Building a sustainable service department

By Emma Peterson. 

Learn the three stages to developing a strong and stable service department. 

Tracey Donels has been around the commercial roofing world, for two decades in fact! He first spent 15 years at K-Post Roofing and Waterproofing as the vice president of services, where he was able to grow the department about 10x in size. After his time at KPost, he branched out on his own and founded Service First Solutions, where he coaches and consults contractors about service departments. He explained a bit about why having a service department is so important, saying, “By growing their commercial service divisions, roofers can grow their overall roofing company... If you think about it, especially when you're going back to the same customer over and over, service is so very important.” But starting a service department can seem daunting, which is why we’ve broken it down into three stages! 

1 - Starting out  

If you’re starting out with opening a new department, it’s going to be small. But Tracey pointed out a few ducks you need to get in a row for this, sharing, “You have to figure out the processes. What's each step going to be?” The processes you define here can be very similar to that of a larger service department, there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel! Tracey shared, “There's no reason 90% of the time it shouldn't go the same. We're going to do the repair a little bit differently, but the call is going to come in. It's going to get scheduled. It's going to get worse. It's going to get done. It's going to get reviewed. It's going to get invoiced.” 

Once these processes are in place, you can figure out your capacity when it comes to people, tools, etc. At the beginning, you and your employees may wear many different hats. You might be splitting your time between the reroofing portion of your business and the service, and that’s okay! But, as you grow larger, you will need to separate out those roles as to not push anyone over capacity. This is again where having those distinct processes determined comes in handy, as Tracey explained, “As you grow, you can start to separate those roles out through those pre-defined processes.”  

2 - Building a market 

After you get more established and have a team dedicated to service, it’s time to look at growth and expansion. How do you find a solid place on the market to sell your services to? The core of this is finding a way to market your services to commercial building owners and show them that you are the best option. Tracey emphasized that having data is a great way to do this, sharing, “Collecting and reviewing data is very important in service... You have to keep a scorecard to know if your turnarounds fast enough and so forth.” Not only is this data you can show to prospective clients, but it will also show you any gaps in your department. Tracey explained, “If you're watching your data through a scorecard, the scorecard will tell you what you need to add? Think about a drive through restaurant. It's easy to tell when we need to go from one lane to two lanes because the lines are on the corner every day.” The scorecard is your line of cars to monitor when and where you need to expand next.  

3 - Facilitating sustainable growth 

As you grow, you want to ensure you do so in a sustainable and organic way. If you grow too fast, you might burn out your team and if you stagnate too much you won’t see the profit margins you want. Tracey recommends looking at growth as the adding of behaviors. He explained, “Growing is about where can we take it and where can we inject some new behaviors? Where can we inject a different person? Where can we inject a new service that we're offering?” Rather than always trying to reach new people and spread your workers thin across a larger and larger area, sustainable growth hinges on offering the customers who already know you more service options than before.  

This entire process is what Service First Solutions focuses on coaching companies through. For more about building a service department, get in contact with Tracey and their team!