Over the last 15 years, I’ve had the privilege of being part of plumbing businesses at every level – from running the field as an apprentice and licensed journeyman, to helping launch and scale a startup that turned national franchise model, to managing multimillion-dollar divisions. I’ve designed training systems to accelerate the development of apprentices new to the industry, advised out-of-state companies on growth strategy, and now focus on revenue recovery – capturing millions of dollars in opportunity across the trades that might otherwise be lost. My perspective hasn’t been shaped by theory, but by real-world wins and losses throughout my journey. I wholeheartedly believe the ideal future timeline we’re aiming to co-create is going to depend on a balance of ethics, deliberate communication, quality management, and intentional leadership. We’ll cover two of those things today.

In his book, Be Your Future Self Now, Dr. Benjamin Hardy lays out a convincing framework for how to become your future self, now. Loosely, this consists of imagining the person you want to be, down to the specific detail, then making a conscious decision to act or exist as that person in the now – with the idea being that we are reverse-engineering the present, as the future self. In other words, our imagined future is directing our behavior, rather than our past; we are communicating back to our present selves from the goal line, advising on how to merge the two realities. Whoa.

In the couple of years since that book came out, I’ve come to notice this concept not only applies to people, but also to the organizations we find ourselves driving. Within the industry, the predictable but marketable personas are uniformly adopted to describe both the trajectory and personality of our businesses: growth-oriented and passionate about serving customers, fostering a collaborative environment, supporting personal and professional growth, honoring work-life balance, etc.

While the generalization of those concepts has become strategic, go-to verbiage for many companies – what does the tactical strategy within them actually look like? If we are ‘growth-oriented’ – some common benchmarks might be: What additional roles are we needing to fill over the next couple of years? How are we securing our tenured employees along the way? Who is our ideal customer, and how many of them do we have 3 years down the line? Where are we projecting our annual revenue to land in 5 years? 10 years? Have we considered whether our plans support healthy gross and EBITDA margins? If so, when can we expect the ‘maturity’ date to fall within that timeframe? With all of that said – how, specifically, do we navigate each one of these areas to unmask the best outcome?

If you’re not quite sure, don’t worry, you’re not alone. To show up as that business who is successful in things like customer acquisition and retention, workplace culture, employee engagement, revenue production, and the art of navigating the journey of everything in between – we have to first departmentalize each area individually, then compartmentalize the roles within them – in order to create the necessary mental and operational clarity, focus, efficiency, and resilience within those groups. With process and communication controls, keeping everyone across the organization aligned, we have now created isolated areas of expertise – without the disconnection between groups – allowing us to become an organization employing people who raise the collective business IQ. The question is – what do each of those interlinked concepts look like, in great detail?

In my experience and opinion, one of the more underutilized and outlying aspects of a service-providing business is the management of quality standards. Ideally, we’re evaluating our workplace through the lenses of quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC) – continually balancing the necessity of both proactivity (QA) and reactivity (QC) within operations. After all, ultimate operational and financial efficiency should be the focus and goal of any establishment offering goods or services. This is the way to uncover inconsistency and transition back to alignment. Peter Drucker said it best – “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” The progressive business focuses on quality improvement because its customer bases deserve to receive consistent experiences.

When we’re talking about the reactive, quality control aspect of any organization, it’s typically applied to production, workmanship, defects, or the like – tangible things. I’d like to introduce its application to the standard operating procedures (SOPs), principles, behaviors, and tendencies that conjunctively power the true ‘flow’ of any business. If you’re familiar with the QC, QA, or QI concepts – you are likely also familiar with the Six Sigma framework, and how they complement it. The focus of this framework is on collecting information and analyzing statistics, to make evidence-based decisions and target specific problems. This tool was designed with the intent of promoting continuous improvement through identifying and removing the root causes found to be creating variance within the business. While Six Sigma is an expansive topic, in particular, the DMAIC methodology within it is extremely useful and easily applied. DMAIC in a nutshell:

• Define: specifically define the problem – ex: excessive callbacks on tankless water heater installations.
• Measure: identify all variables associated with the current performance within the tankless- specific flow chart, that the problem resides within, as to establish a baseline – ex: average install time, materials or equipment used, customer feedback on these jobs, documented error codes that surface, technician experience, actual recall or callback hours worked, scheduling cadence.
• Analyze: identify the root causes of process variance by analyzing the stats, uncovering patterns, and connecting the dots – ex: callbacks being tied to a certain crew or skill level, issues being connected to a specific equipment manufacturer, the schedule being overbooked for the technicians on these particular days.
• Improve: act on the findings by developing and implementing solutions to resolve the identified root causes of variation – ex: standardize installation checklists, cross-train technicians to prevent experience bottlenecks, develop kits specific to installations that prevent supply house runs, streamline scheduling to prevent overbooking, gather input from employees, compare before and after metrics, create SOPs around the new process.
• Control: establish control plans that monitor the process, which maintain the quality and efficiency of the improvements, and also catch deviations early – ex: continually monitor the pertinent KPIs, loop in feedback from both customers and employees to ensure satisfaction, perform random job audits, encourage technicians and office personnel to communicate problems or suggest refinements.

