Sitting at one of my favorite Downton Indy work spots, I couldn’t help but notice same really poor panting had recently taken place. I started to ask myself, what if this was our team that did this? How would I want my customer to respond? Unfortunately, we see too much of this and most building owners and facility managers probably just chalk it up to “well, it’s bad, but most people won’t notice” or “we’ll fix it next year during our repaint.” This is problematic on a few levels.
First, if you paid a reputable contractor a fair contract price, you owe it to your company to get better results than that. Second, you aren’t doing any favors to the company you hired or to their crew who underperformed. Every company will experience a “bad” job, even good companies because we are human and we tend to skip steps in our quality assurance program when we get overbooked. If it was my team that did this, I’d want to know. First, our company has standards and we want to be held accountable to those standards. Acceptable is just another word for minimally okay. We like to think we are better than that and if we are continually let off the hook by sub standard work, that will then become the standard for an Indiana Painting job.
Second, as an owner, I want to understand how our company is performing – especially when things aren’t going well. We are in the business of improving things. We improve your property and we constantly are improving our services and performance so we can serve you better. Can you imagine the momentum we’d have and the incredible service that companies could offer if we all worked toward becoming just .5% better today than we were yesterday? Over a year that would be 175% better than we were last year. And that doesn’t capture the compounding nature of investments.
Finally, we are all created in God’s image. The implications of this are far reaching. We all see really good service or a really good product and we understand the feeling. It is the feeling you get when someone is living within their God given role and reaching their potential. There is no feeling quite so good and the joy and the urging for better that it brings to others is really phenomenal. Now let’s see the problems and what we would want if this was on one of our projects.
My point to this article is not to shame a building owner or another contractor, far from it. My purpose is to let you know that if you paid a decent price for this job, you should expect better for your sake, the end user’s sake, and the sake of your contractor. As the business owner, I would want to be called right away. I am proud of our work and proud of our team’s consistently pushing for improvement. Misalignment is always more demoralizing when you see it a year after the project was completed! We don’t require perfection, but we require ourselves to get as close to it as we are capable of in that moment. We have a sign in our office that reads “Do your job!” Perhaps we should add to it “Then do your job better.”
