S01E19 - The Call Center Conundrum: Choosing Family Over Business
Transcript
Welcome to Moose Tales. I'm Jon with Two Moose Home Inspections, and I have some short home inspection topics that I've been grappling with. So, let's dive right in.
Why do I operate my business the way that I do? Nobody's ever asked me that question, but I ask myself that question from time to time. And the reason why is because there are things in my life that I value more than other things. Money's great. A successful business is great.
But what's more important to me is family time with my wife, time with my kid, time with my soon to be kids. Basically, my family is significantly more important than business. That's all there is to it. That's basically this entire pod in a nutshell. The only thing that truly matters is family. So how did we get to this point?
Well, I was at dinner with my wife, and I got five phone calls. All these phone calls where, hey, I'd like to book an inspection. Hey, can I book an inspection? I'd like to book an inspection. I was at dinner with my wife, and I wasn't at dinner with my wife. I was on the phone. I was taking care of business.
I was making sure that we had more money coming in. I was making sure we had more inspections. Does making sure that, you know, it doesn't matter what I was making sure I was putting the business in front of my family. And it was that evening that I said, this needs to stop. This is not the type of life that I want to have.
This is not the type of relationship that I want to have. And so, the very next day I started researching, and then by the end of that week, I had a call center in place for my business.
a call center. Seriously, are you crazy? John, your business is too small for a call center. Why are you spending all this money on a call center? Don't you know that if you personally answered the phone, your close rate would be so much better? You can be the best superstar salesperson that anybody has ever had for your business.
And the answer is, Yeah, I totally could be. But you know what? I value more time with my wife, time with my family. So, what does this call center do while they answer all my phone calls? They set up all of my scheduling. They do everything that I need them to do.
and that allows me to step back from my business and let somebody else take care of the things that I personally do not want to take care of.
with that being said, are they the best closers? No. Are they the best? Understanding my business? No. Are they the best employees that you've ever had? No. But what they are is something that allows me to live my life the way that I want. And they do a good job.
They do a very good job. If I wanted to hire a salesperson, I wanted to get them to follow this whole sales funnel for how we're going to get people from making first contact with our business to actually buying our product. Yeah, I could eventually hire a superstar, and that superstar is going to just make sale after sale and really bring a lot to our business.
But what amount of effort does it take to train that person? Because I'm willing to spend my free time to improve myself. But are the people that I hire, are they willing to improve themselves in their free time? And the answer is probably not. And also, definitely not. No. And so I want a team that I don't have to worry about hiring.
I don't want to have to worry about training. I don't want to have to worry about scheduling. I don't want to have to worry about any of that stuff. And I surely don't want to worry about phone calls that are coming in. So, my call center, do we have problems from time to time? Definitely. They're human. We're human and we're interacting with humans.
There's always going to be some inconsistency. But I have to say,
I could not run my business as effectively as I do without them. They are such an important part, an integral part of my business and the partnership that we have made and the growth that we've had together is phenomenal. And I am very, very grateful for that.
Again, caveat Could we be earning more money? Could we be closing more? Yes. But what kind of life do I want to live?
doing the work ahead of time has compounding value. What I mean by that is if you were to make a change, for instance, in a previous agency that I was working in, I made a change that saved for data entry maybe a few minutes every day per employee based off of the number of employees that we had in those few minutes that were saved.
I was saving our agency over 100 hours per pay period in labor hours that basically people are able to do other aspects of their job. Now, did this have a huge impact on the business's ability to make money? No, not at all. It was all government funded, so not at all. But what it did was it allowed the people to actually focus on what they wanted to focus on, what they needed to focus on, and gave them the mental break that they needed to perform the job more appropriately.
and in-home inspections.
There are things that I have done and that I've put in place to allow my employees to focus on the things that are important to them and not have to worry or get bogged down by all of this unnecessary work. Call center is one thing. Great. Talking about our template and our report, that's another thing. Great. Talking about our training.
Having a fully-fledged field training program that has over 100 plus videos that discuss our SOP, our culture, a whole bunch of other things that are important to being able to onboard a new employee and not only teach them what they need to learn, but also teach them what our culture is like so they know how to deal with different situations.
Having our in-service trainings month after month is going to be compounding to give our employees the quality that we want them to be. To ensure that the business continues on the right trajectory. All of this being said is that I want to have a good work life balance and sometimes I have to do a little bit of work ahead of time.
So that way I have to do less work later. And it's not that I'm doing less work, it is that if I have to tell somebody something twice, then I have failed them. As a manager, I failed them as a teacher, I failed them as a boss. I need to have resources available for all of my employees.
to be able to be self-sufficient, to be able to learn what they need to learn.
And having those resources is critical because I can say, here are your resources.
now. Even though all of that work was done creating our SOP, creating our field training program and doing all of that hard work. The reality is there are still a ton of things that I would love to do for this business that I think would really make this business fire on all cylinders and just be amazing.
There are so many things that I could do to market the business, grow the business, improve the efficiency of the business from the inside. And yeah, I will eventually get most of those things done. But the reality is I enjoy walks with my wife. I enjoy my time with my family. And could we make an extra thousand, 10,000, $100,000?
Sure. That could happen, but at what cost? Because tomorrow is not guaranteed. So, I would rather spend time doing the things that I actually value versus the things that do have value. Because, again, work life balance.
and with all of my employees, their safety is number one.
Their family is also number one. That's a tie for number one. Everything else doesn't really matter.
The business will be here. And I want them to live their lives the way that I want to live my life. I want them to be able to have the time with their family that they want to have with their family.
I want their work life balance to be as good as my work life balance, even if that means the business doesn't grow quite as much as I'd like it to. And that's a Pod.