Enhance Your Peak Season: 5 Strategies for Success

Shawna: 

People are still joining the conversation. Just a little housekeeping for you all.

Down in the bottom right hand corner of your screen, there's three little shapes.

A triangle, a square, and a circle all kind of together.

If you click on that button, there's something that says Q and A.

That's where you can type all of your questions today.

So again, I know I say, I know I say it every month, but this is a conversation. It's back and forth.

I have some insight, I have some things to chat with you all about.

But we love to hear your questions.

And I'm sure if you have a question, someone else is wondering the same thing. So don't be shy.

Type in that Q and A box if you have any questions.

I'm sure she's going to answer some questions.

So the two of us are here to answer those questions for you today.

Before we get things kicked off, I'd love to set the stage.

I think it would be weird to start the conversation without talking about just the uncertainty in the world.

There is so much uncertainty right now. People are either really excited or really nervous.

There doesn't seem to be any in between of people that are just status quo.

And so I think this, this conversation couldn't have come at a better time.

We're talking about efficiency.

And I think that when things are uncertain or we're unsure of what's going on or what's to come, panic leads us to make sometimes rash decisions.

And I just want to remind us all that we now is the time where we need to protect our largest assets.

Our largest assets in a company, probably your company, are your people.

Number one, we've got to protect our people, make sure that they have a paycheck, that they feel supported, that they feel valued.

And number two is probably your inventory valuation.

When we put those two numbers on your P and L, they're, they probably outshine everything else from a large degree.

The three kind of main pillars of your business we're going to cover today are Your warehouse, your service department and your retail store.

So, kicking things off, let's chat about your warehouse. Last month we talked all about back office.

If you missed that conversation, just go to eversys.com and check our blog.

The recording is there and you can watch that.

But for your back office, we said the back office is really the backbone of your company, which is what I believe.

Well, your warehouse is the heartbeat of your company. Everything flows in and out of the warehouse.

So there are so many opportunities for efficiency and quick wins in your warehouse.

So let's just jump right into it. Efficiency hack number one is movement sheets.

For those of you who haven't heard the term movement sheets before, it is a piece of paper.

We're going back old school here to paper. I know.

It's a piece of paper that is put on every single big ticket item in your warehouse. Non negotiable.

Nothing should be in your warehouse without a movement sheet.

And on that movement sheet there are three things that are most important.

Well, the first thing is the name of the customer that that big ticket belongs to.

If it doesn't belong to a customer, it could just say stock, it could say showroom in the showroom that it's going to.

Or it should say the customer's name. So one of those three things should exist.

It should say the date of arrival of when that spa or hot tub or sauna or hearth unit came in.

And then it should have the delivery date.

If it doesn't have a delivery date, then it would be blank.

If it has a delivery date, it would be on there.

And then in a perfect world, you would have the serial number on there so that you can quickly identify what is what.

When you have a lot of the same looking inventory, that's really helpful.

So the reason the movement sheet is so important and the reason it's going to help you gain efficiencies is because, I don't know, maybe I'm the only one that's walked through the warehouse trying to find a hot tub and I'm literally climbing over stacks of hot tubs and trying to squeeze behind them to find what I'm looking for.

And then you're like on the ground trying to look at the base plate to see what the serial number is.

Maybe I'm the only one. I don't think so though.

Movement sheets are so important so you can avoid that.

The idea is that you walk through your warehouse and you can quickly scan and see exactly what's going on and identify anything that needs to be Fixed anything that needs to go out.

Hey, this has a delivery date of yesterday. Can you tell me what happened there?

You know, maybe your warehouse manager is like, oh, no, actually they ended up getting a different hot tub.

Okay, well then this is available.

We need to make sure that the salespeople in the retail store know it's available so they can sell it.

And we're not sitting on inventory for a long period of time.

So movement sheets are efficiency hack number one.

Efficiency hack number two in your warehouse is checking your negative quantities.

This is definitely software related.

This is something we talk about a lot in our client success department.

