Summer Roundup

With so many having recently returned from summer holidays, Sarah recaps the highlights from our podcast episodes this summer so you can be sure to go back and check out what you missed!

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro.

This episode is going to be a little bit different than our normal format. I do not have a guest with me today. And this is going to be a bit of a summer roundup. I recognize that a lot of people have been on vacation or holiday, whichever your preferred term is, throughout the last couple of months. And I also realized that sometimes with a content platform that produces content on a weekly basis, not everyone catches everything. And so I wanted to do a roundup of some of the summer highlights because there have been some guests on that I certainly would not want anyone to miss. So you can use this episode as a way to have a quick listen at some of the guests we've had and the key points that they've covered. And then if those sound interesting to you can go back and check out those individual episodes.

So we're going to start with podcast number 174, which featured James Galloway, who is the head of product marketing for commercial in the UK and Ireland at BDR Thermea Group. So one of the brands that BDR owns is Baxi Heating and James was on to talk about the process that Baxi has gone through, or is going through, introducing heat as a service. And so he shares openly where they're at on that journey, what some of the challenges have been and what they have left to do and what some of the lessons learned are.

He brings up the point that it's very much a business transformation, and even though it's referred to as heating as a service, so we think of service and service transformation, it's a journey that wouldn't be possible if it wasn't perceived internally as an entire business transformation.

He talks a lot about how, when you're thinking about migrating toward as a service, you need to be focused on designing that offering from the outside in. He brings up a metaphor he heard once that was you design the key for the lock, not the other way around. So he also mentions that there are a lot of assumptions that need to be challenged when you're going through a change, this significant and a lot of work. But we also talk about why that work is so worthwhile, not only for Baxi itself and the impact on the business, but also for its customers as well as the environment. So it's a great episode to checkout.

The next one I wanted to talk about is episode 172, which is with author advisor and top 10 global thought leader, Frank Mattes. Frank is on to share perspective on some of the most common reasons that innovation fails, particularly when it comes to scaling innovation to drive business impact. There are so many nuggets of wisdom in the conversation with Frank. The book that Frank has written, The Lean Scaleup, he did so with a number of different organizations. So it's very much rooted in real world perspective, and that's very clear through the messages he delivers.

So he talks a lot about some of the common failure points around innovation and scaling innovation. He talks about some of the tactics that these businesses have leveraged to overcome those challenges and barriers. And he also talks about how it takes courage to innovate. So it isn't just about the right thinking or the right tools or the right management. It's also about courage. So he says it takes courage to leave a little ice, a piece of ice, where the company has lived comfortably over the last 30, 40, 50 years, and venture out into the wild, into unknown. But it's possible because some leaders recognize that little piece of ice where a company is based is getting smaller and smaller by the year. So it takes courage but it is a necessity for organizations to improve and his content is super helpful for those looking to scale innovation.

Episode 170 featured Rainer Karcher, who is the global director of IT sustainability at Siemens. And we had a great conversation about why service based businesses should be prioritizing sustainability, some of the ways to do that and what that can look like and what the future holds related to regulatory pressures and more. So, I love Rainer's passion for sustainability and the environment. He is incredibly committed to the cause. In the podcast he talks a little bit about why that is and where his passion for this topic came from. But we also talk about the fact that people approach or prioritize sustainability for different reasons. So there are people like him who are incredibly passionate about it as humans, and we all should be, but there's a lot of different reasons that we should be talking more and doing more related to sustainability.

So he talks about the fact that there are regulatory pressures. He gives some insight on what these look like not only in Europe, but across the globe. He talks a lot about how customers are coming to expect more from organizations related to their environmental initiatives. He also talks about how it factors in with public opinion and overall brand reputation. And finally, he talks about the increasing interest from investors in looking into organizations, sustainability initiatives. So there's a lot of good reasons to think more and do more related to the topic and this podcast is a great place to start.

Episode 167 features Tony Black, who is the president of service at Husky Injection Molding Systems. Tony was actually the very first podcast guest I ever had on episode number one when he was with Otis Elevator. In his role at Husky, they have recently moved to a predictive service model and he talks about some of the different facets of what this has looked like for the organization, as well as where they're headed and what will happen next.

