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- [00:05]
A
Here we go. Welcome back to another episode of Truck Talk on the LCR Media podcast. I'm your host, LCR Nailer Taliaferro. And I wanted to talk about. Why can't people just do their job? This is something my wife and I, or my wife has. My wife, she has mentioned many times out of frustration when we have had experiences, that's the word, experiences throughout our life more recently than not, where people just, just don't seem to be capable or, or they're just not willing to do their job. I don't really know what the, what the answer is, and I wanted to unpack that a little bit in this episode because I think it, it matters as business owners to us as to what our customers might think about us. I feel like customer service is just going downhill. It has been going downhill for many years now. I mean, this is nothing new, I'm sure, to any or, or all of you listening to this episode. But I mean, anywhere you go outside of your house to interact with the world, whether you're going, you know, there's things that we have to do, right? We have to go grocery shopping so that we can eat if, even if we always only cook for ourselves. But then there's if on occasion or regularly we go out, whether it's, you know, on a date night with our, our significant other or just grabbing lunch on the go, meeting with friends or co workers or we're taking our team out for any sort of meal, anything like that, eating out, right? There's customer. You have to interact with people. Just like grocery stores, when you have to get food and then any other activities, getting gas sometimes can be a customer service nightmare. I mean, just forget about being on the roads and just driving with all the different crazy people that are out here and trying to deal with that situation. But just when you go somewhere where you are paying, you're paying for a service, you're paying for a product, paying for a service, sometimes both. Or you go into a retail store to get something for your house to repair or you need something new to be replaced and you're doing it yourself, you still got to buy the product somewhere. So you go to a store sometimes to buy it. I mean, you can order things online too, but that could be customer service situation. Like, so whether you're, whether you're buying a product and then you have to be serviced within that store, you have to be, you have to make that purchase at the cash register. Maybe you have a question, you know, God forbid you have a question about Something or you. You can't find something, or maybe they're out of stock on something and you know they've had it in the past and you ask if they have it in the back maybe, or when they're getting it, when they're getting more in. Like, it just seems like customer service is really going downhill. And people, it seems like people are aggravated and frustrated that you're there. It's like, hello, aren't you in business to get business? I know there's employees. So it's not like the owner of these places that you're directly interacting with all the time. Normally you don't even see the owner sometimes at nice restaurants, right? The owner or just the manager, usually not even the owner will come over at the end, towards the end of your meal and thank you for being there and ask if everything was great. And that's nice. But I mean, there's so many interactions where out of luxury or necessity, you are going to purchase a service, a product, or both, and it's just terrible. And you just wonder why, why is that happening? 1. But imagine, but think about how that makes you feel as the consumer, the customer in that situation. And now think about yourself as the business owner. Like, what. What could you be doing better? Or what, what could you be potentially not doing? Well, that is giving that experience to your customers. Or maybe it's your employees, your team, your staff. How big is your team? You know, if you're not in the truck and you have a crew or multiple crews going out without you, what are they potentially? What are your customers potentially? I guess, perceiving of those crews, you know, like, what kind of damage could they be possibly. Or what image, what message could they be putting out there about you and your business? And the reason, the biggest reason why this was fresh on my mind is one, I said, you know, my wife gets frustrated. We all get frustrated. It just is getting worse and worse, it seems, as time goes on, that especially out of necessity where we're in a desperate situation or like a moment of need, where something's broken, needs to be fixed, and it's not a luxury item. It's like an appliance or our Internet or whatever services that, you know, we, we need to our cell phone, you know, these things I get, yeah, I get they're not that necessity. But in today's day and age, we are so used to the Internet and cell phones to stay connected for work, for friends and family, and emergencies come up, it makes it a lot easier. So it's definitely Frustrating because you're used to it, it's very convenient, it makes things a lot faster, easier, and so on. So when you need help with those things you hope and expect, especially when you're paying for this stuff, that you get good service now. I mean, I get problems can't always resolve immediately and, and, and, and, and all that, but if people could just be kind about it and give you their undivided attention for whatever moments they need to, to help you progress to the next step or whatever. So like, so there's just so many personal examples where that happens. Has been happening a lot more recently and it's frustrating to me and my wife, but my wife has definitely been vocal about why can't people just do their job? I don't understand how hard it is now. You know, I get that everyone has bad days and everyone has to learn, you know, everyone has bad days. Everyone has first days, right, where they have to learn how to, to do things properly. And everyone has last days where they don't really care. They're just over it, you know, or they, they're transitioning to something new and they just, they're just not all, all committed to the cause anymore. But it's just it, it gets to be, it seems like it's more times than