Notes from presentations by Shawn Mims and Billy Marshall

DWC Recap: Part One

We’re recapping our DWC learnings, exclusively for DWC attendees. For our first recap, we’re focusing on Shawn Mims’s The Secret to Winning is Losing and Billy Marshall’s Terminate Risk: Your New Sales Mission in an AI World.

Here are our notes.

Notes from The Secret to Winning is Losing

Shawn began his presentation by alerting us to a surprising (but scietific) fact: humans hate losing more than they like winning. It’s a survival instinct and beneficial in many areas of life, but perhaps not business. Because in business, those who take the most L’s are often the winners.

Prioritize the best. Lose the rest. 

Toward the start of his presentation, Shawn pointed out that losing clients could be a good thing when it makes room for better clients. He then pointed out that, according to ServiceTrade’s data, businesses with lower on-time delivery rates are actually growing revenue faster than those who complete more jobs on time. Why? Because they’re prioritizing the best work. 

The Guardian Fire Protection Example

Guardian Fire Protection, who earned a market defining revenue multiple in a recent transaction, is a great example of this approach. Scott Agge, the company’s CEO, allowed Shawn to share his tactics. It comes down to this: dollars over volume. Especially in regards to scheduling and dispatching.

For example, when Scott’s coordinators are scheduling, they use the estimated revenue filter to find the highest earning jobs so technician’s schedules are optimized for dollars as opposed to job volume. 

All this so that everyone in the office can work together to target specific dollars per day per office, division, or tech.

Then, business intelligence reports like this one (below) help the coordinators and managers ensure that everyone is on target.

How BlueHat Mechanical Does It

Shawn then introduced us to Karim Nice, owner of BlueHat Mechanical, who doubled his company’s revenue from 2022 to 2023. Karim’s approach is a little different, but it has a similar outcome.

He uses a better measure than margin to determine what “the best” is. Instead of just measuring gross margins which can be very misleading, he measures Gross Profit Per Labor Hour on every invoice, every contract, and every client. This helps ensure that he’s driving the most profit from every hour of labor he deploys.

As an example we can see how this particular contract (below) has a lower margin compared to some of the others, but the gross profit per hour is really high because there were a lot of parts sold under this contract.

(Note: Reach out to your account manager if you’re interested in Business Analytics. You can take advantage of our 15% off offer through June.) 

Raise prices. Lose clients. 

In the current skilled labor shortage, demand is high and supply is low. That means your business has more opportunity to raise prices. Shawn showed us this on the classic supply and demand graph:

He went back to the data to show us the trend in pricing over a two year period. 

And how companies who are charging above average prices are growing revenue faster. 

In summary: your peers are raising prices to overcome the labor shortage. 

“You need to have a hard conversation with each one of those low-priority clients. On the other side of that conversation, you might end up losing them. That is, unless they pay to stay. Give them a choice: approve the repair quotes or find a new vendor. Pay higher prices or find a new vendor. And guess what? They suffer from the same aversion to loss that we all do. They don’t want to lose you.” – Shawn 

Build more pipe. Lose more deals. 

For his final point, Shawn demonstrated how building more pipeline, giving yourself as many opportunities as possible, and losing more deals can benefit your business. 

He showed us how quote approval rate is not a good indicator of revenue growth. That’s because companies with high quote approval rates are only quoting repairs that they know they will win. When he looked at quote volume, however, he found this: 

ComforT Systems USA + SalesManager

He introduced us to Leila Rookstool, Vice President of Service at Comfort Systems USA and how she managed to streamline sales processes and boost new sales revenue across 35 independently operating branches. She did this by removing as much hassle as she could from the sales process and making it easier for everyone, from the sellers to the end-clients to the branch managers, by adopting ServiceTrade SalesManager. 

For the sellers, she has removed the hassle by making it easier to calculate pricing. Instead of piles of hand-crafted spreadsheets with buggy formulas, they just have to enter basic facility information and how many of each type of asset there are. Pricing is then calculated automatically for new service proposals. 

For their clients, it’s hassle-free with online proposals that they can sign and approve with the click of a button online. 

And for the managers, they have visibility to the entire pipeline with complete CRM capabilities.

(Interested in demoing SalesManager? Chat with your account manager. The DWC discount applies!) 

How VSC Does It

And finally, Shawn introduced us to Jeff Lewis, Vice President of Inspections at VSC. He has deployed deficiency pull-through sales processes that have helped VSC grow their revenue by 30% YOY, a massive accomplishment because VSC is a huge company with 31 branches.

Jeff focuses his team on deficiency quote volume by simplifying the critical steps in the pull-through process.

First, VSC uses the heck out of the deficiency reporting capabilities in the mobile app. As a result, their techs find more repair opportunities. Then, back in the office, the sellers are set up for success to quickly and easily turn those deficiencies into quotes with a whole library of thoughtful, standardized quote templates.

And, finally, Jeff has set up reporting so it’s easy to track the entire pipeline from top to bottom from deficiencies reported to quotes created to client approvals.

In conclusion

In the face of this massive skilled labor shortage where you have more work than you can handle, it’s more important than ever that you overcome your feelings of loss aversion, and use data to gain a competitive advantage in your market.

Notes from Terminate Risk: Your New Sales Mission in an AI World

Billy shared with us a method for determining what ideal customers value. He then talked about providing on-budget service that reduces risk for your best clients and how, in the very near future, we’ll be using AI to do so.

Here are the notes.

How the skilled labor shortage can work to your advantage

End customer demand for your services far exceeds the quantity of skilled labor to meet that demand. That can work to your advantage if you can improve the efficiency of your labor force. This means maximizing the time your technicians spend delivering valuable services and minimizing distractions from everything else.

Billy offered up three related principles for achieving this goal: maximizing planned work, minimizing demand work, and selling better customers. We then focused in on selling better customers.

How can you sell to better customers? First you need to figure out which features they value most.

Some features are more important than others in attracting, selling, and retaining the best customers.  Billy introduced us to Japanese scholar, Professor Noriaki Kano, who developed a model for predicting which features of a service lead to better sales productivity and higher customer loyalty. By determining which features of your business are attractive features, performance features, or required features, you can better understand your ideal customers and how to pitch them.

Premium customers value reliable budgeting and minimizing risk.

In the interactive portion of the presentation, we determined that premium customers are happy when your service delivers good information that establishes a reliable budget and minimizes the risk of equipment failure or poor operating performance.

Enter AI and some Terminator references…

Your mission? Terminate risk for your customers.   

“Together, we’re going to feed a massive amount of data about important customer equipment into the machine. Inspection data, deficiency data, repair data, manufacturer data, and parts data. Using this data, the machines are going to apply artificial intelligence to generate insights and summaries, a plan that you will share with the customer through your digital wrap and in the form of recommendations,  proposals, contracts, and quotes. And they will pay you for an action plan to terminate risk.” – Billy 

In Summary

Here’s the cycle: sell better customers → build a bigger backlog of planned work → build a great schedule from that planned work to maximize the return on your  skilled labor → use the profits from that optimal schedule to invest in more sales to better customers.