Restoration Rewind Delta Development Group Monthly Newsletter
October 2017
10 Tips for Becoming a Service Excellence Leader When I think about great leaders, instinctively I think of people who are fearlessly driven and inspire greatness in others. Leadership can show itself in different forms and span a variety of industries. Fortunately for me, working with residential restoration professionals, I’m surrounded by leaders who focus on service excellence. All the restoration professionals I work with are fearlessly driven to deliver the kind of quality to their customers that can make their company stand out. Working with these remodelers has taught me that customer service is the line in the sand that truly separates excellent from average. With those restorers in mind, the following ten tips were created to inspire greatness for those companies who are ready to commit themselves to quality and become service excellence leaders. 1. Create a Culture of Quality In order for excellent customer service to be delivered in all avenues of your company, you have to have a culture that emphasizes its importance. How customer service is conveyed begins at the top and funnels down to the team members on the front lines. It’s essential for those in leadership roles to develop clear customer satisfaction goals that outline exactly what you expect from your team. Create a company culture focused on delivering the best client experience possible.
2. Communicate with your Clients Communication builds trust with customers. Provide your clients with your contact information, or appoint them a point of contact at your company they can reach out to with any questions or concerns during their remodel. 3. Be Transparent Avoid causing distrust among clients and be transparent on everything from pricing, products, and schedule. Honesty can go a long way, and especially save your company from receiving negative online customer reviews. 4. Set Realistic Expectations The best restorers understand the importance of under promising and over delivering. Work with clients to set attainable goals. Providing great service is contingent on meeting and exceeding the expectations of your clients. 5. Add Value Service excellence leaders stand out in the industry by adding value to every project they take on. Bring value to your customers by providing the most efficient and cost effective solutions to their remodels. Make it your company’s mission to go the extra mile on all projects, pay attention to detail, and provide quality craftsmanship. 6. Share Updates Keep your clients in the loop on all critical aspects of their project and provide progress updates. No one will accuse you of over-sharing. Communication breeds trust and dependability among clients. 7. Measure your Satisfaction Be proactive and identify how well your company pleases clients. Survey your customers to begin gathering feedback on your performance. Review customer survey
responses with your entire team. Discuss impressive work and find solutions for weaknesses, use this as an opportunity to learn and grow as a company. 8. Own Up to Mistakes Even the best remodelers make mistakes. It’s the way they recognize and learn from them that make them great. As restorers, if your company makes a mistake, it’s important that you hold yourselves accountable and make things right for your customers. 9. Show your Appreciation Show gratitude toward your customers and continue to nurture your relationship with them even after their restoration is complete. Send a thank you note, email over relevant articles that can help them maintain their home, and check-in with your customers a few weeks, or months after the project to see how everything with their home is sustaining. 10. Empower your Customers Empower your customers (referral sources) to talk with neighbors, friends, and family about the experience they had with your company. Think of these customers as your brand ambassadors. Equip them with your company’s business cards, web address, and especially social media links to make sharing your excellence easy.
CASH IN THE DOOR DELTA DISASTER SERVICES OF SOUTHERN COLORADO is leading the system with Cash in the Door with a month exceeding 500K! Great job Emmis and team!
Fourth Quarter Alert Reminders as you head into the fourth quarter. The Fourth Quarter always involves planning for the new year. Once again, that time is upon us. Start making lists and checking them twice! I would also encourage you to find and read some articles on the web about business planning, there is lots of very good information. New Business Plan for 2018: Consider writing your Business Plan for both the short term and long term. Remember it is a “living” document. You will want to review it every six months and adjust as needed. There is nothing in this document that should be cast in concrete. It needs to be living and flexible enough to adapt as the year unfolds. It is your road map and will contain some dips, valleys, peaks, etc. Before you begin you need a road map of where you are. • Estimated 2017 Sales. • Number of jobs • Average mitigation job • Average reconstruction job • Other income • Percentage of increase over 2016 • Anticipated / Planned increase in 2018 Year End Planning: It is time to make sure your business is “in order” and ready for 2018.