But it's really important that you check those negative quantity on hand daily.

If you do not check these regularly, they turn into a monster and it's going to take one person days to fix them.

So sticking on top of it daily, it's kind of like cleaning your house.

Like just, just do the dishes daily and they won't ever pile up to be overwhelming.

And you can check your quantity, your negative quantity on hand via the inventory tile.

So super easy do check those daily.

Efficiency hack number three is having an ops call, or what I'd call an operations call weekly.

Now this call is really helpful to get everybody together.

And again, when I talk about meetings, when I talk about having touch bases and calls, they're not long, 15, 20, 30 minutes.

That is going to save you a lot of time in the long run.

So don't schedule these long winded meetings and calls just for fun.

Make sure that you have the right amount of time and that the conversation is very pointed and direct because you're pulling in resources for this.

But on this ops call weekly, you would have your warehouse manager or whoever oversees your inventory.

You'd have somebody from your service department, either your lead technician or your service manager, and then anybody else who makes key decisions like a purchasing manager, a delivery coordinator.

Just make sure you have all the right people.

And then if you have retail stores, make sure you have a, a point of contact at each retail store.

In my world, it was whoever was opening that day would jump on the ops call.

We knew who it was, they were positioned in the right way.

They knew exactly what they were going to talk about.

And on this ops call, you're talking about everything that goes unnoticed and turns into a fire.

So in a showroom, let's pretend that I'm the salesperson in the showroom and I'm on the ops call and I'm like, hey, Shannon.

Yeah, thanks for asking me what I need in the showroom.

It looks like we are completely out of enzyme, so I'm definitely going to need that.

Just want to make sure that's going to be on my replenishment order this week.

We have two light bulbs out near the back of the showroom. Looks kind of dingy.

I have one ceiling tile that looks like it has water on it, so we should probably get that checked out.

And I need toilet bowl cleaner for the bathroom. That's how the conversation goes.

Hot tip for you guys, if you do replenishments to your showrooms, which you probably do, you have to transfer inventory and bring inventory into those showrooms regularly.

Schedule this call the day after those replenishment orders are due.

That way the warehouse manager can have any major call outs like, hey, Shannon, I noticed you asked for enzyme.

We're completely out of enzyme in the warehouse, so you're not going to receive that this week.

Is there something that you need instead or. The unicell filter order is backordered.

Just giving them a heads up on what to see, what's going to come. Any major call outs?

They're going to be doing fire alarm testing next week in your showroom.

Just a reminder, make sure you're ready for that.

It's just a really good pause during the week to make sure the back office, the sales department, the warehouse service manager, everybody's really aligned on just those sort of boring things that don't get talked about enough.

So that when somebody from leadership walks into a showroom, they're not asking, why is this light burned out and why are they stealing?

Well, we have a leak. That's a big problem, right?

That just doesn't happen because you're getting ahead of it. So.

Moving on to service. Service is definitely a hot topic. Lots of efficiency to be had.

And I'm not going to go over the basics that you guys probably already know, like efficiency in your routing.

Make sure you're not be bopping people around town.

I love the idea of not giving promise times, so I'm not going to give.

I'm not going to give those more obvious things though. We were more than happy to chat about that.

If you guys would like to know Those So efficiency hack number four for our service department is going to be home garaging.

Before you guys freak out on me and say like no way, just hear me out for a minute.

Home garaging is, it's a privilege. It's not expected.

It's definitely not something that I would have a new hire do.

This is something that is reserved for my senior technicians, people who have proven their trustworthiness and people who have proven that they deserve that opportunity.

And it's good for the customer, the company and the coworker.

So that's a huge win. I don't know.

In any major metropolitan area, that can be an hour, an hour and a half drive that you're wasting in the car not helping customers.

So they're going from their home directly to the first job site of the day.

And in lieu, what's really cool is you can change your starting location based on the technician.

