was looking to work out a procedure and a policy that would be fair and equitable to himself, the company and to all his staff. It was a really great question that I hadn’t thought about in years.
Al Levi: Behavior in the new social media world company culture
To be clear, I’m not a fan of trying to legislate too much personal behavior unless it directly affects the business. Many of the smartest people in the contracting industry have been ensnared in the court of public opinion. We’re not perfect, but since there is no privacy anymore, we’re not allowed to fall down, stumble, dust ourselves off and get up as easily as we once did.
Al Levi: Sharpening the axe before you need it company culture
It was still hot and sweaty in the midday sun just a couple of days after Labor Day in New York, and at first glance, you’d think we were out in the yard in the dead of winter. Why were we out in the yard you ask? We were laying out our truck’s snow chains because our Service Manager, Tommy, at my family’s company made us do this every year right after Labor Day. This was an annual ritual triggered by the calendar.
Al Levi: No such thing as accidental company culture
Revised to include details on the latest technologies, Valve Handbook, Third Edition, discusses design, performance, selection, operation, and application. This updated resource features a new chapter on the green technology currently employed by the valve industry, as well as an overview of the major environmental global standards that process plants are expected to meet.
Al Levi: Delivering poop sandwiches
Revised to include details on the latest technologies, Valve Handbook, Third Edition, discusses design, performance, selection, operation, and application. This updated resource features a new chapter on the green technology currently employed by the valve industry, as well as an overview of the major environmental global standards that process plants are expected to meet.
Al Levi: Doing good, ending badly
Although I believe in second chances, I believe you must go the extra mile to do it right. All of which I feel doesn’t get enough attention by mainstream media. That said, there is a time when over-reaching to do good by a company can be problematic. An example is when you choose to hire the down and out or those who have gone astray, and that’s because it can all backfire. Hear me well, I do believe in second chances, but within reason.
Al Levi: Getting employees to ‘released’
The more you do the right way in this process, the more things go better for your customers, your company and yourself. There are five steps in the Staffing Power! process I teach and they are: Recruiting: The better you do at attracting the “right stuff” willing type of potential employees, the better the result will be.
Al Levi: Practice what I preach
We’re too emotionally close to see it all. Know that I’ve been very fortunate to work with great contractors here in the U.S. and Canada. Along the way, I’ve made a very successful consulting business by doing so. But, it’s not how I pay my bills or how I put my kids through college. I left my family business not really needing to work, but choosing to work because I believed then, as I believe today, that the work I do with my fellow contractors is still important. Here’s the tough thing to admit.
Al Levi: Nepotism: Keeping it all in the family
When I was the last of the three brothers to enter the family business, my dad said to me, “I owe you an opportunity, not a guarantee.” Pretty frank, don’t you agree? At first, I was a little annoyed. That’s because I felt I had been proving myself worthy for years. After all, I had been working in the business since I was old enough to dump waste paper baskets and push a broom — all for a free lunch and $10 spending money.
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