As a bowling coach I find myself looking at statistics all the time. Looking over what my team just did over the weekend compared to our opponent and the other teams in our district. Number crunching, figuring out what’s working and what isn’t, what I can change. 

While some days seem to be never ending with stats, it’s a good thing to have handy and review. It does help in making game-time decisions, knowing who is best on different oil patterns or who is having an off week.

It can be the same for a plumbing company too. You could determine what your crews could use training on. Are you getting more calls for water heater repairs than fixture replacements, maybe spend more time on water heater training. Do you get customers calling more from one area of town than the other, perhaps spending more advertising dollars in that area that isn’t getting as much. 

Number crunching can be a headache, but you’ll see it in almost anything you do these days. If you aren’t already keeping track of some of this stuff for your business, it’s a good time to open that laptop and start figuring out some stats that can help you.

WHAT TO TRACK

Business stats can be determined based on your specific market, company size, location and so on. By having baseline stats to track performance, companies have a better understanding of what is going in their area and in the larger industry opposed to just their company.

The stats can help determine the effectiveness of a certain advertising campaign, service offering or even service area. It’s important to know early on what you should be tracking and how. 

Here are three simple things that you can track as far as your plumbing company:

Inventory: It should be a given that many of you are already doing this. If you aren’t, you should be. It’s the easiest way to know what your team is using and if you should keep more of that product on hand or not. It would also be good to know why it’s being used. Do you see more of a certain item used in one time of the year than the others? This is how you can figure that out.

Advertising: Keep track of where you spend your advertising dollars — social media, television, radio, newspaper, yellow pages, etc. Knowing this and asking customers where they found you is extremely valuable to your company in knowing where to spend money and where not to. 

Customer Calls: It sounds weird, but you can track customer calls. More specifically, what type of services are being requested. This way you can see if you should be devoting more time to certain staff training or the possibility of adding services if you continually get requested to do something you don’t offer (like HVAC work).

NUMBER CRUNCHING

You don’t need fancy software to track this stuff. If you or someone at the office is tech savvy, all you need is a spreadsheet software, like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. Create categories and fill them in whenever you get a call or go out on a job. Make it a regular thing to do after customer interactions or job service calls and it’ll become a habit.

There are plenty of resources online and throughout some past business features in Plumber magazine to help determine what you could be keeping track of with your company. Just start with one and see how it helps and ease into the others.  

This article was originally posted April 2023.