Every morning, I get the distinct pleasure of watching our fleet of trucks roll out to provide our customers with exceptional service and expert guidance that helps keep their businesses running efficiently. You can’t imagine how proud I am when I see our hardworking team members hitting the road, and I’m humbled by how many exceptional individuals have chosen to join our team.
When you think about a company’s core, it’s easy to assume that the central component is a strong leadership team. After all, when a company makes the news or is recognized within the industry, it’s usually an owner, founder, CEO, or president who gets the spotlight. But that doesn’t mean they’re the core.
When you’re looking for a company’s core, look at where the value gets added for its customers. In Hays’ case, it’s those hardworking HVAC technicians who are on the road bright and early each morning. They’re the ones who make Hays Service’s offerings valuable to our customers.
Time, Training, and Technology
Hays’ HVAC technicians have a wide and varied job description, requiring skills that address countless issues our customers may face. But when you boil it down to its essence, the value that our team members add comes from three sources: their time and experience, their ongoing training, and their embrace of technologies that help them work faster and smarter.
Experience Is Key
Think back to the last time you started a new hobby or took on a new type of project around the house. You probably weren’t perfect on your first few tries. But over time, you developed a deeper base of experience and eventually became skilled, and then you may have even become proficient.
“Practice makes perfect” applies in all aspects of life, from our jobs and hobbies to more personal things like our relationships and our faith. Our team has decades of collective experience installing, repairing, and maintaining every type of commercial or industrial HVAC system imaginable. That experience gives them the insight to see solutions quickly and the confidence to make recommendations that will save our customers money.
Training Is Crucial
The easiest way to become irrelevant in a business like ours is to assume that you know everything. The HVAC industry constantly changes as new technologies emerge that offer even higher efficiencies and better reliability. New processes and techniques improve our ability to predict and prevent significant issues with our customers’ equipment.
Staying on top of the continually changing world of HVAC means constant training. At Hays, we ensure that our team receives regular refresher and development training to ensure that we are always offering our customers the most up-to-date services and products and that we’re always working at our most efficient.
Technology Is Vital
You may not think of your HVAC service team as a technology company, but we are. System manufacturers are making strides every year to improve system efficiency and reliability, provide new functionalities, and implement other innovations that help lower costs, increase convenience, and improve overall business bottom lines.
But that’s not the only place where technology helps us serve our customers. New tools enter the market continuously, from diagnostic tools that help us predict failures before they happen to specialist tools that allow us to work faster and more efficiently. When a new technology emerges that can help us save our customers money, we don’t hesitate to adopt it and make sure that our team is using it to maximum effect.
The Role of Leadership
Earlier, I made a point of saying that the day-to-day work of our dedicated technicians is the core of our business. That’s not to say that leadership is unimportant – nothing could be further from the truth.
Without our technicians, we wouldn’t be able to serve our customers. And without strong leadership, our technicians wouldn’t be able to serve anyone. A company’s leadership team provides two invaluable resources: direction and support.
Setting the Company’s Direction
A company’s leadership team serves as its goal-setters. They create a strong vision for the future and define a set of core values that define where the company is going and how it’s going to get there. Without these defining statements that the entire team can understand and rally around, efforts are disjointed, results go unmeasured, and failure is all but guaranteed.
Supporting the Team
The other main trait of strong leadership is unfailing support for the team. That’s pretty important, so let me say it again: a huge part of leadership’s job is to support their employees – not the other way around. Because our HVAC technicians are the core of our business, our entire leadership team is dedicated to doing whatever it takes to support them in their work.
That means ensuring they have the tools they need to do the job. It means providing training when it’s needed. It means recognizing and celebrating their successes and helping them learn from their mistakes. Above all, it means ensuring that they know their value to the organization and helping them feel confident in their role.
Hays Service: An Unstoppable Team
I used the word “team” a lot in this message. At the end of the day, that’s what we are: a group of people working together toward a common goal. Some of us here at Hays are technicians who are on the roofs, down in the boiler room, maneuvering through the central chiller plants, and delivering exceptional service to our customers. Some of us are managers, team leads, dispatchers, and other admin supporters who make the technicians’ valuable work possible.
But we all do the same thing every day: demonstrate our commitment to our customers, our industry, and to one another by doing our absolute best in everything we do.
Coach Cal