Just a quick heads up, we’ve released two new certificates in Powered Now:
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Legionella Risk Assessment
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Fire Alarm Certificate (G6)
These two additional certificates pushes the total to 18 now available in Powered Now. We are on track to deliver all major forms and certificates. If you would like to request a missing certificate please complete our poll.
To access these new Forms & Certificates please go to Settings > Forms & Certificates where you can enable or disable.
Currently available Forms and Certificates
Gas & Plumbing:
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Gas Breakdown / Service Record
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Gas Service / Maintenance Checklist
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Domestic Gas Safety Record
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Central Heating Commissioning Certificate
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Gas Testing and Purging Certificate
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Gas Warning Advice Notice
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General Installation / Commission and Decommission
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Commercial Catering Inspection record
Electrical:
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Electrical Danger Notice
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Portable Appliance Testing Report (PAT)
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Domestic Electrical Installation
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Electrical Installation Condition Certificate
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Lighting Completion Certificate
Other Forms:
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Measurement Form
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Legionella Risk Assessment
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Fire Alarm Inspection and Servicing Certificate (G6)
Seeing things your customer’s way is one of the keys to succeed in business. The following article suggests 6 key ways that can help you set yourself apart by understanding your customers better.
Happy customers are a pleasure to deal with. Happy customers will recommend you to their friends and family. Happy customers will quickly accept your quotes and will pay on time. What’s not to like?
Of course, this perfect world may only exist in my imagination, but how can we get as close to it as possible? This article suggests some ways to think about how to make your customers happy, outside of the obvious points of doing a great job and charging a fair price.
Set customer expectations correctly
A few years ago the expression “sticker shock” came into use in America. It came from car sales where there had been a big and unexpected rise in prices. The point is this. Whenever we start thinking about buying something, we have a rough price in mind. We experience a shock if the price quoted doesn’t match up to what we had in our heads.
Many residential customers will have a wrong expectation of what a new heating system or rewiring project may cost. It’s our job to guide them into the right ball park before we send the quote to them, so they won’t experience “sticker shock”. It also means that if they aren’t prepared to pay the price needed for a quality job, we can both save each other’s time before anyone invests more time.
Matthew Stevenson of The Landscape Company puts it this way: “I always tell customers that we won’t be the cheapest, but we will be the best value.”
No one likes a surprise and if they get one, they tend to react badly. Trying to set expectations correctly can avoid this pitfall.
Get your quotes out quickly
A while ago my company, Powered Now, conducted a survey of over 1,000 home owners. One of the questions was about getting quotes from trades companies. This turned out to be a major frustration for the typical homeowner. Ideally, they would like several quotes to compare. In practise, they often found it hard to get one.
That’s why there is such a benefit in turning quotes around quickly. Doing so demonstrates your efficiency and putting a time limit on acceptance helps you to beat the guys that are still looking up the parts.
If you are busy, you can always negotiate on the start date. Being straight with the customer helps to build trust. Being busy suggests that you are good because you are in hot demand. It all helps the relationship with the customer and makes them more reasonable when you start doing the job.
Be professional in the little things
We recently employed some decorators. They were good. They came when they said they would. They did a professional job. They charged a reasonable price. But we will never use them again. Why not? They were a bit too fresh with my wife and she felt uncomfortable.
When you do a residential job, you are invading your customers most personal territory. That’s why making sure you leave the toilet clean, take off dirty shoes, clean up and treat customers and their families with total respect is so important. Failing to do this can often explain the apparently inexplicable behaviour of customers. That’s what happened in our case as we have ignored every contact we have received from those decorators.
Do what you say
You said that you would start on Tuesday. You didn’t turn up and the next time you contacted the customer they were fine about it. So that’s OK? I’m afraid not. Lots of people dislike confrontation but every time you say one thing and do another you undermine that most precious commodity – trust. Undermine this enough and they won’t trust you at all. You will then wonder why they seem uncooperative and don’t believe anything you say.