Things to Do and Check: Here are some of the categories to be thinking about for your 2018 business plan. •
Objectives (Sales and Production) o Sales Goals for the year (include income and number of jobs) ▪ Mitigation ▪ Construction
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Marketing: New Accounts (what will this look like? What will you actually do? How and who will do it? How many new accounts will you gain? How many will you lose?) o Plumbers o Agents o Fire Department o Direct Repair Programs o Events: Golf Tournaments, Charity, etc. o Others? Budgets o Marketing o Mitigation o Construction o Overhead expenses Employees (Do you need to add or subtract?) o Training and Education o New employees needed – Where and What Capital Expenditures o Mitigation Equipment o Vehicles o Office Equipment, Computers o Technology Upgrades Other Considerations o Any plans for Expansion? o Is your Franchise License Agreement up for renewal in 2018? o Are there any facility changes that will need to be made in 2018? o Are you planning to package your business to sell in the next 12-18 months? We will have two Wednesday Webinar / Go To Meetings. One will revolve around your marketing planning. I would encourage you to have your marketing person help write the marketing portion of the business plan. The second Wednesday Webinar will revolve around your overall 2018 planning. Please reach out to Delta Development if we can be of any assistance as you plan for 2018.
Marketing Corner As marketers for restoration work we often find ourselves cold calling folks that truly want us out of their office or business for the mere fact of being overburdened by solicitors and work. Having only a few seconds to present Delta, we need to try and relate almost immediately with the person or the wall goes up and we go out the door. One key aspect to keeping that wall from going up is to connect with empathy. Find out or read the person from where they are coming from and relate with them to bridge over that wall. Below is a great article on empathy and how to effectively use empathy as a marketer. Enjoy! Jason Kaber
Are We Born With it or Can it be Learned? By Angela Stephenson
All high-flying sales professionals will agree that emotional intelligence is key to developing successful business relationships. However, if you struggle with client empathy then rest assured: everybody has the ability to empathize. In its most basic sense, empathy means ‘the ability to understand and share the feelings of another’. It means stepping outside of your own lived experience and opinions, and seeing where other people are coming from and what their motivations are. In short, this is about remembering that you're not the only pebble on the beach. Everyone has different motivations and personalities, and the best sales people recognize this. Empathetic people are popular because they have the power to fully understand others and make them feel at ease. When someone seems empathetic, you open up to them about your problems without the fear of being judged. The most successful sales people engage their clients in this kind of trusting bond and get to understand them on a deep level.
How does empathy relate to sales? Being charismatic is not enough if you fail to truly listen to and identify with your clients. You might have charisma but you need empathy to push past first meetings and make sustainable business relationships that will last for years. Empathy builds trust in client relationships, strengthens teams, improves coaching interactions and forms an emotionally intelligent foundation to build strong business on top of. However, can everyone be empathetic? Some people claim to be ‘naturally’ less sensitive or empathetic than others and struggle to relate to others. Insensitive, un-empathetic people tend to be arrogant and self-centered with a need for admiration. They are selfish, manipulative, aggressive and often fail to listen to others. Will they be successful in sales? Probably not at first. But with a little bit of work they could begin to emotionally relate to people in business.
Nature or nurture? As with all nature or nurture debates, nobody is certain why some people are more empathetic than others. However, research has proven that individual capacities for empathy are not restricted and people can work to improve their emotional intelligence. Recent research shows that people living with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) are capable of empathy. If they are capable of empathy, almost anyone is! Narcissistic personality disorder is a psychological condition where people have an inflated sense of self-importance and constantly seek admiration from others. It has long been thought that narcissists are biologically incapable of empathy, but in truth they are able to condition their minds to relate to others. Empathy is the ability to experience another person’s perspective or emotions – it reinforces social cooperation and throughout the years has ensured our survival in groups. High empathy friendships are rewarding and help us improve our quality of life. The bottom line is that anyone can boost their empathy levels and sales people will find that this directly impacts on their success. Here are five ways to strengthen your capacity for empathy: 1. Always seek to establish common ground with whoever you meet. Seek to identify similarities rather than differences between you and other people. Once you identify