One of the things I really like that Tony discusses is he says, it's a fallacy if you think you can kind of have magical AI and bots and automation do all of the work, it doesn't work that way. So they are leveraging all of those things, but he's very quick to point out that there is a real personal human connection component that will always be very, very important. So he talks a little bit about the tools that they are using and the approach they're taking to predictive service. But also how they're balancing that with some new roles that are building and those customer relationships nurturing those customer relationships and serving that purpose of marrying the data and the automation with the human touch. He also talks a lot about what the move to predictive means in terms of field service and that in his opinion field service onsite work will always, always, always be an important part of what they do, but how this predictive model is helping to evolve the way that they do work onsite. So there's a lot of good things in there.

Those are some episodes you should check out. We also featured a number of episodes from our Future of Field Service live tour events in the spring. Episode 169 features Jean Claude Jobard, who is the vice president for EMEA at Marmon Foodservice Technologies, and Jean Claude talks about the pace of change we're seeing in field service, how we need to become more agile. He shares his thoughts on four major trends that are shaping the future of field service, specifically what those things will look like in the three-to-five-year timeframe. That's 169. Episode 171 is from the Stockholm stop of the Future of Field Service tour and features Roel Rentmeesters, who is the VP of services at Munters.

Roel talks about some of the considerations for creating a remote service strategy. Munters deployed remote assistance at the start of the pandemic for business continuity and it has now shifted gears to examining its overall remote service strategy, how that factors in in the longer term on their journey towards servitization. That was a good conversation. Episode 173 from the Paris event is with Jean de Kergorlay, the digital buildings services director for Europe at Schneider Electric. Jean has been with Schneider Electric for 34 years, which gives him a very unique perspective, and he talks about some of the ways that despite the digital world we're living in, some of the ways we need to focus more and prioritize people.

Even though he is leading digital buildings, he is sharing his perspective on why and how our focus on people needs to continue to be a priority. In episode 175, we share a session from the Austin event. It is a session with both Katy Chandler, vice president of learning and development at DuraServ, as well as Roy Dockery, vice president of field operations at Flock Safety, about the tactics that they've implemented in their roles to not only find new talent, but to accelerate their time to value, as well as maximize retention. It's a really good conversation.

Episode 176 is also a session from Austin featuring Sonya Roshek, who is vice president of B+T Group, who talks very openly about what her experience is being one of few, if not the only woman in a series of male dominated industries and roles has been like. The intent here is to really understand what the experiences of a woman in service look like and get that firsthand perspective on what progress we've made, what progress we've yet to make to attract more women into field service. That gives you some food for thought of episodes to go back and check out and listen to and lets you know that we've been hard at work over the summer and there is much more to come this fall.

Stay tuned for a new podcast every Wednesday as always, and also stay tuned for information on the 2023 Future of Field Service Live tour. You can find more and stay up to date by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn, as well as Twitter @thefutureoffs. The Future of Field Service Podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more at ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

This is part two of a two-part article discussing some of the reasons that service innovation fails. No, it isn’t meant to be depressing – but to give some food for thought on common missteps and roadblocks so you can avoid them. If you haven’t yet read part one, do so here.

(If you refuse to read part one first, just know that the insights featured in this article are from innovation thought leaders Frank Mattes, author, advisor & founder and CEO of Lean Scaleup and Dan Toma, award-winning author of the Corporate Startup and Innovation Accounting, and co-founder of innovation advisory firm OUTCOME.)

#6: Companies Believe Innovation Will Detract from the Core Business

There’s no denying the fact that juggling the demands of today’s business while planning for the business of the future is complex. But in today’s competitive landscape, it is also necessary. What companies sometimes overlook is that, if structured well, it is possible to focus on innovation without detracting from the performance of the core business. “If you look at the broad scale, companies are investing 70% in keeping their existing products and services relevant. Modernizing them, integrating speech interfaces and touch screens. Adding in one more functionality,” explains Mattes. “That’s perfectly fine, right? But the point is that it still locks the company inside the box. If the box changes, then it becomes hard. Therefore, we need to think wisely about where and how to spend the 10% innovation budget. That’s the average for innovation that is aiming at changing the order of things.”