My sister recently had a new boiler fitted. She had asked for a particular model and the installer said they didn’t normally supply that one. Under pressure they said they could. When the job was completed she noticed that the wrong model was installed. Emails pointing this out went unanswered. That was until she said she was getting someone else to rip out his boiler and replace it with the right one. Was this all deliberate? It’s hard to think that it was a mistake. The installer in question is going to end up with a second hand boiler and will have done two installs and one uninstall to be paid once. He would have been better off saying he didn’t want the job in the first place.
A while ago I had a big job done on my drive and parking area along with some walling. The job kept expanding and I accepted nearly all of the quotes for additional work. They told me that the job was the biggest the company had ever done for a residential client. I paid fully and on time.
When they finished I asked if they could give me a quick hand-drawn diagram of where the utilities ran under the drive and they agreed. It’s never been supplied. Two years later there was a bit of a problem with a small part of the job. They denied they had done the work involved.
I now hate this company and take every opportunity I can to bad mouth them. Living in a smallish town that matters. If it was more significant I would have sued them. Why? They didn’t keep their word to me and then treated me as a mug.
Avoid the unreasonable
Every so often you will come across customers who are truly unreasonable. Fortunately it’s not too common but it does happen from time to time. Incidentally, if you seem to come across customers like this frequently, you need to take a long hard look at yourself. Then consider the points in this article carefully because your experiences may suggest that some changes are needed. Virtually every customer will become unreasonable if they feel they are not being treated right.
What to do with the unreasonable customer? The answer is to run a mile. If you haven’t yet started the job, make your excuses and drop out. If you have, try to resolve whatever dispute has arisen and get away as fast as possible. The time and emotional energy consumed by standing up for your rights, unless it threatens your business, is not worth it. The truly unreasonable customer will not only refuse to pay, they will also complain to trading standards. In the worst case they will sue you. It can be a world of pain.
If you work with too many unreasonable customers this can cause endless problems. It’s all too easy to start feeling that everyone is against you. The danger then is that you can dismiss valid complaints. It’s a dangerous path.
Respond professionally to complaints
We all make mistakes and sometimes that’s likely to happen in your business. I always accept that people make mistakes and it doesn’t upset me when it happens. What does upset me is if the person responsible doesn’t pull out all the stops to fix the problem. I think that’s how most customers feel.
This means that when remedial work is required, it shouldn’t be fitted in when there is a lull in workload. Rather it should be a priority. There is actually a big benefit to this. Research has shown that when customers who experience problems and have them fixed to their satisfaction, they become more loyal than customers whose job went smoothly. That’s because they know from experience that you will stand behind your work. It engenders more trust than mere talk can ever produce.
An easy life
I’ve said some hard things in this article but my intention wasn’t to offend. Some of us are naturally empathetic and will adopt many of the approaches suggested here instinctively. This article will mostly be for those that don’t have this advantage.
A lack of empathy with customers can explain lots of difficulties in business life. My intention is that there might be some useful thoughts here to help smooth the path.
Competing on price is one of the easiest ways to make you poorer. That statement may seem strange so this articles will explain how 5 tips on smart pricing can combat this problem.
Pricing is the most critical aspect of running your installer business, yet it’s often the worst understood. Competing on price tends to be the first strategy that people new to business adopt. As a result, under-charging is one of the most common causes of failure. This doesn’t mean that you can charge what you like. It simply means that price shouldn’t be the main reason that you win business. Better than that, smart pricing can be a key strategy to make you more successful. Hopefully, these tips can help.
Quote for all business
There are different ways that you can run your business. The first is simply charging by the hour. This means there is no risk to you. However long the job takes you get paid a reasonable amount. The problem is that customers don’t like it as they don’t know how much they will pay.
If you aren’t particularly ambitious and your existing customers already trust you, this is a safe way to run your business. It’s also the only way to survive if you are very bad at estimating. However charging by the hour means that you will never get rich and the rest of this article may not be of much use to you.
