So I'm a 3 man shop and I have control issues. Im the only person who answers the phone and returns customer calls. I start my installations @ 10am and try to shut it down by 4pm (no lunch). I can never answer the phone during business hours as I'm always busy with the installation or proposal. So the voicemail /email/txt messages pile up.

If I can get finished up by 4 or so I can get home, eat something real quick and start listening to voicemails. I get 10+ messages a day. It can easily take a couple hours to get through all that and I'm calling customers back at 7pm and later. I usually stop calling around 8pm and finish them up the next morning.

The problem is those long days. Tonight I didn't get home until after 7pm doing an after hours service call because I'm 3 weeks out. So I went through all the messages and I haven't called anyone back yet. So tomorrow morning I have a dozen calls to return before we start again @ 10am. I can't/won't start calling until 9am so that's a problem. Some of these calls can be 20+ minutes long. I don't know what to do and this happens regularly.

How are you guys handling calls? There has to be a better way.

You identified your own fixes.
1. Stop being a control freak. Hire office lady that can handle idle chat and summarize the call and work order or sales call for you
2. If 1 can't be addressed, stop doing so many installations. Put on your PM and Sales hat and grow your business
3. Why would you not start calling until 9am? Most people are up at 7, getting kids ready for school, starting morning commute. I won't warm call before 8am, but my existing clients are more than OK with me calling my 7-7:30. By the time I arrive at their house at 8-9am, they're gone.

Don't complain about being too busy.
Talk to coach or business advisor(s) (RC?) and grow your business.

You said you are a three man shop.
Even people with control issues can usually get the crew set up and going in the morning, leaving you with time to respond to the messages and calls.
Spend an hour or two dealing with calls (Sales?) and then back to the job site to ensure everything is going well. You should still have time to deal with whatever it is you feel you are the only one that can do it.

You didn’t say what the calls are about. New sales opps? Customer issues? Very different answers for different sources of phone traffic.

And who the f starts at 10:am besides you? Text them back while driving or call back while knocking on door of your existing job asking them to wait while you do this call. Be like the rest of our f'd up society.

Really you just need to start sooner and set aside time. If too busy to run a business then you are understaffed.

Thanks for the feedback and for letting me vent. We service a very specific geographic location, a retirement community. One of my guys does hang and bangs. TV's, SoundBars and wireless HEOS systems. The other guy is my attic rat. He helps me do the audio jobs. We could probably start @ 9am but I'm not really excited about that. I'm more of a 7:30-8am alarm clock guy and exactly ZERO of my customers work. 8am return phone calls are out of the question. The calls range the full gamut from nice sales calls to can you hook up my DVD player to service issues. I'm thinking about hiring someone to manage the phone 9-5 but I HATE employees. That way when I'm done I'll have all the basic information needed to make return calls and hopefully the customers will feel better talking to a human than leaving a voicemail and hoping for a return call.

I'm not real excited about growing the business and adding additional vehicles and employees. I've been down that road before more than once. Start a nice business, making good money and decide its time to grow. Next thing you know you're doing 5 times the revenue with 10 times the drama and a minimal increase in personal income. It just not worth it. I swore I'd never do it again.

You only work in a retirement community? Last I checked those folks are up at 4 am anyway. Sounds like you’re burning a good 6 hours of prime business time.

Well, It a retirement community with 150,000 residents, 14 County clubs each with 27-36 hole championship courses , 34 Executive 9 hole courses, 150 pools, over 100 tennis courts, two polo fields, you get the point. And it's all golf cart acceptable. The unofficial motto is "A drinking community with a golfing problem". They don't wake up at 4am.

It sounds like you're suffering from death by a thousand cuts. The conventional wisdom would be:

1. Make your work more repeatable/automated.
2. Hire and train better.
3. Charge more.

If you can't solve your problems with some combination of these approaches, you may need to consider whether you have a viable business model given your lifestyle goals. This is a tough business as it is, and doing high volume with relatively low budgets for this challenging demographic is a particularly difficult place to start.

NOPE.


It sounds like your time is too valuable for certain small tasks. You'll have to use your judgement, but I'm learning to see that some things just aren't worth the time. And it may not be the one you think it is! I have one guy who bought a house from a desperate seller, and re-listed it for north of $50 million. This guy is so cheap that he won't put diesel in his backup generator and wants me to bypass the UPSs because he doesn't want to buy new batteries. That guy is getting cut off.

Also, it sounds silly, but earbuds. I love those stupid Apple earbuds with the mic and volume button. Talk and drive, talk and work, talk and climb up a ladder and carry stuff... I noticed that when I hold the phone, I STOP. So I don't hold the phone anymore.

So that's why you start so late. The Villages. So many old gays having to tend to their sore buttholes the next morning.

Charge more, period.
Let clients back out because they can't afford you.

Start raising prices slowly or rapidly, your choice.

My buddy here doubled his hourly prices few years ago.
Now he literally can work half the time for same money.

Benefits are exponential because with half the installs he gets half of warranty calls. Also, higher hourly rates mean clients can afford better gear. Better gear, hopefully means more stable systems.

YMMV

+1
Tom,
I am not sure if it was your company that was featured in one of the CE magazines or someone else with the same business plan but I remember reading it and thinking that it sounded like a service call nightmare. Selling the lowest priced, lowest margin, least reliable products, to the toughest customers, is a good way to go crazy and bankrupt at the same time. If you want to stay in that part of the market you need to treat it like an IT firm. Do big volume and make all the money on service. You will need dedicated service people who just handle the phone calls and spend all day fixing problems. For you to remain profitable the cost to the client will not be cheap (guessing $125+ an hour) and I think it will be shocking to older clients. Have a yearly service plan that includes up to x number of hours and a charge for additional hours, that way they will know that this will be an ongoing expense. Otherwise you will get a reputation of doing systems that don’t work and charging people to make them right.
If you want to stay small you have to move to higher priced, high margin, reliable, repeatable systems. Sell lighting and shade control, a control system, quality network, and performance audio, all from established players who make more reliable gear. Don’t do any IOT garbage or client supplied gear. You need to have repeatable core systems that are profitable and easy to service. Set the base package in every category and don’t go below that. Clients who can’t pay for even the base package upfront are the ones that will complain most about the bill to service the system in the future.

I'm sorry, I can't get past:

We could probably start @ 9am but I'm not really excited about that. I'm more of a 7:30-8am alarm clock guy and exactly ZERO of my customers work. 8am return phone calls are out of the question.

I don't know a single successful business owner that sleeps in until 7 am. The bulk of my work is in a vacation home community. My clients (well, a large percentage of them, anyway) are only here on their time off. Whether they're in town, or their normal residence, phone calls start between 7:30 and 8 am. Install/service call start times are ONLY delayed by access to the home: if a property manager is my gatekeeper, I have to wait for them, so sometimes 9 am is the earliest. I avoid that if at all possible in order to start as early as possible. I guess if you can make those hours work, the more power to you, but it sounds like you want less work all around.



^^^^This. 100% I love the Apple earbuds for this very reason. Can't stand BT earpieces. I can multi task well enough to carry on a phone call while working. My clients appreciate that I almost always answer, and if I don't, I call back relatively quickly.

^^^^^ This