not nowadays. And for me specifically recently dealing with my storage facility people, the, the, the management that used to, you know, this is, this is multiple locations, so it's not the owners, but how. The. I don't know if all storage facilities work this way, but the particular one that I am in, the people that manage it, each location has different management and they, they usually live there or stay there. Like the, the main building, the office building is like a duplex. Like it's, you know, the main floor is like the office and things that pertain to the storage, running the storage units. And then upstairs is the, the living quarters, you know, the, the bedrooms and bathrooms and you know, the kitchen might be downstairs off on the, to the side, kind of disconnected a little bit from the main office as well. But it's, it's a house that has an office, whole office area kind of on the first floor built in. So the people that manage it stay there too. So they're always on, on location essentially. Right? They're, they're at the, they're on the facility, which helps make people feel safer. And for emergencies, you know, you can, they, they can respond to emergencies faster, they can monitor things and so on and whatever else. But the people that used to live there that managed the place, they retired, they were older, they were super nice, super on top of it. You know, there was, it was Tom and Kathy. Tom was always out tinkering around, doing stuff on the storage facility. Everything looked amazing. He was always on top of it. He would always chat it up with me, you know, sometimes I didn't have time for that. But just like your customers, they come out, the elderly ones, and they're chatting with you. But you know, I would, whenever I could, I would strike, I would engage in the conversation and we got to know each other. I knew about his kids, he knew about my kids, I knew about his grandkids and, and it was like a fun, family friendly environment. But Tom was always on it. Even though he was elderly, he was in good shape and he was always walking around or riding around the golf cart, depending on what needed to be done. And he was always on top of stuff. Sometimes there's a couple of occasions where random things would happen and he would call me up and let me know, hey, just wanted to let you know. I was going through and I saw that your storage unit wasn't locked, right? Or, or it was open or something. Just wanted to make sure. You know what? Didn't know if you were coming back or if you knew about that. Just wanted to let you know, right. And you know, sometimes I forgot. Sometimes, yeah, I just ran, drove around the corner real quick to pick up something, I'll be right back or something. I don't think I actually ever left my unit open, but I believe there was at least once where I did leave my. I forgot to put the lock on it for some reason, which is crazy. That's just, you know, you get busy, distracted over the years. That's what happens. I think that happened once and then there was times where he would just give me a heads up like, hey, you know, we're going to be doing some work. We're going to be doing some. Working on something here and there and everywhere, you know, or construction or people moving in the unit or we're working on some electric electrical issues. Just wanted to give you the heads up. Like he was just always on it and always keeping me informed if I had a problem, like, oh man, one of my unit's door broke. Like the springs that help open and close it, the rollers or whatever, one of the cables I broke. So like it wasn't, it wouldn't open and close properly and it was a mess. And it told him and he was immediately on top of it and got someone to Come out, like, the next day, and it was great. You know, communication was always great. Sense of urgency was always great. And if it was like a technical thing or a billing, like a billing or an office thing, which was technical for him, he'd be like, oh, I'll let Kathy know. Kathy will be right on it. And he always let Kathy know, and Kathy was always right on it. Kathy was super nice. If I ever had any issues when I go into the office, she was always there, and she would take care of it right away. And it was amazing. They were nice people. They were on top of everything. A whole progression of stuff, you know, throughout the years that I was there, moving different storage units around, asking if I could have let me know when there's more units available in this area so I could just kind of all them be in one spot. What about these parking spots over here? Be great if I could ever get those. It was just. It was just a great relationship. And, you know, and over time, that's what happened. I had units all in the same row, and then parking spots right at the end of that row. So it's like I have my own little section, my own little. I mean, there's a lot of other units there, too, but I could just park or pull up and had that whole area, and we could just unload, load, work on maintenance, do. It was like have my own little shop, my own little section there. Of course, other people would pop in every now and again, and we'd have to play musical vehicles and move things around. And I always try to be mindful of that anyway, just in case someone did show up. But it was great to not have to really go anywhere else but that one section of storage for everything that we needed. Trucks, trailers, equipment, and so on. And that was all over time of me communicating with Tom and Tom communicating with me, you know, hey, oh, yeah, I think that could work. Let me figure out if we can do that. Let me ask this person if they'll move and swap spots with you. And then, hey, just to let you know that those tenants are going to be moving at the end of the month. If you. If you want to open that spot up, I'll. I'll give you first dibs and blah, blah, blah. And. And that's what happened. Yeah, give me that spot. So I had two spots and had the whole whole section. And so that was my experience for so long. And then they retired. And the new people are nice enough, but they. They're not on top of everything the same way. And And I know people aren't perfect, I get it. But it's just like, dang, how hard is it to do your job, you know?
