SMB Case Study: Getting a bird’s eye view of operations with ServiceMaster of Salem

ServiceMaster Restore is a nationally franchised business that specializes in restoring residential and commercial properties after disaster strikes. Their specialties include remediating water, mold, fire, and weather damage. 

Brian Greer is the owner and operator of four ServiceMaster Restore franchises in Oregon, located in Salem, Eugene, Corvallis, and Lincoln City. To run a complex business — at four unique locations! — Brian needed a way to get his team organized and on the same page. He implemented EOS® a few years ago, and recently made the switch to Strety as his EOS® platform. We spoke to Brian about how his business operating system to keep growth on track and to keep his team on the same page.

How did your team get started with EOS®?

I was researching different management styles, and the biggest focus for me was meetings. I felt like we were having really bad meetings — we were meeting to meet. And I hate that. I'm very passionate about it. If we don't have anything to talk about, let's not be here. It’s such a waste of time.

So I started with some research on meetings and found the book Traction by Gino Wickman. I read it, had my management team read it, and we said, “Yep, this is what we want to do.” 

I decided to implement myself, because I had the time. We have taken the approach of starting with our leadership team, getting that up and running and getting comfortable with the process, and then we've continually moved it further down the organizational chart. We're at the point now where basically only our production technicians are not using EOS®/Strety at this point. But I wouldn't be surprised as we get them a little better on Teams and everything else that we move in that direction too.

How has your team tracked your EOS® implementation?

Initially, we were trying to track everything EOS® in MS Teams, using a variety of meeting notes and Excel spreadsheets. We basically built a template inside of One Note within Teams, and then just followed the steps of a Level 10 meeting, and we used Excel to track the scorecard data and numbers, things like that. 

About a year and a half ago, I jumped onto a new software to run EOS®, which was our first time using a platform for our EOS® implementation. 

How was your experience using your initial platform for your implementation?

What I didn't like about the first platform we used is that it was very rigid. A lot of it wasn't very customizable. It felt like — this is the way and the only way. And I didn't necessarily like that, because it doesn't always fit every aspect of our business. 

It was pretty easy to use for, say, a leadership team meeting and a leadership team. But as we started to branch out within our organization, it became a little bit cumbersome for some of my teams that don't meet weekly, or have metrics that aren’t really measured every week. It just is kind of clunky in that way. It definitely was an upgrade from using Teams and making our own templates, but I thought it could have been much easier, more user-friendly.

Another thing that slowed us down was that you couldn't store things. For example, if I wanted to put in a headline or a to do, I couldn't add a document that we could reference within it. We'd have to go back into our OneDrive to find a document, or even to put notes. 

How did you get started with Strety?

Before we started paying for a platform we wanted to make sure it really was the best option out there. I had seen Strety before, and at that point, I thought I need to research it, because to me, it looked like the best program available. 

Like in every industry, there's an app for every different part of your job, and we're trying to limit how many things people have to log into to do certain things. And so before we jump into it, we want to make sure it's doing what we need it to do. I had also seen Traction Tools (aka Bloom Growth) in the marketplace. But when I looked at Strety, it had a lot of the things that I thought would be more beneficial. 

I love the fact that Strety is integrated within Teams, which we try to use throughout our whole organization. That integration immediately checked the box of lightening the load of log-ins for our team. 

In our organization there are things that don’t make sense to track weekly. It may need to be monthly. It may even need to be annually. Our business is definitely a marathon versus a sprint, and so I need the ability to track those things differently.

What intrigued me is that Strety is customizable, and that the Strety team is receptive to feature requests and continually developing the platform. I felt like the other tools were a little more rigid — they imply that there is only one way to run EOS®, and you have to do it their way.

What are the biggest differences you see in using Strety versus your previous platform?

Strety is a lot more customizable and flexible. It’s much easier and more user-friendly to add documents and notes to things within Strety, making it easier to stay in the platform and not jump around through One Drive while we’re meeting.

We definitely have a lot more teams and meetings set up now that we’re in Strety. We have a lot more people involved in using it weekly, in addition to having more consistency around monthly and quarterly meetings that need to happen. We also really like the feature that some of the scorecards actually merge up and add up and can go into different groups. It's just easy to use. I'm trying to get my people to use Teams as much as possible, and the fact that you're in Teams and you get to jump on Strety and do that part of your job is great.

