To be a world class company admired for the excellence that customers, franchisees and associates experience with Dwyer Group . OUR VISION
OUR MISSION
To teach our principles and systems of personal and business success so that all people we touch live happier and more successful lives.
Making our Business
Bigger and Better
Mike Bidwell, President and Chief Executive officer, Dwyer Group®
W e continue to remain busy at Dwyer Group® working to make our business bigger and better. Bigger comes from the acquisitions we have completed, the new franchisees that we recruit into our system and our franchisees’ ability to in- crease their business (same store sales). We launched Neighborly™ in April of this year to assist you with your ability to increase your pool of customers while also reducing your customer acquisition expense. This is a double win – grow sales while reducing your cost. We intend for Neighborly to also improve your ability to retain customers by reducing customer defection and shorten purchase service cycle time. This should further enhance growth and profitability. Next, you must be able to service the additional work associated with the increased sales. We have continued to refine and enhance the RAREtoolbox resources, features and functionality. Turnover is expensive, both in lost revenue and reduced produc- tivity during on-boarding of new (replacement) staff. A well-trained and happy staff generates higher pro- ductivity. This is straightforward stuff, but executing at a high level is not something most companies do. We have been focused on this same concept for our business at Dwyer Group . We also need to reduce employee churn so we can be more productive. Productivity is driven by better efficiency and effec- tiveness (you can have one without the other, which is not what we are after). We have made significant commitments to our internal People Services group by adding several new positions. Over the last year or so, we have hired four HR professionals with advanced degrees and functional experience. Before that, we had none at that level. The result – a 30 percent improve- ment in our year on year turnover results.
We achieved these results by first being inten- tional and making a commitment. We enhanced the sourcing/recruiting/hiring process, the job design process, the on-boarding/training process and the cultural experience. At the same time, working with an HR consulting firm, we did also enhance our benefits where they identified we were not market. It is important to note that wages were not otherwise adjusted – those generally came out okay in the study. The point of emphasis here is to highlight the importance of the things other than wage. People will not stay for wage alone. You must be in the right range, but then you must do the other types of things I referenced above. I recently read a study (forward- ed to me by one of those professionals I referenced) that stated most employees that leave within the first year of hire effectively had made the decision to leave within the first week of employment, regardless of when they ultimately leave. For me, all of this reinforces the importance of paying more attention to recruiting and retention. Our work with the RAREtoolbox is one of our greatest priorities. As an additional enhancement, we are now working to brand the employment experience in a Neighborly or Dwyer service brand franchise. As always, we work to expose best practices into our system. We have been working on other wiring in the background at Headquarters as well. We are staying focused on improving our capabilities, always with an eye to enhance our value proposition to our franchise owners.
PIPELINE® | EDITION 2 2017 3
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