with someone and see them as a reflection of your own personality, you will have more time for them. Empathetic people seek to identify with people they may hold contrasting opinions with. 2. Listen intently. Listen with 100% of your attention focused on the person who is speaking. It sounds simple, but very rarely do we do this; usually, we are busy thinking about our own plans and thoughts, or simply about what we’re going to say. The ability to completely immerse yourself in what someone else is saying allows you to focus on their feelings, wants and needs. Highly empathetic people put their own thoughts aside and listen to others. 3.Push your comfort zone. This applies more to your personal life than your professional life; visit new places, spend time with different people, do some regular volunteering. Push yourself to do or see things that you would not usually do. By exposing yourself to different places, people and lifestyles, you will eliminate the differences between your life and others’, whilst developing your capacity to empathize with almost anybody. 4.Talk to strangers. The most empathetic people are curious about strangers and unafraid to develop a relationship with them. Take inspiration from children; they often seek to develop relationships and engage with people by asking them questions and getting to know them. Try to regain some of that childlike curiosity. You don’t have to be strangers, they can be people you see regularly but have never spoken to: cleaners, delivery drivers, neighbors or people you regularly see on the bus. 5. Pay attention to things outside of yourself. This is closely linked to the second point, but it’s vital to developing empathy. Instead of becoming too preoccupied with your own thoughts, pay attention to other people and what’s going on around you. Notice the subtleties, like body language and tone of voice, and tap into the details of other peoples’ existence. You will find the results fascinating. In sales and life, those who lack empathy will pay a high price in the long run. A lack of empathy leads to the breakdown of relationships, increased conflict and can encourage poor decision-making practices in businesses. Empathy is a valuable trait that all sales people should work on in order to become not only better at their job, but better human beings
The truth about 100-year floods
A teenager rides a Paddle Board in the flooded streets of Houston on Aug. 27, 2017, in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. (Photo: Shutterstock)
Whenever a strong hurricane or storm causes significant flooding, there is often talk of a 100-year flood. When people hear this term, they think a flood of that magnitude occurs once every hundred years, so they should be safe from harm for the next hundred years. Unfortunately, some base their decision to buy flood insurance on this false belief, putting them at risk of a catastrophic loss. The reality is much different. It involves frequency analysis and statistical probability. In order to determine the frequency of floods of a given level, scientists create a history of the area. Generally, scientists start with a minimum of 10 years of information. The longer the record the better and the more accurate predictions are. They look at the frequency of different size floods and the average number of years between them to develop the probability of a given size flood in a particular year. Insured losses continue to climb according to the latest estimates from Karen Clark & Company.
‘Extreme’ floods To consider a flood extreme, experts start by determining the normal amount of rainfall and stream stage for a specific body of water. Stream stage is the level of water measured in feet above a certain arbitrary point. The measurement is the distance from the riverbed to the height of the water. A stream or river in normal conditions could have a stage of two feet, meaning the stream is two feet deep. If a big storm hits suddenly, the stream stage could rise to 15 or 20 feet quickly. A flood occurs when the stream or river overtops the natural or artificial banks of the stream. Rain volume alone doesn’t always create a flood; the condition of the ground before the rain starts is critically important. Has the area received a lot of rain recently and is the ground already saturated? Less rain is needed to create a flood under those conditions. Likewise, if the area has been under a drought and the rain is falling fast, it is possible for the water to run off instead of soaking into the ground. This can lead to mud and landslides depending on the ground in the surrounding area. If a river basin is altered such that it affects the flow of water, scientists will re-evaluate the frequency. The addition of dams and levees will change the odds. Once a flood has receded, high-water marks are surveyed to estimate maximum flows that can’t be measured during an active storm. Stream gages record the height and quantity of flow. As rivers and streams flow and flood, the beds and flow of water changes, causing sediment to flow downstream and the bed itself to change, which can change the flow of water. The accumulation of data allows for a determination of the annual probability that a given stream or river will exceed its banks. This is known as annual exceedance probability or AEP. A 1% AEP flood has a 1 in 100 chance of occurring every year, with an average recurrence every 100 years. This is the 100-year flood. A 500-year flood has an AEP of 0.2% chance, or a one in 500 chance, of occurring in any year. It is entirely possible for there to be 100-year or 500-year floods in consecutive years. Because of the confusion and misunderstanding, the term 100-year flood generates, the U.S. Geological Survey is encouraging the use of the AEP terminology, preferring the phrase “1% AEP flood” over “a 100-year flood.” During the span of a 30-year mortgage, there is a 26% chance of a home in a 1% AEP, or 100-year flood area, of being flooded.
And we will leave you with this…