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Hey, just real quick, if you haven't heard, I have a new event coming up this summer right here in Richmond,
- [13:38]
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Virginia, which is on June 26th and 27th.
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It's called the Profit Accelerator Live.
- [13:43]
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Special guests. What you're going to learn there. So you're going to learn how to stop underpricing your jobs, improve your route density, close more bids, and fill your schedule with more profitable jobs. So stop sacrificing so much of your time for a little bit of money and join us at the Profit Accelerator Live link is in the episode description.
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A
Dang, how hard is it to do your job? And, and, and I try not to. I try to say that in as humble and as empathetically as possible because I know mistakes happen. I know firsthand all of the mistakes I've made and things I've forgotten, for sure. But to go from Tom and Kathy, you know, to, to the new folks, and it's just like, oh, man, it's been rough to, to, to say the least, without going into all the, all the details. I mean, you know, I, I reduced, you know, I got rid of one of my units because I didn't need as many anymore. And they said, oh, yeah, we'll take care of it, you know, but she didn't actually go and take care. Like, I didn't see her go and take care of it. She was busy and whatever. I was like, oh, yeah, I'll take care of it. She wasn't, she wasn't busy. She, she was, she was tied up. She was in the middle of something else. And I felt bad and I was like, should I come back? Or I'm sorry, no, no, I'll take care of it. So of course I want to partially take the blame for it because that's the kind of person that I am. I take accountability. I don't just blame everyone for everything. If, if there's something that I could have been accountable for, but at the end of the day, it was her job. I came in, didn't know she was going to be busy, you know, but that's the nature of the beast, right? People are always coming in, you're busy, you got to do what you got to do. That's part of your job. And she said she would take care of it, you know. Oh, yeah, I'll take you off first. You know, first of the month. Okay, thanks. And first of the month comes, I get the bill, still has that unit on there. I'm like, oh, man. So I call, oh, I'm so sorry. Oh, I don't know what she said, but she just. She definitely apologized that she'd take care of it. It'll probably be. I can try and get them to send you a check, but it'd probably be easier if I just credit your account for the next month, you know, so that you don't have to pay. Essentially, you'll be paying, you know, however much money that was less for. For everything that you. That you have now. I'm like, all right, cool, that's fine, whatever. As long as they get the money back somewhere, some way or another, right? Well, guess what? This month just came through a couple of days ago. Well, that, that unit's off now, but I didn't get a credit either. So I'm like, okay, so now I got to stop. So I had to stop back in. And she seemed a little frazzled, and that made me frazzled. And I was already having a frazzled morning. And with other people not doing their job, I'm like, you got to be. You know, it's just. It's just like a never ending thing. And. But. But, you know, I should. But I don't want to project that. I try to not project, Leave that baggage somewhere else. Right? Like, I don't want to project that. My frustrations for something else onto her, but because she was already frustrated about something else and projected that onto me, now I'm projecting mine on. And so it wasn't a good situation to begin with. And then she's like, oh, man, you know, I'm really sorry. And then she's talking about, I sent him an email. I don't know what happened. And so who knows, who knows if she's just pointing the finger, placing blame, you know, and not taking accountability for her forgetting or something, but she's, you know, saying it's someone else's fault and let me check and make sure everything went through. And I'm So sorry. And it'll, it'll definitely go through next month. And I'm like, okay. So it's just frustrating, right? It's not the end of the world. But sometimes it can come close. Like think about in real life threatening emergencies. You get into an accident or you get ill, you're sick, something happens or you injure yourself. Like that's where you really need the best care and the best service. And you, you can not, you can't, you can't afford for people to have a bad day or to not do their job. If their job is saving your life, you need them to save your life, right? If they're capable and if your life was capable of being saved and they're capable of saving your life, that's when they need to do their job, right? That's the extreme circumstances. But at any level, everyone should be able to do their job. So I just think, always think about myself in those situations. Just like I talked about, not projecting my own, trying not to project my own frustrations from something