Speaking of the team, how did they adapt to Strety? Was there a big learning curve? 

Adoption was very easy. Since we’ve started using Strety, there’s been much more engagement and people are actually putting in more numbers. They're building their scorecards. We have a lot of data that we can go and access through all the different teams.

I think we're definitely more aligned as a whole on EOS® principles. I think the cadence of our meetings has been more and more consistent, and we’re also more consistent about the data being entered prior to a meeting. People come prepared to the meetings, consistently tracking all this information ahead of time, so the meetings are more efficient. 

In the past, in our organization, I always felt like I was reporting down to people — I would be the one researching and reporting data out to people down, down, down. Now our reporting has moved up — people have their numbers, and their numbers build upon the person, their supervisor and their supervisors numbers. So now, a lot of that reporting is coming to me, and it's coming to my senior leadership, and so that's been great. They're not in charge of grabbing that information; they're getting it fed to them by their people. I think it's a huge, huge benefit for us. And honestly, when you give people numbers and you track it, they figure out a way to get it done. 

How has your business changed since you started using Strety?

There's been a multitude of changes. I think our sales accountability has improved. Our sales team’s a lot more accountable for their touches and their sales performance, because their metrics are evaluated every week. They know they have to hit certain numbers, and if they don't, they better be ready to explain why they didn't.

We have better visibility as far as our processes go — how they're working and how we're doing as a business. In the past, we'd wait till the last two, three days of the month to build something, to invoice everything at once, and we go, “Gosh, I hope this is a really good month.” Now, we know what's in our pending sales. We know what's projected for the month's billing. It's given us a lot more projection tools, and I think, really, it's helped keep people accountable in a positive way. I know people often look at accountability as a negative, but it's not. I think our team likes it, and it gives them something to strive for.

Our meetings sucked, and now they're very good. They're very structured; just about every meeting we have follows the L10 format, and it’s so nice to be able to customize each one. I also love the Tangent button in Strety, because we can get on tangents. And we always laugh when that tangent bird comes across the screen. It gets us back on track in a fun way. 

The famous Strety Tangent Alert.

One of the other things I like is using the Strety homepage as my dashboard. Instead of going to a different platform, everything's just in my Strety home. There's my To do's, there's my Issues — it's all just right there for me. 

Has Strety helped you gain more visibility into your business?

Running one business that’s located in four places can obviously be challenging — you can’t be everywhere at once. And different locations have different needs. 

Strety makes it easier for me and for our general manager to quickly home in on different metrics for different locations. For example, we can ask: “Hey, how is the water damage division in Lincoln City doing on their metrics?” I can directly go into that metric and see how their scores were last week or their 13 week trend. 

Also, our accounts receivable person handles all four locations, and I can see all the information that pertains to the company as a whole, but also can look at each branch. It's been great being able to easily combine information in together or separate it out, depending on what you need to do.

Do you and your team use that visibility to track business against your different locations or to set benchmarks?

Absolutely. When it comes to, for example, SLA performance, we may set a goal of 75 for each branch, and then we can see what each branch is doing based on that goal. The beauty of it is, say the Salem branch is hitting an SLA at 75 but the Eugene branch is at 50 — the Eugene branch manager can go to the person in charge of that SLA in Salem, and go, “Hey, how are you doing it? What are you doing differently that you're hitting those metrics?” And then they work together on it, because in the end, we're all one team.

It’s easy in Strety to streamline the permissions so managers can see everything, including other branches, and down at the technician level, they only see the things that are relevant to them. 

Do you have any advice would you have for any business owner who's thinking about implementing for themselves?

Do it. Use it. It works.

I think the biggest thing is consistency. Initially, you know, we started with that leadership team, and we started small — it was just 4 people. If I'm not in a meeting, I make sure my data is in and my management and leadership teams keep the meeting. Afterwards, I can look at all the information that happened in that meeting. They fill me in. This way we’re always moving forward. 

Thanks, Brian! To learn more about how ServiceMaster can help you restore your property in Oregon, visit their website. To get started with Strety, begin a free trial here or book a meeting here for a VIP tour of the platform.