These metrics clarify that innovation doesn’t have to detract from the core business in terms of budget, but it also doesn’t have to detract from the core business in terms of talent. In fact, Mattes has found with many of the organizations he worked with in writing the Lean Scaleup that for a company to innovate well, it only needs a small percentage of its workforce that are geared toward innovation. “Three of my clients said, ‘Well, Frank, we don’t need 100% of our staff to be really innovative. It’s only 4%, 6%, and 12%.,’” he says. “That’s what those three companies said. Four percent was an automotive company, six percent was a bank and 12 percent was a telecommunications company. You only need a fraction of people who understand innovative ideas and how they could be translated into the machine of the day-to-day business.”

Finally, we’ve seen in companies we’ve interviewed for the Future of Field Service podcast that even when more innovative offerings are introduced – say As-a-Service – you don’t have to rush in moving away from how you serve customers with your core business. In Kaer’s story, for instance, Dave Mackerness discusses the slow transition from core business to the As-a-Service concept to transitioning entirely to Cooling-as-a-Service.

#7: Companies Fail to Scale Innovation

“It turns out, it’s quite easy to drum out ideas and do some small-scale experiments,” says Mattes. “But, when it comes to really making it big, this is where seven out of eight of big ambitions fail.” What Mattes has centered his focus on is helping companies to scale innovation because he’s found that the majority of the challenge isn’t in developing innovative ideas, but in making them work at scale within a traditional business.

“These companies have built their organization as a machine, executing the same processes over and over again. Over the years, they have fine-tuned what they need to do, doing that flawlessly and most efficiently. There’s a lot of expertise in there, creating, delivering value at scale, and earning the margins,” he describes. “The problem is, when these companies set up their innovation ambitions, they found an innovation center or a digital lab, or an incubator, accelerator, or a corporate venture builder – there are several concepts and terminologies out there. But, for the sake of simplicity, let’s say there’s a little garden where smart people can think about the future. Then you have two systems. On the one side you have your day-to-day operations. Where customers log in their orders, which are then processed. The supply chain does its work, and the stuff is being shipped and serviced out in the field, et cetera. That’s a day-to-day business. And on the other side, you get those crazy ideas. There’s no problem in that. The problem arises when you try to make those bold ideas that should change the order of things big.”

When I talk with our audience in manufacturing who see the potential in Servitization, I think many would agree with the feeling of fighting against a “machine.” And this barrier to innovation isn’t anyone’s fault – that machine is what has led the company to its success thus far. However, staying stuck within the machine can also be what keeps a company too deeply rooted in its legacy to see what’s needed to continue its success into the future.

The changes that need to be made to allow for Servitization to grow from concept to reality often fight against the nature of a proven business, which is typically very short-term numbers driven. “The management system that you have, that you need for that day-to-day business is about efficiency, productivity, short term views and no risk. Risk is not a good thing if you want to have those processes,” says Mattes. “Now the people who have been playing out in that innovation playground come and say, ‘Let’s make this big. Let’s build a factory. Let’s build processes. Let’s recruit new people to sell that new stuff.’ This really conflicts with the management system that you have for the day-to-day business.”

Hope is not lost, however. Many companies are determining how to take those innovative ideas and integrate them in a way that they can scale – and mindset can’t be underemphasized. “When you want to achieve scale, you need to have a different thinking. The thinking rooted towards the running day-to-day businesses with a monthly, quarterly, annual horizon needs to shift to look at how you leverage all the good things that you’ve built up in the last 30, 40, 100 years of your corporate history. If you look at it, there’s so much there of corporate assets and corporate capabilities that could be the foundation of that future. With new value pools and new revenue streams,” says Mattes. “Innovation isn’t a conflict about people, but a conflict about systems. You need to establish a collaboration model. You need to define what is to be done in that transitional phase. It is a phase, when the ‘blue shirt’ innovators gradually hand over the responsibility for scaling up, and then actually running it at scale to the ‘red shirts.’

#8: Leaders Lack Courage

If you think about the layers of change that adopting not only a new mindset but a shift in systems and collaborative processes means for an organization to become adept at true innovation, you begin to understand the critical role leadership plays. To lead a company through innovation, especially if it is a company that has is working to modernize beyond its legacy business, takes courage. And not only courage, but tenacity. Not every leader is willing to take on what is necessary to succeed at innovation and this is another reason we see companies lag.

