In this month’s Today’s Word, Mike Weil discussed “Five Ways Your High-Performance Business Can SOAR Above your competition.” SOAR stands for Situation, Opportunities, Action, Results.

Let’s take a look at five more ways to apply a SOAR approach to making your company stand out in your market.

  • Educate, Don’t Sell. Most contractors learn to sell customers on why they are better, why they offer the best equipment, and why they are the best choice for the job.

The educational approach is very different. It’s not about you, it’s about the customer and their home. By teaching a customer how their system is performing, and involving them in the testing and discovery process, you have moved from someone trying to sell them something to a trusted advisor who is there to help them buy exactly what they need and want.

Bad Habits can stymie your competitive soar
  • Make Air Upgrades Part of Every Equipment Replacement. Virtually every installed system can benefit from an Air Upgrade.

This product ensures equipment can perform per the manufacturer’s specifications. An Air Upgrade makes it possible for equipment to deliver it’s designed capacity as close as possible to its rated energy efficiency.

  • Don’t Just Promise Performance, Prove it. Most contractors promise their work will perform as specified, usually citing SEER and AFUE ratings. Very few can prove that their installed systems actually work as promised.

As a High-Performance contractor you prove what you are delivering through documented test results — even certified by a third party.

  • Continually Train Your Employees. Training is not an expense, it’s an investment. It must be ongoing to get the results you want to achieve.

The biggest investment in training is not the cost of a class, it’s the lost opportunity cost of your tech not having that person in the field generating revenue. This cost needs to factor into your training investment. With good training, your Return on Investment (ROI) should be many times your initial cost.

  • Build A High-Performance Culture. Maintaining a culture of high performance isn’t just training your employees and putting a stake in the ground that you are now different. It requires an effort on your part to keep the fire burning.

Our industry has a lot of ingrained bad habits like just swapping out boxes when it comes to replacements, slapping on the gauges on the condensing unit before verifying airflow, and so forth. It takes a concerted effort to change these habits and keep them from creeping back into your organization.

Oftentimes new hires can inadvertently start to drag a company towards the old ways. It’s important to assign a champion in your company who not only helps keep the High-Performance culture alive, but is ever-vigilant to make sure wrong thinking doesn’t creep back in.

Of course, there is so much more to each of these ways to SOAR above your competition. But that is exactly what this magazine is all about. Be sure to study both current and archived articles. I know you will find many of the answers you are looking for.