If you spend much time talking to plumbing contractors, you may start to notice some similar refrains: “One month we’re slammed, but the next month we’re just twiddling our thumbs.” “Some of our techs are stellar, but others could stand some improvement.”  “Revenue is up, but our profits are all over the place.”

What do all of these concerns have in common? At heart, they’re all concerns about consistency. Inconsistency can be a stealth killer, preventing plumbing companies from prolonged growth. Thankfully, acknowledging a consistency problem is the first step toward meaningful change.

Thinking systematically

First, it’s worth asking: Why is inconsistency so common among plumbing companies?

The short answer is that a lot of plumbing business owners are never taught to think in terms of systems or processes. They hire talented people and expect them to do their best, but even well-intentioned and hard-working people can sometimes be at cross purposes with one another.

When you have a group of individual efforts with no overarching system to ensure consistency, you end up with one tech who knows how to sell, and another who doesn’t. You end up with one dispatcher who always knows which tech is best-suited for the job, and another who is inefficient. 

To put it another way, depending on people to just show up and do their best is never going to produce predictable results. Consistency can’t be gained by just buckling down and working harder, either. It comes from creating the kind of structures that can yield repeatable outcomes.

Prerequisite for growth

Consistency matters for contractors because it provides a foundation for growth. In fact, pursuing growth before addressing inconsistency is really a fool’s errand.

Why? Because growing without consistency can actually compound your problems. With an uneven close rate, getting more leads won’t amount to much. With pricing that isn’t standardized, more jobs may not help with profitability. And without full alignment between team members, hiring more personnel may simply lead to chaos.

If you want to translate your activity into sustainable results, you’ll need to put systems and processes into place. That’s the key to ensuring your growth is predictable.

Consistency gaps

So where are the areas where your company struggles to do repeatable, predictable, systemic work? The answer may vary, but there are a few common areas where many plumbing companies struggle.

One of the big ones is lack of a standard sales process. This results in every technician doing their own version of selling. One offers the customer tiered options, the other doesn’t. One is confident talking about price point, one timid and hesitant. One cultivates trust, one wants to rush the process. This can lead to divergent ticket prices and conversion rates across your team, making it all but impossible to forecast revenues in a meaningful way.

Another area where many plumbers lack consistency is in key performance indicators. While it’s pretty common to keep an eye on revenue and profitability, business owners may pay little attention to the other metrics that drive their business growth. Things like average ticket value, call booking rate, conversion rate and revenue per tech are easy to overlook, yet these are exactly the metrics that allow contractors to identify opportunities for improvement.

And what about inconsistent dispatching? Dispatch can be one of the most powerful drivers of consistency; at the same time, when calls aren’t booked properly and the schedule isn’t well-optimized, everything downstream tends to suffer. Techs show up for the wrong jobs, scheduling gaps diminish productivity and calls get lost in the shuffle. Fixing dispatch is an important way to ensure consistency before the trucks start rolling.

Here’s another area for consideration: customer experience. What does a great customer experience look like for your company? If you can’t define it then you certainly can’t provide it, at least not with any kind of repeatability. When customers have wildly different experiences, you can expect to see it reflected in reviews, referral volume and more.

Addressing inconsistency

To take a more systematic approach to your business will require effort and discipline. Here are some places to begin:

Standardize your sales process: Make sure every technician follows the same protocol for each sales call they take. Create a regular rhythm for everything: greeting the customer, diagnosing the problem, presenting options and more. Get all of your team members running the same play.

Track the numbers that matter: You don’t need to monitor a dozen different KPIs, but you should make sure the ones you do follow are actually the right ones. Again, some recommendations are average ticket value, call booking rate, conversion rate and revenue per tech. Review these numbers on a weekly basis!

Refine your dispatch process: Train your dispatchers to do a lot more than just answer calls. Make sure they know how to book quality calls, and how to dispatch the right tech for each job. Get them up to speed on minimizing drive time and schedule gaps, too.

The bottom line: Inconsistent results don’t happen randomly. They happen because of inconsistent processes. If you want predictable revenue and a business that actually scales, you need to build systems that create standard outcomes, again and again.