“Apart from the right thinking, tools, culture, and management systems, it takes courage to leave a little sheet of ice where the company lived comfortably over the last 30, 40, 50, maybe even 100 years, and venture out into the wild. Into the unknown, because some leaders recognize that the little sheet of ice is based is getting smaller and smaller by the year,” says Mattes.

But today’s leaders have a choice. “If you don’t take your future into your own hands and future-proof the company, the forces of the market will determine your future. In many cases this will not be the better option,” cautions Mattes. “Leadership plays an essential role in here. You can have the best process with all the jumps in between, all the validation, all the technology, you might even have a set up a collaboration model. But once leadership doesn’t support it, it all cracks. If you look on our website, leanscaleup.com, there’s a visual where we say out of the many cog wheels that run in the day-to-day business, leadership is that cog wheel that takes it out and creates that environment for the unfair advantage. It’s a leadership task, and in my view, it’s THE leadership task, to answer the question, how can we win today? How can we win the now? While at the same time, future-proofing the company, creating the NEW. Everything else delineates from there.”

In my conversation with Howard Bowland of Schneider Electric, we talked a lot about the traits leaders need to spark and sustain innovation as well as the traits of those who make for a strong team to spearhead innovation in a legacy business.

#9: Short Sightedness is Fueled by Unrealistic Expectations

We discussed that the core business is structured to focus largely on the short-term. In his latest book, Innovation Accounting, Dan Toma discusses why innovation and standard accounting don’t go well together. “In innovation, we are essentially trying to build things that are not that heavy on assets and financial accounting, looking at the value of a company or value of an idea through the number of assets it employs. With innovation, we’re doing the exact opposite,” he says. And this can be a hurdle that is hard for companies to overcome, because when they seek to measure the success or failure of innovation based on their standard accounting practices, they aren’t allowing the room companies need for innovation to develop from idea to concept to value.

Toma, who has led numerous start-ups, relays what businesses looking to innovate must learn from the start-up mentality. “We sought to build a complimentary system to financial accounting, that’s able to account for early-stage innovation. If we started a startup tomorrow, we are probably not going to be profitable for the next quarter or for the next two years,” he explains. “So, we need to have a system that allows us to say, ‘Yes, this idea is going to be successful, but in the future, not now, let’s not discontinue it.’”

A measurement system for innovation that takes these points into consideration helps leaders who are supporters of innovation protect the company’s investment of time, money, and resources into seeing the process through. “Otherwise, we might fall into the classical corporate trap where we value everything through the lens of financial accounting, and guess what we’re going to do?” asks Toma. “We’re always going to prioritize the core business and investment in the core business. And we are going to do that by always putting on the back burner innovation until we actually need them. And when we need them, we’re going to be sitting there and looking at our ourselves and say, ‘Okay, so where’s the innovation that should have saved us now?’ Well, it’s nowhere to be found. Why? Because we just used the wrong metrics whenever we had to take investment decisions.”

I am not an accounting expert by any far stretch of the imagination, so I expected Toma’s book to be a struggle for me to read. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the book’s readability, due in part to the analogies and anecdotes used. “I always give this simple example: if we take our kids to a swimming competition, they have their own benchmarks for their age bracket. We are never going to evaluate a 10-year-old swimmer or a 15-year-old swimmer for the performance of somebody that just won a medal in the Olympics, because it’s just impossible for a 10-year-old to compete with a 20-year-old and be able to hit the same benchmark,” Toma describes. “So, if we do that in sports, why don’t we do it with businesses, with innovation? Why do we compare an idea that was essentially founded three months ago or three weeks ago, or three days ago with a core business that we’ve had for a hundred years? We should never do that because we’re going to be super disappointed by what we have in front of us, what we’ve learned. And because of that, we’re just going to invest in the core business.”

#10: Companies Ignore the Reality that Innovation is Iterative

Finally, we need to fight the urge toward complacency and learn to never rest on our laurels. In the digital age everything moves faster, including the need to innovate – which means companies need to build an innovative mindset, culture, and system that can work iteratively over the long term. Not every innovation will be of the disruptive sort but focusing on creating a machine that fosters creativity versus nurtures the legacy is an investment in your future.