So if you have two technicians at home garage, you put in their home address as their starting location and then when you hit optimize route that's integrated with Google maps, it will optimize it based on their home starting location instead of the warehouse.

So that's your efficiency hack number four is home garaging. Just think about it, consider it.

It might not be for everybody, but it sure does help if it works for your business.

Efficiency hack number five from a service standpoint is probably something that Louis it's like number one efficiency hack in Lou and that is mass invoice and pay.

So with three clicks of a button, three button clicks, you can invoice all of the jobs, take payment for all of the jobs, and send your digital door hanger receipt for all of the jobs.

So with three clicks, you can literally invoice, pay and Send receipt for 3 thousands of jobs at a time.

This could save you potentially days, depending on how many jobs you guys do in a day, how many technicians you have, what your service department really looks like.

It saves you so much time.

And I just want to say that when you, when you're thinking about mass invoice and pay.

You really need business process that supports it.

So creating a rule within your business that we do not dispatch without a card or a payment method on file.

That has to be lined in the sand for this to work really well for you.

Make sure that when somebody calls in, we're like, great.

Sally Jo, it looks like we're going to be in your area on Thursday.

We're going to get somebody out to take care of you. Super excited to get you back into your pool.

Which card would you like to put on file for. For that service?

And if they're like, I don't, I don't know, I want to pay with a check, no problem.

We can do that through the customer portal. But there's solutions for everything, right?

Just making sure you have some sort of payment method on file before you dispatch so that we can quickly invoice, take payment and get people moving.

And then efficiency act number six, this is the bonus tip for you, is for your retail and your sales department.

And efficiency hack number six is going to be dynamic kits.

I know that that probably just sounds like lingo.

Dynamic kits are built by you, by your company within Lou software.

And they are a series of questions that lead to basically a variety of different inventory skus.

So we can use the example of hot tubs.

Well, I want a Jacuzzi J345 in platinum and silverwood.

I know those are old colors, but I want that hot tub. This is the COVID that I want.

This is the lifter that I want. These are the steps that I want.

What's really cool about dynamic kids, I could geek out on them all day.

You're never going to deliver the wrong sub panel.

Your salesperson is never going to put the wrong sub panel on an order because you've identified what sub panel goes with that hot tub and it's built into the system.

So bulletproof there. Your salesperson's never going to put the wrong lifter on a hot tub.

Oh, man, that lifter's too small for that hot tub that doesn't fit. That's not going to work.

No more delivery crews in people's backyards with the wrong lifter.

It's going to get your salespeople back responding to that next lead.

We want them doing the least amount of admin data entry as possible. This will do that.

And, and this will save your warehouse and delivery crews a ton of time from just errors, double checking orders, double checking manufacturer suggestions for what goes with what you've already done.

All of that, you've spent a day, you've had a kit making party, I'll call it.

You've whiteboarded all of this out and you've put all the data in.

So it's just rinse and repeat from there.

So efficiency hack number six is dynamic kits in your software. Super important, super important.

Okay, before we move on, stick around.

We're going to do Q and A really quick and then after that I have some just rapid fire efficiency hacks for you and then we'll wrap things up.

Shannon, I'm going to pass it over to you. Do you have any questions on the line?

Shannon:

We have a couple. One question.

What opportunities are there within Lou that can streamline and make management of accounts receivable more effective?

Shawna: That's a really good question. So number one is cards on file.

So just getting ahead of accounts receivable so you're not chasing money, putting those cards on file is really important.

And then with our integrated payment solution, there is, there's an option to pay, it's a small monthly fee and it basically will scan in the background for any new expiration dates.

So if you have cards on file that are expired, it will scan in the background and update those expiration dates for you so you don't have to make phone calls to customers saying, hey, I have your card on file, but it looks like this one expired.

So I think that's a big efficiency hack for chasing accounts receivable.

There's also the customer portal which is great for accounts receivable.

So going through maybe your aging AR report on a weekly basis.

I'm a big fan of like cash flow type meetings with your executive level team, going through that and saying who owes us money?

