This Week In Review

Reminder, I do not live in a vacuum. Along with growing a business, I have a wife to take care of, a baby on the way in January, Holidays coming up, church commitments, and a funeral to attend this week. Not trying to brag and say I am great at handling things or complain and say my life is hard. Just a reminder that all these high performing operators we see online juggle being great business owners with having personal lives and family as well. I am not the greatest of all time by any means but here are some tips that have helped me.

One of the most important skills a business owner needs is the ability to make decisions quickly. We don’t have time to sit around and mull over the pros and cons of every decision whether it’s big or small. Make decisions quickly and live with the consequences.

Two months ago, we hired a new technician that immediately started having issues with attendance. We tried to work with him and be understanding that he was having some bad luck in life. We did not stick our strategy of “hire slow, fire fast” and he strung us along for 2 months and missed almost 50% of his scheduled days. We let him go yesterday and it is a weight off our shoulders.

This summer we had a really talented sales rep that wanted to grow with the company. We structured a deal where he and his sales team would work for us for the next three years and over that time he would earn equity. We had a meeting set up with our attorney to write up the agreement and get the ball rolling. He backed out last minute and went another direction. It’s fine. We don’t put all our eggs in one basket and we did not bet the farm on this deal powering our business. We evaluated the situation and pivoted our plans for next summer.

Another technician was found bashing our company on his personal Facebook. We are not sure why this is happening. He was our worst performing technician and even though we had worked with him a lot on improving his service, he still did not see our vision didn’t understand the way we operate. Luckily, we have technicians from other companies all over our service area asking to be hired by us. We reached out, did some interviews, and had a new tech hired and the old tech let go within a few days.

On a far more unfortunate note, 2 weeks ago we received a call that one of our office staff had passed away over the weekend. This is not something we had ever planned on happening and did not have a plan in place. We made sure her family was taken care of and made sure her kids were in a safe spot. We rolled with the punches and let the whole team know immediately. Out other office person got a day off and worked from home the rest of the week.

We quickly decided how to move forward and did so without skipping a beat. Customers didn’t know anything had happened. They still received great customer service and our team knew that we cared about them and do everything we can to take care of them.

Life doesn’t wait for anyone. Business owners are no exception.

Make decisions quickly. If you make the right decisions, business will move along swiftly and smoothly. If you make the wrong decisions, and you will, take full responsibility and be accountable for the mistakes. Then make better decisions moving forward and keep working hard.

Chris Hoffman with Hoffman Brothers tweeted that his company makes decisions 100% fast and 70% right. This means they move quickly and try to be right as often as possible but they would rather be wrong quickly than correct slowly because so many decisions are time sensitive. Read that tweet here!

Jeff Bezos works similarly. He claims to make decisions when he has 70% of the information he needs to be 100% certain of his conclusion. Ideally, we could all wait until we had 100% of the information in front of us before we said yes or no to anything. That’s not a reality. We may often never have 100% of the information we need to be certain of an outcome. When the facts are laid out and you have the majority of the information needed, pull the trigger. You can always pivot and make tweaks to your plan as you go but inaction will keep you right where you are.

This same concept applies to those of you who are not yet business owners.

If you want to start a business but not you are not sure if now is the time or not, weigh out your options and say yes or no. There will never be a perfect a time. You can either start now, later, or never but you need to choose. I am biased but I recommend starting a pest control company.

Pest Control News This Week

Service businesses finding rising car prices to be a big challenge in growing. Many companies will only buy vehicles if needed. What is your company doing to battle high prices?

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I’ll catch you next week my friends.