Sarah shares what was top of mind among attendees at WBR’s Field Service Hilton Head event last week in South Carolina.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. I'm back again this week for another solo episode, two weeks in a row. This week, actually last week by the time you'll be seeing or hearing this, I've been in Hilton Head for the WBR Field Service Hilton Head event. Today, I'm going to give you a little bit of a recap on what some of the biggest themes and discussion points were at the conference. If you aren't familiar, WBR has a series of field service events. There is a variety of them. You should do a little bit of research. Typically, there's an event in Palm Springs in the spring. There's this event somewhere on the East Coast in this timeframe.

Sarah Nicastro: There's a Europe event happening towards the end of the year. There's a Field Service Medical specific event. There's a Field Service Connect event. If you're in this space and you're looking for conferences to attend and learn some things, meet with some different folks, make some new connections, it's certainly worthwhile to take a look at. I'm sure many of you are already familiar. I've been coming to these events for quite a few years, and just wanted to share with you all a synopsis of some of the themes that were most prevalent at the event this week. I'm going to pick three things that I think came up again and again and again and seem to be the focus area of a lot of conversations this week.

Sarah Nicastro: The first is all around data. We know how incredibly important data is in today's service landscape. I think the reason that it's such a prominent part of the discussion is that it impacts so many different areas of the business. It impacts the customer journey. It impacts internal decision-making. It impacts the customer value proposition. It impacts workforce performance. It impacts so many different areas. I think we're at a point where everyone has recognized the criticality of not just data, but sophisticated data and real-time intelligence, but also the importance of what you're doing with that data. I think there was a point where just being able to collect and have the data was a point of competitive differentiation.

Sarah Nicastro: We're certainly past that point, right? We're at the point where it isn't about, can you get it? You should have it. It's about what are you doing with it? There was a number of different conversations this week about that. One was a gentleman named Len from Eppendorf, who was talking about the fact that data isn't something we should be using as an organization just to drive costs down, but also to drive revenue up, right? To think a little bit differently about what we're doing with the insights we're collecting and how they can impact the business. He also talked about the fact that, again, data itself doesn't do much, right? It's our ability to leverage it that is powerful.

Sarah Nicastro: You need to be able to take that data and tell stories with it. One of the things he mentioned that I thought was really interesting is that he has actually sent a data analyst or maybe more than one to a creative writing course to learn a bit more about storytelling. This is the idea that most people that are consuming data, whether that's your internal stakeholders or your customers, they can't, won't, or don't want to make sense of raw data. They want to know, what is the story? What is it telling me? They want you to digest, simplify and turn that into that valuable perspective. His point that he shared is that a lot of data analysts tend to be very technical.

Sarah Nicastro: They tend to be the people that can make sense more intuitively of raw data. Sometimes it's helpful to teach those people how to turn that into stories. I thought that was interesting. There was also a gentleman from Henny Penny who talked about... We talk a lot about connecting assets, but that isn't where the value comes from. The value comes from what you do with the insight from those assets to drive value. There was a session with source support and some others talking about knowledge management and knowledge capture and knowledge management, which is another really important point of collecting and leveraging data and making sure that you're retaining the insights of your valuable frontline workforce.

Sarah Nicastro: David Douglas of Scientific Games had a session on leveraging technician scorecards to drive performance. Using data to motivate the frontline workforce to meet specific KPIs, to continuously improve, et cetera. There's a number of elements to this part of the conversation. There's the infrastructure around collecting data and connecting assets. Some questions that were brought up this week were around the ownership of that data. If you're collecting data from customer locations, who owns that data and how do you handle that discussion? How do you ensure security of the data? Then once you sort out the infrastructure, there's the analysis and the storytelling aspect.

Sarah Nicastro: Of course, there's the move toward leveraging data to become more predictive and proactive. And then there's a whole separate conversation around the commercialization of data and how once you've put the infrastructure in place and once you have mastered the ability to turn data into knowledge, how do you then use that to grow revenue of your organization? A lot of conversation around data. The second key thing that came up that I wanted to share is around third party. There was a very cleverly named session called Ain't No Party Without a Third Party, which I thought was cute. In that session, Patrick Dell of Varian and Sal Accardo of ABB shared some of their thoughts around leveraging third party.