Quoting up front gives you the opportunity to make a much greater margin albeit with greater risk. This is because customers will rarely know what the job will involve as well as you do. They won’t have a feel for how long things will take so they will focus on the cost compared to the benefit. This switches them to thinking about value rather than cost. That’s in comparison with a rate per hour which everyone understands and about which everyone has an opinion.
Compete on value not price
It’s sometimes hard to believe, but most people don’t buy on cost, they buy on value. That’s why the roads are full of BMWs. The cheapest new car in the UK is the Dacia Sandero, which costs around six thousand pounds. But it’s not the only car you see on the road. It’s not even in the top ten.
Of course, it’s possible to compete on price by paying yourself (and any staff you have) a low salary. In addition you can cut corners on the job. The first approach means immediate poverty. The second makes you poor later. You will also never get recommendations by word of mouth so you will be competing on price for ever. After drowning in a sea of unpaid bills and investigations from trading standards most people understand the problems with this approach.
The alternative, competing on value, is about explaining and demonstrating that you will do a quality job. Mark Goodchild of Electric-call.net explains it as follows: “The aim is always to do a quality job and be highly responsive to the customer. In the last 12 months we haven’t received a single complaint. However, don’t try to compete on price as you can’t do that at the same time as providing a great service”. Matthew Stevenson of The Landscape Company agrees: “I always tell customers that we won’t be the cheapest, but we will be the best value”.
People will pay more if they feel that they will get a quality job. And remember, every interaction that they have with your company will add or subtract from their view of whether that’s what you will deliver. It’s why uniforms, smart vans, tidy appearance, being totally professional with prospects and producing great looking quotes can all help to establish that feeling. Qualifications, membership of trade associations, customer testimonials plus before and after pictures of previous work can all help too. The Landscape Company’s site at thelandscapecompany.org.uk is a good example of how to do this right.
Another approach is to provide a service level that nobody else provides. One installer I know responds to emergency call outs within one hour, 24×7 and however small the job is. This is their way of generating new work as customers immediately start trusting them. Delivering service like this builds confidence. Often an installation with a problem needing a callout is an installation that needs a lot more work.
In fact, some companies are so against competing on price that they won’t even quote if they are in competition with anyone else. You do need a steady stream of leads to be able to work this way.
Understand and set expectations
An old colleague told me that the answer to the question “How much will it cost?” was “How much have you got?”
That isn’t a question that you can actually ask but it does illustrate a point. If you are doing a job in a large property (or a commercial property) where only the highest standards have been accepted in the past, you mustn’t be surprised if only the best will do. And that costs money which means that you need to price accordingly.
Most people will have an expectation about quality of work, but your customers will also have an expectation on price. Surprises kill sales, which is why it is important to make sure that your prospect is thinking in the right ball park before they get your quote. Failing to set expectations can lead your customer to angrily reject your proposal, then inexplicably sign up with a competitor who is charging even more.
Both understanding and setting expectations is key to winning a job and then completing it profitably.
Only engage in sensible competition
You can only use competition on price as a strategy if you have a cost advantage over competitors. However, it’s hard to see where that would apply for normal installers. Big supermarkets have a price advantage by squeezing their suppliers until the pips squeak, but I doubt that any of us have this sort of power. That’s why we shouldn’t compete on price.
Estimating accurately is the key to competing while retaining a decent margin. This is because it enables you to confidently know how far you can go. The way that you can improve your skill at estimating is by reviewing each completed job and seeing what it actually cost you versus your original estimate. That’s hard work but it is key to success.
Your pricing cannot be hopelessly out of line with competition but you should always walk away if it’s getting silly and don’t aim to be the cheapest unless the competition is Rolls Royce.
Avoid price-driven customers
Very often, customers who are obsessed by price are the most difficult customers too. If they are super keen on a “deal” they are often unreasonable about other things. They see the price of everything but the value of nothing. They probably drive a Dacia Sandero. It’s best to let your competitors have them.
