In this episode of The Pulse, Donnie shares the lessons he learned as he built his appliance service Business. When Donnie started his struggles were around billing, staffing and the financial side of the business. Looking back on those years he does wish he reached out to more folks in the financial world for help to have set up a better foundation. He also brings up the importance of starting out with good staff and investing in their training early. By not doing this you can hurt your business.

Donnie made the switch from a Pen and Paper business to automation, using FieldPulse, and suggest this is something you should do from the start. Not only did this make his life easier, but he also saved time on his workload and had a better relationship with his customers.

During this episode, Donne offers great advice on the importance of the customer experience. He built his business on word of mouth and credits that from taking the time to listening to each customer and communicating with them. You do not treat a customer as a number and you spend as much time as you need to in their home to get the job done. Your customer needs to be confident in you and that is part of his Tech training for his staff. He talks about how quality is better than quantity when building a business. He will spend time gauging the tech skills when making a schedule to align them with the correct customer home to make sure jobs are not rushed.

He offers some great advice in upselling for any business. He gives a story of how he would be caught off guard when working on one appliance and someone would ask if he services a dishwasher too. He reminds us that you need to make sure your customers know what service you offer when you are in their home.

He talks about his process for receivable and invoicing saying that it makes it easier when a customer has the option to choose payments and he currently accepts Cash, Check, and Credit (made easy with FieldPulse).

Finally, he talks about how the CoronaVirus has effected business. It sounds like before this crisis he had a good process in place with his tech because service work is dirty work and they needed to have a handle on that before this crisis.