Sarah Nicastro: I think generally agreed that in the talent landscape that we have today, the reality is in some form or fashion, third party is just a necessity. I don't know that everyone would agree, but that did seem to be a common consensus here at the event. With that said, a lot of the conversation centered around if you're leveraging a third party workforce, how do you ultimately protect yourself against that workforce becoming a competition from taking customers from you? Part of that conversation was around you can't completely mitigate that risk, right? Part of it is just accepting that fact. But one of the points that was brought up is, if they can come in and beat us at this thing, what else can we do?

Sarah Nicastro: What other knowledge expertise do we have that they can't? Focusing then on what is your true competitive differentiation and how do you highlight that with your customer base, how do you ensure that you are protecting your knowledge in whatever area makes you unique. The other point that was brought up by Patrick that I really liked is he said our goal should be to make them as good as we are because the customer experience has to come first. He very honestly shared that 15 years ago, he wouldn't have said that because he didn't necessarily look at it that way. But I thought that was a very honest sharing on his part and a very mature viewpoint.

Sarah Nicastro: But that is the reality, right? Then we also had a conversation in a breakout session that I was part of with Ira of Okuma, and they have specifically a distributor network. He was talking a lot about how they use NPS scores and different customer outreach to make that relationship collaborative and to make sure that those distributors feel like partners and have that sense of a relationship. With use of third party, obviously part of it is how do you manage the knowledge sharing with those folks. And most importantly, I think, is around how you protect the brand experience for your customers when you are relying on service providers that are not your own employees to deliver that.

Sarah Nicastro: The final point that seemed to come up quite a bit was around best practices for field service management. More looking at, how do we make the most of the modern, sophisticated technology that exists today? I had a number of conversations with attendees on the side about the vendors that were at the event exhibiting and showcasing their solutions and who had popped up that was new, who had been around for a long time, who does what, et cetera. I think the reality is there are a lot of modern, sophisticated tools and a lot of that can become quite confusing for people that are looking for the best fit for their business.

Sarah Nicastro: There's certainly an argument to be made for organizations today that the more they can simplify their technology stack, the better off they are. Because when you're looking to protect the customer experience, the more systems you have in place that are sort of pieced together, the more failure points that introduces and the more complexity. On the flip side, you want to make sure that the more you fit into a single tool, you're not trading capability or value of anything else. Again, I've said this in a lot of our content, I think there is this tendency to jump to, we need to use AI because it's on the agenda and people are talking about it, without necessarily really even defining what that means.

Sarah Nicastro: Just kind of hearing it as a buzzword and knowing that or thinking that they need to be doing that. In reality, I think there needs to be a better definition of what that means and how it's purpose driven for any individual business. But as I've said many times before, when it comes to making the best use of today's technologies, the starting point is really making sure there's a strong foundation in place. I'll point back to a podcast that I did a while back with Eduardo Bonefont from Becton Dickinson. He talked a lot about them kind of taking a beat or pressing pause to reflect on what they had and what they needed.

Sarah Nicastro: Because before they added or built upon their existing infrastructure, they needed to solve some foundational problems in what was already in place, their employee engagement, et cetera. I think that's very important for companies to keep in mind. You can't just jump to what's next or what's new if you don't already have a strong level of foundational capability in place. If you do or when you do, that's when should start looking at, okay, we have mastered the basics. We have really good access to a universal source of real time information across the business. We have technicians that are efficiently and effectively utilized. We are able to provide them the information they need at their fingertips when they are on a customer site.

Sarah Nicastro: We keep good track of our inventory, those sorts of things. That's when you can start looking at how you can layer in more advanced tools. Then you can start looking at, okay, how do we leverage machine learning or artificial intelligence to move toward more predictive models or to automate more tasks? How can we maybe leverage augmented reality with our customer base or with our internal employees and teams? The reality is twofold and sometimes it's a bit of a catch 22, but there are incredibly cool and interesting technologies that are available and ready for use today. But the question companies need to ask themselves is, are they ready to make use of them?

Sarah Nicastro: If you can answer that question honestly, it just sets you up for better success, right? I think the goal... I've noticed also, the conversation has shifted to, how do we empower our frontline? It's less about how do we control them and more about how do we empower them. How do we equip them to give the customer experience and the brand perception that we want? I think that's a great place to be in the conversation. I think the frontline workforce deserves that viewpoint versus one of control. I think that's really exciting. Those are three of the big things that I took away from the conversations this week. Of course, you can always visit us at Future of Field Service to hear more and learn more.

