The Call No Tech Wants to Go On

In the emergency trades, there’s one type of call no tech wants to go on.

But an HVAC company in Tuscumbia, Alabama, kept taking those calls anyway.

Why?

Because they had no choice.

A callback is the trip nobody gets paid for. An unhappy customer. A job that was supposed to be done right the first time.

Most owners chalk it up to the cost of doing business, like an error in baseball.

But in the summer of 2009, David Allen, the owner of Allen’s Air Conditioning, decided to take a closer look.

The three month evaluation

His team reviewed callback records from April through June of that year.

Sixteen callbacks in three months.

Not a big deal, until they asked why.

All sixteen traced back to the same part.

The answer had been sitting in his own records the whole time. Nobody had seen it.

Following the clue

Allen wanted to know why that part kept failing. He called suppliers and manufacturers. His team also started checking that part on every new install, to see what the factory had put in.

The trouble showed up in two places.

The first was new equipment. Higher-priced units came from the factory with a good version of the part, and they rarely failed. Cheaper units came with a cheap version, and those were the ones breaking down during the warranty period.

The second was his own repairs. His techs had been using the cheap version too.

The part was a capacitor.

Each one of them cost less than two dollars. The callbacks they caused were costing him hundreds more every year.

The fix

Allen didn’t make the equipment. But he chose what his team put in. Moving forward, on every repair call, no matter what it was, they upgraded to a better capacitor.

Then he went a step further for existing customers. During the next maintenance visit, his team replaced the cheap ones they had already installed, before they could fail.

As Allen put it: “It’s worth the peace of mind to know we won’t be called back anytime soon because of a faulty capacitor.”

Most owners treat callbacks as the cost of doing business. Allen used them for insight.

Most of the time, a problem like this goes unnoticed for years.

We call that the Visibility Gap: the time between when something happens in your shop and when you find out. The bigger the gap, the less time you have to act.

For Allen, the gap meant sixteen unpaid trips in three months, all over a part worth less than two dollars.

Your Moneyball move: Pull your last 90 days of callbacks. Sort them by cause. If the same thing shows up more than twice, do what Allen did and follow the clue.

Close the gap.

That’s Moneyball for the Trades.

In Chapter 4 of Moneyball for the Trades®, you’ll discover how two other shops shortened that gap.

Sources: David Allen, “Contractor Detective Work Leads to Reduced Callbacks,” Contracting Business, June 3, 2010. Firsthand account by the owner.