And going through and shooting them off a customer portal link with a little message saying, hey, you owe us this money.

And then there's some different terms within Lou where you can put different messages for 30 days past due, 60 days, 90 days, so on from there.

Shannon, do you have anything to add on that topic?

Shannon:

No, I mean, I think those are all great suggestions.

And Lou allows you to collect multiple deposits on a single order.

So you could effectively do a type of progressive billing in collecting those deposits on orders.

That can help as well.

There's all kinds of ways like that to just be proactive and make sure that it's seamless and easy for your customers and you.

Shawna:

Yeah, that's a good recommendation.

Shannon:

We also have a question now.

Where can we get some information on that expiry program for the credit cards?

Shawna:

Yeah, so our financial services team can help you with that. You.

You might already have it, but if you don't, they can set you up.

I think it's pretty simple for them. Just email efsav assist.com and they can make sure.

Just call it exactly how I explained it.

They'll know the name and they'll make sure to get you set up. Yeah.

Shannon:

Then we had a comment come in that says what has really helped their AR is to put the invoice due date in the subject line of an invoice email.

While you do manually have to do that, it is another way to just give a visual cue to your customers of when something's due.

Shawna:

Yeah, that's such good advice. And I know for myself as a consumer, that always helps me.

When you get millions of spam emails a day, it's nice to be able to skim and see what needs your attention.

Shannon:

Yeah, they're also asking mass invoicing. Does that only work for recurring orders?

Shawna:

Yeah, mass invoices. Mass invoicing is designed to only work for reoccurring orders.

So if you have something that needs to be mass invoiced, you could set it up as a reoccurring order, assuming that it is that.

But for big ticket items or things that are one off, those will need to be just invoiced.

You can still take payment really quickly right there with the card on file, but you can't do vast amounts of them at once.

Shannon:

That's it for right now.

Shawna:

Cool. All right, well, thanks, Shannon.

If you guys have any more questions, type them in the Q and A box.

We'll circle back to those at the very end. Let's go into rapid fire.

If you don't have your pencil or your pen out or your little notes on your iPhone, get those out.

Now, I'm going to shout some stuff out to you, and if you guys have any questions about details behind it, just let us know.

Number two, rip the tops off your boxes so that you can quickly see what's inside of them.

Yes, I'm literally saying that when you open a box and you have those four flaps, rip them off, cut them off so that you can quickly see inside.

Number three, only open one box at a time.

You have a case of chlorine, you're only opening one and you have all the rest of them stacked behind, fully taped, not open at all.

Do not open multiple boxes at one time. Makes your physical inventory count way easier.

I lost track of where I'm at, but next one Load service trucks with case quantities.

No onesie twosies allowed. Review and update your reorder alerts annually.

They're not going to update for you, so you need to take a moment. Pause.

We talked about it in the last webinar.

Go back and review those notes if you'd like to, but review your reorder alerts annually and last one Stage your spas.

Stage your big ticket. What's going out tomorrow. It needs to be staged.

You should not be pulling all of the accessories and chemicals and pellets and all of that.

The day of that is so frantic.

That probably stresses your warehouse people and delivery guys out a ton.

So let's save them the stress.

Stage the stuff the day before, the week before, or even better when it comes in.

All right, that's what I have for rapid fire. If you have any questions, let us know.

I'm just going to recap really quickly what we kind of talked about in today's conversation.

So number one, efficiency hack movement sheets in your warehouse.

Number two, check and rectify your negative quantity on hand daily

Number three, have a weekly ops call with your team. Number four, consider home garaging.

Number five, mass invoice and pay on all those reoccurring orders.

And bonus number six, dynamic kits for your sales.

If you guys have any questions, please let us know if this was helpful to you or you feel like you could benefit from more conversations like this.

Again, we do offer training, both business training and software training.

For more information, just let us know.

You can email us@louvasis.com or supportavasys.com and we will get you into the right hands.