Maximising return
Think of things this way. How many times have you completed a job for a grateful customer who would have been happy to pay more? That’s called leaving money on the table. We’re not talking about ripping people off here, we are talking about sharing the value that your great work generates in a fair way.
Getting pricing right is the key to getting the most out of your business and generating the cash to enable it to grow. Best of luck with your endeavours.
Our world has been transformed by technology with a vast array of different uses. But when a new technology arrives it often takes some time for the world to figure out the applications that are acceptable as well as deciding that some are unacceptable. This article looks at the ability to track individuals and vehicles. This is something that smartphones have made particularly easy so he looks at how these should be handled in the installation business.
The progress of technology
Technology has gone from strength to strength in the last few years, but this isn’t a new phenomenon. Aqueducts, which the Romans were famous for, is a form of technology as is the printing press. That latter innovation revolutionised the world as it made it so much easier to record and then widely transmit knowledge.
The new kid on the block is possibly more revolutionary than anything that has come before. That’s because smartphones are the fastest adopted technology in the world’s history. They have gone from first being introduced in the common form of a large touch screen with no keyboard in 2007. (That was with the introduction of the iPhone). Then in just ten years they have gone to being owned by billions of people around the planet.
There are many impacts from smartphones such as the ability for a president to tweet their thoughts to their followers at any time of day or night; now most of the world’s knowledge is available at any time and on the move; they have brought some powerful companies to their knees while raising others from nowhere. Alongside, the smartphone has created a host of new billionaires.
Big brother is alive and well
“It may no longer be an exaggeration to say that big brother is watching” says the Stanford University Law web site. Carnegie Mellon University went even further when it showed how much can be learned about a person’s life just from their Twitter feed. Not everyone uses Twitter but Facebook also makes a lot more information available than we might imagine.
What’s even less well known is that it’s been possible to track mobile phones for years, even before GPS capability was added. Mobile phone companies have always been able to “triangulate” movements of phones using multiple phone towers. In fact, if you ever send a text, send an email, use a payment card, carry a phone in your pocket, post on Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat, you are often giving the game away about what you are doing. Judging by the billions of people that do these things, most don’t care.
You can argue that this is all very intrusive. There is also an argument that only people that are up to no good really worry about being tracked.
Tracking using smartphones
Smartphones are now cheap and ubiquitous and it’s not far off the truth to say that everyone has one. Since a GPS and data connection has been added, tracking is much more accurate and apps can do the tracking as well as the mobile phone companies.
As was discussed earlier, this isn’t entirely new. However, none of it was easy in the past. The biggest application came from law enforcement tracking people’s movements. That tended to be in connection with serious crimes.
Virtually all technology is neutral, but the way it’s used can be either good and bad.
Nuclear power is a good example. The sun, which we can’t live without, is nuclear powered as its light and heat is the result of continuous nuclear fusion. Nuclear power may be the means that can eventually take us to inhabitable planets. Meantime, it provides the capability for the human race to wipe itself out. To illustrate the point, some nations have been rattling their sabres at one another threatening nuclear destruction even in the last year.
The smartphone is under intense scrutiny for its involvement in dating (early research suggests it has had a mostly good impact) through grooming (bad) and influencing elections improperly (also bad).
Tracking individuals
It’s necessary to keep an open mind when it comes to the application of tracking to individuals. Like other technologies, there can be good and bad applications.
Both myself and my business partner travel a lot, exacerbated by the fact we live over one hundred miles apart. We get together pretty frequently and the “Find friends” on our iPhones has saved us lots of texts and time. It also saves lots of texting and phone calls with my wife as well as eliminating worries.
Let me give one simple and fairly mundane use of this tracking. My business partner tries to have a fresh cup of tea ready on the table for the moment his wife walks in the door after visiting their grandchildren.
