couldn’t trust.” “We brought new people in,” he continues. “We brought in people who are more customer service focused. We brought in people who are focused on delivering a product and a service with pride; as opposed to people who just want to work their shift and try to get paid for doing as little work as possible.” One adjustment that made a huge difference, Neil explains, is they stopped allowing team members from just going and buying product from paint stores without going through an approval process. They started tracking those trips, and they found that some people were going to the stores five times a day. “They would just drive back and forth and get paid for being completely unproductive,” he says. “That doesn’t just hurt us. That hurts our customers. When productivity goes down, projects take longer, and then we get behind.” So they introduced more accountability, Neil reiterates, and they replaced team members they discovered were previously taking advantage of the company. But they didn’t just crack down on employees who were doing the wrong things – just as importantly, they also started rewarding employees who were doing the right things. “When people were doing great jobs, we started to reward them, and people saw they were getting rewarded,” he says. The company has also strived to keep things fun, Neil adds. That’s also important. They believe they can have a culture where people are accountable while still enjoying coming to work. “For example, we do push-ups in our office,” he explains. “If anyone comes into our office late, its three push-ups for every minute they were late. When they’re really late, it’s usually because they were doing something important for our customer, and in those cases we share the push-ups together. The partners will get down on the floor too. If someone’s an hour late and we have to do 180 push-ups, we’ll take turns doing the push ups until we get the whole 180 on. So it’s a little bit of health and exercise, a little bit of team building, and it also keeps things quite fun.” Customers have noticed, Neil says. Within four-to-fivemonths of their culture shift, he says “customers told us we were an unrecognizable company from what they had experienced before.” New customers, meanwhile, have also given the company exceptional feedback: “What they tell me is that they appreciate us,” he says. “They appreciate that we do what we say we’re going to do, we do it when we say we’re going to do it, and we do it for the price we say we’re going to do it for.” That success has also been reflected in sales. Again, Neil says this has been a “record year” for the company commercially. “We’re only bidding somewhere around 50 to 60 per cent of the total bid value that we’ve bid in the past few years,” he explains. “But we’re winning approximately one in every five bids, and we’re working with the same customers over and over and over again. Our profitability is up. We’re way back in the black. As I mentioned, we lost more than a million dollars last year – now it looking like we’re going to be able to pay back all the losses from last year within just this one year.” NOVEMBER 2022
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