Written By: David Oliva, RD Appliance Service, Corp.
Article originally published in The Retail Observer
I’m sick of being a technician and I’m sick of being a manager. I want to be an entrepreneur. I don’t want to do the work in my business, and I don’t want to organize the work in my business. I want to develop my business and take it to places that the technician I was 22 years ago couldn’t have imagined, and pull it toward a vision of what I know it can be.
To fulfill my vision of my future work, I’ve followed, among others, the guidelines that author Michael Gerber lays out in his book, The E Myth Revisited, and it’s gotten me closer to my goal than I’ve ever been.
It’s taken me beyond the three-truck plateau – that seemingly endless wasteland of daily grind mixed with tedious managerial tasks and a multitude of problems that never seem to end and don’t have ready solutions. It’s a financial desert, with a puddle here and there, but no fresh, clear-flowing spring water. It’s been the death of countless businesses that could see no end in sight and had no plan to escape the plateau, as they’ve stagnated, failed, regressed, and never joined the few that have made it beyond.
This is evidenced by the statistics: 80% of appliance repair businesses employ five people or less, and many are one- or two-person businesses. We may stretch the definition of “business” in this case, since many owners have built themselves a job but not a business. They’re literally stuck as technicians.
Gerber explains that we have three personalities: the technician, the manager, and the entrepreneur. The technician is the one who does the work, with no goal beyond completing the task. The manager organizes the work and ensures that it gets done when and how it should. The entrepreneur provides a vision and a path forward for the technician and the manager.
The plateaus happen because each of those personalities is at odds with the others. In order to harness your inner entrepreneur, you must first acknowledge the problem. Then you need to let your inner technician go, realizing that the technician isn’t going to build your business because the technician simply doesn’t want to.
The next step is for your inner manager to develop and document your existing processes. Start with the basics: what are the core roles you’re filling in your company? Technician, customer service, bookkeeper, claims admin, parts admin, etc.? Probably, you’re doing them all. Now, pick one and flesh out a detailed job description. What’s the role of the customer service rep? Once you have the job description in hand, you can begin to document each task the role is responsible for. With the tasks thoroughly documented, you can begin to list the processes by which each task should be done. What are the specific steps for taking a call? How do you book a job? How do you handle a customer who’s upset with the bill – and so on. Now, repeat for each position until you’ve written down all of the tasks for every role, and how to do each one.
Now you have a system outlined for how things get done, even if you aren’t there to do them yourself. You need to hold your people accountable – so you need a way to measure their performance. That’s the next step: to develop benchmarks and KPIs. With these in place, you’re ready to form a real team – not just a disjointed group of people who follow whatever thoughts you might have on the day, but a machine that runs smoothly and churns out results.
Finally, it’s time to wake up your inner entrepreneur and start directing the team with a vision and a mission – while setting the values and culture for your business, and bringing the company up to the level of success you know it can attain. This is what we’ve done over the past ten years, and while we’re still a small business and have plenty to accomplish, we’re finally feeling like an actual business.