else onto someone else. Even if it is their fault. I don't want to project that onto them. I want to be professional. I want to handle it in the best way because that's the, that's. You're going to get the best results that way anyway. You can't really fight fire with fire. You're just going to create a bigger fire. You got to put the fire out, you got to suffocate it. That's the number one way, right? So I really try to think about all that. Sometimes are easier than others. Especially the more excited you are, the more upset you are, the harder it is. But ultimately I want to focus on not projecting that kind of negative energy or high energy or nervous energy or excited energy onto people. I want to try to think about how are people perceiving? How are my customers perceiving? The way I talk to them, the way I'm handling a situation that may or may not have anything to do with them. And am I doing my job right if I, if I can't get to their, their job when I said I could, how often is that happening? How. And so how is my customer perceiving that? Do they think I'm unreliable? Do they think I'm just making excuses? How do I handle those situations? Do I handle it with grace and empathy? Apologize sense of urgency. I'll be there tomorrow. We'll reschedule as soon as possible. Let you know as soon as possible. And then am I following through on all that like what kind of image and perception am I putting out there for my customers? Because that could make or break losing a good customer, maybe spreading some bad word of mouth and also not being able to charge as much. Right. When you are operating at a high level of customer service, high level of execution of whatever your job is that you're performing, high level of detail, attentive, you know, showing up when you're supposed to. So a high level of dependability, reliability, accountability, then you can charge at a higher premium and increase your profitability. Because people know, hey, they mean business, they don't mess around, they're reliable, they're. They're reliable with when they say they're going to be here. They're reliable with the quality of their work and the completion of their work in the time frame that they said they're going to complete it. And if something comes up, they are on top of communication and they are letting us know immediately and keeping us up to date as often as possible so that we can navigate accordingly if we need to. And we're not wondering what's going on and when is it going to be finished. And oh man, you know, can't they just do their job right? Maybe they're thinking that way about us. So that's kind of the ultimate summary here and where I'll wrap up the episode is why can't people just do their job? And are customers asking that about you or your team or a specific employee or a specific service that maybe you're not the best at or you're getting better at and maybe you just need to communicate that with your, with your team so they can communicate that and, or communicate that with. If it's just you, you know, with your customers, like, hey, I know this is taking a little bit longer, I apologize. This is a new service or we have new equipment that we're trying to figure out or we've had some breakdowns so we're trying to navigate through that, replace some of our equipment while we are still trying to service our customers and still get these services done because it's time sensitive. So we can't just not do them while we are working on getting better equipment and so on. You know, please bear with us. We will keep you posted with any updates. Like communication is key. And yeah, it does come to a point where people are going to be like, okay, enough is enough. This is supposed to be done weeks ago. It's great that you're giving me the play by play, but I'm just over it. Like, get this done and I'm never going to schedule this service with you ever again. Like sometimes those things still do happen, no matter how good at communicating you are. Because at the end of the day, people do just want you to do their, your job. Like what they hired you for, what they're paying you for, or what they paid you for or going to pay you for. They expect that fulfillment. They expect you to fulfill the job or the service, the product, Give them the product or the service that they paid for. So just think about that. Because in the spring it gets real quick and easy for us to get overwhelmed and not be 100% serviceable for all of our customers, including our longtime clients. They're the first ones that get pushed back. Unfortunately, if you know, you know, they're the ones that get pushed back when you get overwhelmed, take on a whole bunch of new work, trying to grow your business, but you're, you know, but then you're not going to be able to get it all done and you're like, oh man, it's Friday. There's no way I'm going to get all this done. Who am I going to push back? Well, in your mind, you think, I'm not going to push back the new customers because I don't want to lose them. I want them to become a long time client. So what do you do? You push back your longtime clients, which is really the opposite. Thinking you should always be protecting and putting your