What if Operations is Your Weakness?
If you are in the SPF business and you are not an expert at operations and you don’t spend the majority of your time in operations, then you definitely need to have a strong operations person close to the business.
You need someone that you respect, someone that you can trust, someone that you can count on, to oversee and run operations because operations is where the rubber meets the road.
This is where we serve our customers, this is where we actually get to implement our service, or implement our product.
In the case of spray foam insulation, this is where we go in and use our rigs to spray foam into attics, to spray foam into commercial buildings and upgrade building envelopes.
The business revolves around this component of the organization, so you have to make sure that you have somebody strong overseeing operations.
This operations manager may have one rig or multiple rigs that report directly to them.
They should be intimately familiar
- with the equipment
- with the crews
- with how the rigs operate
- with the cleanup process
- with the maintenance procedures for all the equipment
- with the maintenance schedule
They have to oversee and manage how these rigs operate, make sure that the rigs stay in good working condition because if the rigs are down the business is at risk for not making money.
The operations manager is responsible for the integrity of the equipment and the integrity of the crews.
How does an operations manager deal with absenteeism?
How do they deal with worker callouts?
How do they deal with workers that show up late?
Dishonesty?
Workers fighting with each other?
All these issues should be dealt with at the operations manager level, this is the best place to deal with it.
You may have to bring in other managers from time to time, but the operations manager has to understand what’s happening in the operations component of the business:
- what’s happening with the rig’s
- what’s happening with the crews
- what’s happening with the job board
- are we getting all the jobs scheduled properly
- are we getting our clients served in a timely manner
The operations managers should know your top 10 or 20 clients, those customers that bring you the most business throughout the year because we want to make sure that our crews understand that our best customers, those that continuously do business with us over and over again, get that little “extra”.
We are going to go that extra mile for them, we are going to make sure that these customers understand that they are special and make sure that we don’t miss a beat when it comes to them.
Of course, we want to treat everyone with respect, and we want to “WOW” all of our customers with our service to develop and earn more best customers, but there should always be a special effort when it comes to our current best customers.
Operations is how we serve our customers, and we want to make sure that the person organizing and running those operations has a complete understanding of how the business should run and specifically how the operations component of the business runs on a day-to-day basis. This brings us full circle, if you are not an expert on SPF operations then you really need someone in your corner, you need someone on your side that is an expert at the operations side of the business.