There are also now a range of ways of protecting children with a mobile phone. For instance, parents can “ring fence” an area and get an alarm if their child wanders beyond the limits. It’s also possible to establish your innocence of a crime if you can prove from tracking that you were nowhere near at the time. Facebook has recently added a feature that helps in the case of a terrorist attack or other disaster like a fire or earthquake. There’s good as well as bad.
The case against
Apart from not wanting to be caught doing something that we shouldn’t, the case against tracking individuals pretty much comes down to the loss of privacy. Extreme privacy advocates argue that all personal information should be protected, particularly as an authoritarian government could abuse it. There is a more pragmatic view that suggests that there should be certain controls on personal information but that an authoritarian government would rapidly remove protections once it was in power anyway. Just look at Russia.
Business benefits
Tracking vans and lorries has been around for some years but it has always been very expensive. Now that everyone has a smartphone with GPS, there is a lot of potential for low cost replacements.
Software from my company, Powered Now, enables companies to deploy solutions that let individuals within the business to be tracked. Of course, permission has to be given first and we are not the only people able to supply this type of technology.
There are many ways that it can be used to simplify administration, eliminate paperwork and improve efficiency.
One way to cut down drastically on administration effort is by automatically booking people into and out of jobs based on their arrival and departure from the job. While things like lunch breaks and trips to the builder’s merchants must be considered, this offers the opportunity to do precise time-based billing (or tracking actual cost when the job is fixed price) based on precise numbers without the hassle of timesheets. That’s because time and location stamping can provide an error-free record all with no manual intervention.
When the real-time location of staff is known, this greatly increases the efficiency of responding to emergencies and call-outs. There is no need to ring round. The nearest people and the time that will be taken to respond can be determined electronically.
With a system that shows all jobs on a map, it is just a small step further to be able to minimise driving between jobs. Driving time is dead time so this can help to improve profitability.
The last obvious benefit is making sure that staff and vehicles are acting responsibly wherever that are. The mere fact that colleagues know that they are being tracked is most likely to eliminate poor behaviour. As is well known, the certainty of being caught is the biggest deterrent of all.
The tracking touchstone
Owners of installer businesses can get some major benefits using tracking. You can make sure that staff are where they are supposed to be. You can confirm that vans are being used correctly. If you do a high proportion of callouts, you can use resources much more efficiently. What’s not to like?
Whats new in Powered Now – June 2019
We are delighted to announce a huge update to Powered Now, our latest version (7.9) comes with some fantastic new features, some improvements to old features and a bunch of bug fixes!
7 New Forms / Certificates
The measurement form is perfect for anyone that, well, measures something! It’s a really quick way to capture details while you are on a job. This form can then be sent on to engineers, your customers or just filed against a project for later. You can also change what it is your measuring in the settings. Its the most versatile form we have created so far.
For Gas Engineers we have three new certificates including the Central Heating Commissioning Certificate, Gas Testing and Purging Certificate and a very handy General Installation / Commission / Decommission Certificate. Thats a lot of certificates and when you consider we already have some of the most useful ones, there is probably a cert that works for every job you are doing.
However its not just Gas Engineers that get all the love, Electricians will also be happy there are a bunch of new certs just for you. This new release includes a Electrical Danger Notice, Portable Appliance Testing Certificate (PAT) and the Lighting Completion Certificate.
Thats a lot of new certificates, however we are not stopping, we have a bunch more coming down the pipeline. If you want to help influence which cert we do next just head over to our survey and have your say.
Improvements
In this release we have a major improvement to the way you can capture expenses and supplier invoices. We call it ‘quick capture’, its a way of adding a large number of individual items without the headache of going through every single step. You can also record milage and set a price, Powered Now will do the maths and automatically add the details.
We have also hugely improved the search feature within Powered Now, give it a go!
We also have a bunch of bug fixes, if you have reported something to us over the past few weeks its probably fixed.
See a quick overview below.
Benjamin James Dyer 