current clients first. Fill your schedule with your current clients, prioritize your current clients and make sure that they are your number one priority. And then figure out when you can fit anyone else in after that. And then serve them at the highest level as well after your clients so that those customers can hopefully become future long term clients. So don't let the busy spring rush get you sideways. And now your longtime clients are now wondering, why can't they just do, why can't he just do his job? Why can't they just do their job? I don't understand. They used to be perfectly fine. Now all of a sudden they're just falling off. Maybe they're too busy. Definitely. People have said stuff like that about me over the years from time to time. I think maybe you got too big, you know, or maybe you're just too big for me. Like one person, one customer was like, I miss all the real personal one on one experiences and you being on my property all the time. And you know, I feel like you're just too big for, for us now. And you know, we just Liked the personal touch. Like, you know, you guys, your guys go too fast and blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, well, but, but they. Did they get everything done? Yeah, but it's like, okay, well, so now what we've done is I've spoiled my customers and they're used to me just doing all the detail work, talking, having conversations. And that's not as profitable as we need it to be. You need to have a balance between that, like, don't be rude, say hi, say yet, talk, you know, have a, some quick small talk, but get back to work. You know, like, don't, don't shut your equipment off and sit there and have a conversation. Like, you gotta, you gotta keep it moving in a respectful, professional way so that you can be profitable. Especially when you have employees that are sitting around waiting on you. That's, that's money just going down the drain. Sometimes you do need to do that. Sometimes there's a long conversation that needs to be had for one reason or another. But you just gotta make sure that you're not just catering to customers that are lonely and bored or just chatterboxes and want to talk to you for 15 minutes every time you're there. And then when you're not there, they wonder why they can't get that 15 minute talk. They don't feel comfortable doing that with your team. And I get all that. But you know, sometimes that's on you for spoiling them by allowing that to be a thing. And your team is doing a great job. Details there, everything's quality is there. But because they're quick and efficient and not having small talk now, it's, it's a problem. So, but again that, that, that's on you spoiling your customer. So that's, that's tough. When you're a solo owner operator, that's easy to do. So you got to be mindful of that as well so that they don't think, well, why don't they just do their job? Like what's good? What happened? What, you know, they, they changed, you know, that they fell off or whatever. And, and that's, that shouldn't have to be the case. So all those different things, again, wrapping everything up, trying to try to wrap it up before, but added some more value there to, to summarize the episode. So as the spring rush is busy and crazy, it's easy to let things, or it's easy for things to slip through the cracks. Not that you're letting them, they just, you just get overwhelmed and busy and you take on too much work and you're not pricing correctly and it just turns into a crazy situation with the spring rush and it just completely takes over. And when the dust settles, you might have lost some good people, employees and customers. You may have lost some money or not made as much money as you could have. Definitely lost a lot of sleep, maybe get lost some brain cells, maybe. Who knows, you know, your health might have declined a little bit. Eating a bunch of not great food, you know, as, as you're rushing around and not having time to prepare your food and have good food and things can get off the rails fast. With the spring rush, we, we talked that we went through this in that how to not get crushed by the Spring rush free masterclass a couple weeks ago. The replay, I believe, might still be available if you click on my Instagram profile at the time of this recording. If it's not there anymore, well, I guess you just have to be on the lookout. Or it might also be in the, in the description of this episode, this podcast episode. It might actually be there in the resources too. So you could check that first if that's easier for you. And you can check out the replay there. But again, hopefully this episode helped as well. This is kind of a little more in. In the weeds here than what I did in the masterclass, but there was a lot of other great things that I talked about in the masterclass to, to how to not, you know, let the spring rush take over. Essentially five, five or four, four or five key things I went through. So thank you guys. On that note, thank you guys for listening to this episode. Thank you to Tutorial company for sponsoring the LCR Media podcast. And until next episode, this is Nail Artalifero signing off. This has been an lcr media and Mr. Producer production.