In the 10 years I’ve been in this business, I have definitely seen some changes. Recently we had a valued employee leave who had been with us for many years. At the time, I didn’t know how this would affect me and the Roto-Rooter family my father had built over the years.
After some soul-searching, I realized that changes like this were the best thing for me as a father’s daughter running his company and for our employees as a whole. As a result of this departure, I realized that I as a vice president needed to surround myself with employees who wanted to be in our Roto-Rooter family and wanted to give us 110%.
After numerous conversations with Al Levi, I decided that Al was someone who not only had been in my shoes but had made big changes for his own company. Al Levi has the knowledge of being an employee for not only his dad but his brothers as well and had operated a contracting business for more than 25 years. Being in the business and growing up in the business has extended his knowledge to other types of contracting companies throughout the United States.
So, I hired Al to implement his procedures at our company. He had been to my shop and evaluated our company as a whole. During this process, I realized that every company needs to have motivation, incentives and a willingness to want to change. You might think everything you are doing is right, but when you have an outsider looking in and evaluating employees and receiving feedback from them – that’s when you really begin to change.
I want our business to have manuals and incentives in place and for our employees to be able to grow to different management positions over a period of time. Al definitely made me realize that we have the potential to meet our goals once a month, over a 12-month period and for the next several years. And he is only an e-mail or phone call away if I have any questions for him.
He just returned to implement the next step in the Power! Programs, which is the customized operations manuals, so that every employee – CSRs to field techs, plumbers to supervisors – will be a valuable asset to our company.
Being 35 years old now, I look back to when I thought I had the answer for everything. Now I’m realizing I can implement things, but I need to have willing employees and have my team 110% behind every decision I make… not only to increase our sales, but our bottom line.