We can set up a discovery call to figure out what would be most helpful for your business and then to see Lou if you'd like to see Lou.

If you're not already on Lou, let us know. We can set up a custom one on One demo for you.

We will walk you through the software step by step and we'll take these business processes that we talked about and show you how they pertain and how they work within Lou.

How Lou will help you become more efficient.

And then lastly, keep an eye out for an email in your inbox within the next 24 hours of this recording.

You can share it with your coworkers or anybody else that you know that that might find this conversation helpful.

And keep an eye out. To register for next month's webinar, we have a special guest from Bio Lab.

Super exciting. We're going to be really talking a lot about sales, optimizing the sales processes.

And that Webinar is on May 7 if you want to pencil that into your calendars.

Now before we all leave for today, Shannon, any final questions in the Q and A box?

Shannon:

Yeah, we just have a couple here. So we've talked a lot about efficiencies.

What suggestions do you have to get employees wanting to put in the time up front to make those efficiencies work?

Shawna:

Yeah, this is going to sound super cliche, so sorry, but it's fine. Real.

I think it's so important for people to know the why and to be bought into us as leaders.

People work for people. That's how you gain loyalty. That's how you gain hard work.

People, people want to feel like they're working towards a common goal.

We are team players generally. Like we're as humans, we're built to be in community and on a team.

So explaining to people the why. I'm a big fan of having company wide meetings regularly.

Maybe they're quarterly where you bring everyone together, they're sitting in the room and you talk through how each department impacts the next and why that's so important.

Right. When I tell you we need to have a card on file before we dispatch, why is that important?

Why would a salesperson care about that? Well, they care about that because. Because we don't.

How would you feel if you were a service technician and you went out on site and you did all this hard work and that revenue didn't show, you didn't get credit for it, you didn't get credit for the work because it was never paid.

I think we all want to work for a company that we feel like is going to be in business for a long time.

So I think that's really important. Like you really impacting the company. Right.

So explaining the why is really important.

Getting them bought into it and putting it in a way that makes something about their job easier.

People can't just work harder and harder all the time.

So those are just a few of my tips, but I'm sure there's some better ones out there as well.

Shannon:

And then also, what are some of the automated reports that are available in LOU that help business owners and managers run their companies?

Shawna:

There are so many.

There are over 300 reports in Lou and we also have just launched Lou analytics that will work really well for some people.

Lou analytics will include an executive summary.

So very high level overview, 30,000ft of your business. And then there's also an open orders report.

Super helpful. Some reports that come to mind are best selling SKUs.

Looking at that report regularly and making sure you're stocking what's selling. That's awesome.

Invoices with skews details is really helpful.

I already mentioned it, but your aging AR report is something you should be looking at regularly and like physically highlighting.

I like to print those sort of things and highlight them.

And your inventory valuation is of course super important.

Shannon:

I would throw in the negative quantities report too.

Shawna:

Definitely.

Shannon:

And then the last question is how do we automate the AR process to collect money up front?

We kind of talked about this a little bit already, but they're asking specifically about getting rid of those paper invoices and statements.

Shawna:

Yeah, card on file. Card on file. Card on file.

Taking deposits up front and then you can just apply the deposit to the order.

If it's not a reoccurring order that you can mass invoice and pay. Just take those deposits.

Don't deliver anything without payment in full.

I think that this is a, is a process that gets lost sometimes.

Like, well, they said they're going to pay and like no big deal, but truly like discipline.

We do not deliver without payment in full.

My policy as a business owner would be at least 72 hours prior.

And if we don't have it 72 hours prior, we're going to reschedule your delivery.

And if we don't have it 24 hours prior, there's a late cancellation fee.

So like putting those things in place, money talks.

Shannon:

Yeah. And we also can email statements.

Shawna:

Yeah. And train people to use their customer portal.

They have a customer portal that has all of the information that's relevant to them.

It's really like a little customer database. So encourage people to use it.

Shannon:

Yeah, totally. And looks like that's it for our questions for now.