P.J. Fitzpatrick also has a separate system for scheduling service jobs, according to Stover, who points out that it’s vital to have a good dispatcher. “On any given day you don’t know what you’re getting into,” he says. A service appointment can take anywhere from 10 minutes to 10 hours, so it takes an adroit dispatcher to balance the schedule.
Respond quickly to service calls, or the goodwill you might otherwise generate will dissipate in homeowner frustration. “For service to work it must be available 24 hours a day, which means you need some kind of on-call system,” says Reid Ribble, president of The Ribble Group in Kaukauna, Wis., a business that operates two separate roofing companies. “When a client calls because his building was hit by lightning at 1 a.m., he’s not waiting until 8 a.m. for someone to return the call.” Ribble’s service personnel take their trucks home with them each night so they’re ready for a call. A roof leak, he says, is “always an emergency.”
Make service permanent or you’ll quickly be chasing your own tail. “In roofing you’ve got to eliminate the quick-fix way of doing things or it will kill you,” Petrucci says. “It costs more up front but eliminates problems later on.”
Ribble agrees. “Our approach to repairs, whether for a homeowner or for the largest company in the world, is to do whatever it takes so that the repair will not leak again.” Some companies rush to keep up with their workload. “We take the exact opposite approach,” Ribble says. “I’d rather take a couple of hours at the front end and make sure that I don’t get another callback.”
Commitment Required When your business is based on production, one of the biggest challenges in developing service may be changing the way management and employees see their roles.
“It’s a big shift in mindset,” Ribble says, “from getting a job done to making a customer happy. If you’re already stressed to find good people just to manage your roofing jobs, how do you take your best people off a crew and put them in service?” he asks. “You do it by commitment and by believing that what you’re doing is going to pay off.”
Despite the challenges, a service business is well worth it, contractors say. “If I was in a bigger market, I think we would have made a pretty strong move toward doing nothing but service and maintenance,” Bradford says.
Service issues will always be there. The question for home improvement contractors is not whether to deal with them or not but simply how they will handle them.
“The service thing can be a nightmare and a negative that can disenchant and disenfranchise customers,” Gindele says. “The bottom line is that you have to take care of the customer and the company. If we aren’t profitable, the company won’t be here, and if we aren’t taking care of our customers, we aren’t going to be here either.”