Take a current process in your world and map it using DMAIC – what patterns do you see?

Again, quality doesn’t just apply to production; it can equally to ideology and transactions, where process adherence and ethical approach are crucial. Let’s get more comfortable with the stigma of – sales. All of our respective businesses are fueled by transactions, as well as the effectiveness of both finding and converting opportunities for them. Sales as a core function consists of nothing more than processes formatted around finding and influencing a person or establishment to purchase a good or service. A sale, then, is simply an exchange of money for that good or service. Like anything else of importance, ideally, there is a ‘playbook’ of sorts formatted around its best practices. Without strategy, we find ourselves ‘winging it’ – and bluntly, unprepared. Preparation is one of the most underrated aspects of business-to-customer (B2C) transactions. As a company, having a defined and trained approach to transactional conversations that produces consistent results - this is nothing more than preparation. As so, quality control safeguards can also be critical in maintaining the standard.

So, what happens when an operating standard hasn’t been established, and a pulse isn’t kept on the experience being had by the end user? Good question – let’s explore some different scenarios. In his book Zombies Ate My Business: How to Keep Your Traditional Business from Becoming One of the Undead, Jamie Gerdsen offers an analogy of “zombie employees” to describe unproductive, disengaged employees – quietly draining productivity, souring customer experiences, and dragging down team morale through negativity. This disengagement surfacing within a company that has also fallen into stagnant routines, it’s framed as a ‘plateau’ phase of a business. At this stage, putting real effort into reinvigoration becomes necessary, with teams needing to be rebalanced and a new approach needing to be taken. New strategy and leadership may also be essential in moving the needle forward, objectively re-aligning employees with meaningful goals. At this point, taking these steps is a non-negotiable in reversing the decline of what we commonly refer to as culture. What can be done to hard-reset?

Enter: Production Pay. Performance-based compensation models are sweeping the industry and providing opportunities for life-changing income, while positively impacting financial metrics of organizations. There are a variety of ways to compensate our people that are contingent on production, meaning incentivizing them for the ability to consistently produce transactions, while also completing the service as efficiently as possible. Whether you agree or disagree with this approach, consider there being no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to structure the latticework of compensation – organizational development is subjective. Each business has a unique position and journey within the market; the key is not being influenced to choose an operational template that doesn’t fit. The idea is groundbreaking – not only does it motivate employees to convert opportunities, but also encourages them to adhere to a preferred model that assists them in doing so – while dually ensuring work is routinely completed in a timely manner. It’s really about the messaging to our teams on the almighty why, and reinforcement on exactly how this customer experience should look – every single time. This is the hard truth – production pay can drive results — or ruin culture. It depends entirely on how it’s implemented, communicated, and monitored.

This is where the value of quality management comes into play – if the narrative around intent isn’t upheld by leadership, this kind of compensation dynamic has the potential to spiral a bit. For proof, look no further than the social psychology concept of Incentive Caused Bias – it’s literally when someone’s motivations – especially financial, social, or psychological rewards – cloud their rational judgement and influence their actions. Do the math. That, paired against Extrinsic Incentive Bias – where people overestimate the motivations in others’ actions, causing them to assume another may be disingenuous in their approach to their job – particularly in the sense of believing they may take advantage of a situation they have a financial interest in. You really can’t make this stuff up. Go down that rabbit hole one day.

My advice would be to set expectations around the standard of ethical approach – and coach to it daily. Our moral compass must be fixated, leading people to make buying decisions that benefit them – not ones that benefit our own wallet. This is an important area to take a proactive (QA) stance against – return business and word of mouth (WOM) marketing depend on it. Sure, it’s easy to turn a blind eye when things are going great, but we risk enabling in the name of revenue production.

Keeping a pulse on exactly how we are getting great results is essential to not only our organization’s success, but also to upholding the reputation of our industry. While we’ve spent decades looking to undo stigmas associated with our trade professions, right in front of our faces we risk creating a new generation of distrust through unchecked sales activity. In fact, the competition will silently follow these breadcrumbs and ultimately leverage this informational advantage in their efforts to increase market share. There are many directions opportunism can take; we cannot allow it to pick up the least bit of traction. Quality metrics should be taken just as seriously as any other KPI that is routinely measured.

So, ask yourself – what does my company’s future self look like? Are my processes, people, and ethics aligned to bring it forth? Your company’s future self already exists. The only question is whether you’ll bring it forward today. What will it take to bridge the gap between vision and execution?