Quick take: Q&A with Gorjanc Home Services' CFO, COO

Nestled in Northeast Ohio, a market crowded with private equity-backed players, is Gorjanc Home Services, an independent contractor on track to grow revenue over 20% this year.

• I caught up with CFO Paul Hamilton and COO Ben Schaubert to cover what’s happening today, and what’s on their minds heading into next year.

How are you guys thinking about labor efficiency?

• “On the install side, our goal is to get our crews in and out of the shop in 15 to 20 minutes in the morning. We’ve developed a system where the kits are made up so the guys don’t have to restock everything they used the day before — even down to having coffee, water, and snacks available so they’re not stopping at the gas station on the way to the job.” 

• “We don’t want techs leaving jobs to get anything, so we also run partsrunners. We have one staged on each side of town, 20 minutes away from techs, so they aren’t sitting around waiting. They probably make 4 to 5 runs a day.” 

What about managing your fleet?

• “We try to keep our fleet under 5 years old and use a mobile oil change service that’ll come in the mornings when we have meetings. They can do 4 or 5 trucks in an hour, so we don’t have to send them out. We do the same thing with tires.” 

What’s the first thing you do with new CSRs?

• “We get them doing outbound maintenance calls because they can control them a little better. Then once they get a good feel for it, we’ll turn them loose to take some inbound diagnostic and emergency calls.”

Any notes or thoughts on employee engagement?

• “On the service side, we created a point system that focuses on revenue, memberships, sold leads, and accessory sales, and it’s a monthly contest. We used to do it by hand, but we just started using [a system called] PIVOTL to tally the points.” 

• “On the CSR side, based on the amount of booked calls the entire team has for the month, there’s a wheel they spin and they get gift cards to certain places.” 

What’s going through your mind as next year approaches?

• “I think for many years, there was an overreliance on pure PPC advertising. But it’s an auction house, so it can get expensive in a hurry. So focusing more on organic is a growing trend.”

• “I think there will be more headwinds over the next couple months than we’ve seen in a little while. For several reasons, there’s been a slowing of the economy, and an election coming up, and I think everyone in the industry will have to work harder to get the same level of sales we’ve seen before. We have to be crazy good at follow-up.”

• “[We’re] rewriting SOPs and putting a renewed focus on them. As we grow, there are a lot of different ways to do different things, and they all work, but we’re trying to reel that in a little bit. The more you grow, the looser some of those things get.”

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