In the world of Performance-Based Contracting?, training is the cornerstone to success. Even if you are not following the high-performance path, training is the secret weapon to keep your company ahead of the competition so it can better serve customers. Period.

Here at Getzschman, we believe that a company without training is a company destined for failure. Trained employees are ambassadors for your company. The more experience they gain from training, the more valuable they are to your entire team.

Training on Purpose

The key to putting together a program that keeps your technical team on top of the best techniques, skills, and processes is one that is done on purpose. It requires thought, planning, and of course, enactment. That requires you to have money set aside to cover the costs, and in our case, to pay our techs while they are taking training classes.

Sometimes, membership organizations have rebate programs you can use to help pay for training. For us, our membership with National Comfort Institute (NCI) has a benefit where a percentage of the dollars you spend doing business with their vendor partners are rebated back to you in the form of what they call NCI Training Bucks (ncilink.com/bucks).

We do a great business and buy a lot of equipment and tools through NCI’s vendor partners. So, we earn a lot of NCI Bucks, which we use to help pay for nearly all the technical training for our team. We often use those bucks to bring trainers into our facility to train just our people. We believe that is the best way to train your entire team in the most correct methods for testing, measuring, and diagnosing HVAC system performance issues in the field.

We also do a lot of vendor training as needed for new products, new equipment, and new tools. That covers our outside training.
Like many HVAC companies, we do a lot of internal training led by the company owners as well as our service manager. Our human resources manager keeps tabs on who has done what, who needs what, and maintains all the training records. That way we have all the information necessary when applying for licenses and permits.

Our service department meets weekly and the installation crews meet daily to cover job and code issues as they come up.

Training is a Process

Training is a process that needs to be continuous for it to stick. It must be top-of-mind awareness. If you don’t regularly reinforce the importance of those processes to your people, the process will suffer. This applies not only to training itself but to other processes like sales. For example, if we aren’t always talking about maintenance agreements with our techs, they soon stop talking about them with customers. It’s out of sight, out of mind.

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