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. Thieves crashed through our gates so many times that we made them break away so at least we could fix them rather than replace them. We hung in there, though. 

That is until one night, someone drove a truck through the side of the cinderblock wall. That was the end. We decided to sell the property and build something new on Long Island. 

Why did we stay in Queens so long? Inertia. After all, we’d been there almost 50 years by the 1990s. Want to talk about recruiting, hiring and retaining issues? We chauffeured a number of our office staff from home to work and back again — I kid you not.

Well, the decision to move came down, and my brothers and I knew we had one chance to get this right. We finally found a place more centrally located to where our client base had moved — and away from the wreckage of where we had been. 

We also heeded the great advice from our industry guru and great friend, Dan Holohan, when he suggested we use our building to showcase what we do and make it a destination other companies wanted to visit. People were blown away by our facility — including my good friend, Ellen Rohr, and her husband, Hot Rod. They had their own plumbing company in Utah at the time.

The place was spotless and bright and the envy of the industry. I stood in the doorway with Dan, admiring our great work, when he said, “Al, remember — it’s easy to be great one day. The trick is to continue to stay great, day after day.” 

Ouch!

What Dan meant was I had to make maintaining that high standard a priority, or it would deteriorate over time. And if it did, I’d need a way to get myself back on track — by leveraging my systems and checklists. I’ve always remembered this conversation and have seen it play out over and over with my clients during the past 20 years. 

Reinforcing culture

A good example of this is my great client, Jim. When I showed up at his shop, there was a lot of friction (aka butting heads) between the staff and management. We worked hard to get manuals in place with never-ending training and ensured everyone was on the same page with regular meetings. The staff was excited, and things were going great. 

Jim would actually frequently text me long after we had finished our work with things such as, “So much less stress!” “Money’s rolling in!” “I love coming to work.”

So, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, everyone started to work from home. The office staff worked from home, and technicians were remotely dispatched more frequently. In July, I got a call from Jim: “Al, it’s back to an ‘us vs. them’ culture.” 

I asked him if anything had changed. He replied, “Well, due to COVID, we had to stop meeting ….” 

I interrupted him: “Time out! Meetings are how you stay on the same page, how you figure out better, cheaper and faster ways of doing things, and how you keep the culture by working as a team. Not meeting daily, weekly and monthly per the structured meetings we put in place are the issues. I bet you can do this either with more meetings in smaller groups, socially distancing, Zoom video or even Facetime. Use any and all to get your structured meetings going again.”

The thing is, once you have manuals for everyone at the company, people need to be in a meeting once a week, reading one to two pages aloud. They read, not you, and then they discuss if there’s a better, cheaper or faster way. This is how buy-in is accomplished and how it stays in the culture. 

Anyway, Jim started the meetings back up. About three weeks later, he texted me: “Al, everyone’s back on board. Like SERVPRO says, ‘Like it never even happened.’” 

Battling inertia

Having systems and processes in place is like a clutch. If the wheels start to fall off, you can re-energize and recommit to what you know works without having to spend any extra energy reinventing the wheel.

Systems allow for that. Every time you put it back in gear, you don’t drift as much. It’s so much easier to get things going again. 

Here’s the dirty secret: Dan said you have to be great, but the truth is if you can manage to be good all the time, you’ll probably beat out all your competitors. As another one of my clients, Mike, once said to me, “Less done all the time beats spectacular once in a while.”

One last tale to share about the power of inertia (aka complacency): Another super-successful client is Mark. He negotiated with me the move from doing new construction only to residential service and installation. I called him about a year after we had done this to see how things were going. 

He said: “Great! I’m out of new construction, as you know, and I have all the techs I need.”  When we touched base about six months later, however, I found out that not one, not two, but three of his great seven techs had left, all for legitimate reasons. 

The problem was Mark had nobody in the pipeline to take their places. He had a case of inertia and stopped focusing on my Staffing Power guidelines.

Staffing power means always having apprentices ready to go in the pipeline. They earn their way from apprentice to junior tech training; as junior techs, they earn their way to go to senior tech training. 

I told Mark: “Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to go to your four remaining techs and say, ‘I recognize we’re down three guys, so I’m going to pull on-call shifts with you. Hang in there with me; I’m going to fix this. We are going to fire up the training center, we’re going to get 20 techs, and it will happen in about two years.” 

Here’s the fantastic end to this story. It was two years later, and Mark had 19 techs with more in the pipeline.

The enemy here is inertia. You think you can stop and coast, but you can’t. Running a contracting business is like pushing a rock up a hill; about when you think you can rest for a minute, it starts rolling down. You must be continually climbing. Systems make that climb a whole lot easier. It’s easy to get back on track; you’ve already done it. You don’t need to do it all by yourself anymore.