Sarah Nicastro: If you wanted to take a look at any of the upcoming WBR Field Service events, the Field Service Europe event is in Amsterdam, November 30th and December 1st, and the Field Service Palm Springs event is, of course, in Palm Springs scheduled for April 25th through 27th of 2023. I would love to see you at either one. And in the meantime, you can stay up to date on the latest in field service right here with us at futureoffieldservice.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn, as well as Twitter @thefutureoffs. The Future of Field Service Podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more at ifs.com. And as always, thank you for listening.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

It’s exciting when we see the success of service organizations who are embracing the opportunity to innovate and seeing the impact of their efforts. Take, for example, the stories of how companies like Baxi, Kaer, and Schneider Electric have introduced As-a-Service offerings to replace their historical transactional models.

But while there’s inspiration and wisdom to be gained from triumphs like these, there’s also value in understanding the trials – what is preventing companies from succeeding?

It helps to understand the complexity that exists around service innovation. When we’re talking about bigger-picture, disruptive innovation we’re typically referring to a company that has a long history with a particular business model looking to completely reinvent the way it goes to market, sells, and services. It’s not only an identity shift but also a process that in many ways goes against the momentum of the “machine.”

I’ve recently had the pleasure of connecting with two innovation thought leaders that I’ve learned so much from – Frank Mattes, author, advisor & founder and CEO of Lean Scaleup and Dan Toma, award-winning author of the Corporate Startup and Innovation Accounting, and co-founder of innovation advisory firm OUTCOME. Frank and Dan both cover different perspectives and have so much knowledge to explore – they are both worth a follow.

From my handful of conversations with them, I have put together a list of 10 reasons that service innovation fails. This isn’t an exhaustive list, by any means, but it gives you some cautionary points to be aware of and consider.

#1: Companies Ambiguously Define Innovation

“Innovation is the creation of new value,” says Toma. “Digital transformation is around keeping existing business models and processes valuable in the digital age, which improves customer satisfaction and lowers operational costs. Confusion comes in because companies think innovation is a one size fits all type of word, but one of the big lessons learned for us is that when you want to start doing innovation, the first thing you need to do is to define what innovation means for your organization.”

There are different ways to define innovation, but one thing that tends to happen is that a company wants the benefits of bigger, more disruptive innovation from the efforts of more incremental improvement. Digital transformation is one example of more incremental improvement – it, in and of itself, isn’t changing the core business, but rather improving upon it. Yet companies expect that once they’ve invested in digital transformation, they’ll see the results of bigger innovation – which is only possible if that investment is used to drive further change in the business, aka disruptive innovation.

“Innovation is a game that you play three to five years in advance,” says Mattes. “I define innovation as capturing the value from meaningful insights via new offerings that change the order of things. It’s not about ‘new stuff’ – it’s about value, and value is defined by the customer. It’s also about capturing the value or collecting the dollars and the cents of that value. The last point, new offerings that change the order of things, means new business models, new go-to-market strategies, etc. We are talking about big steps here. Changing the order of things, thinking outside of the box, if you will. If it’s in the box, if it doesn’t change the order of things, and then we have incremental innovation.”

#2: Companies Fail to Realize Service Innovation = Business Transformation

Within our audience specifically, one of the issues we see is that companies think they can innovate within service as a silo. While this is possible, incrementally, in the form of service transformation, if the company desires the more disruptive innovation of a shift like Servitization or moving to an As-a-Service model, the conversation changes. At this point, it becomes critical to reconcile the fact that what we’re really talking about is business innovation – not service innovation. This means that it’s a journey for the entire organization, not for service alone.

What today’s customers are demanding from companies are outcomes, guarantees, peace of mind – and that is a different way of doing business than transactional service. This is prompting companies to examine the layers of business transformation needed to evolve fully to a new value proposition. Aspects like go-to-market, financing and revenue recognition, sales and marketing, customer success, and many more arise as a part of bigger-picture service innovation.

#3: Companies Expect Operational Talent to Lead Innovation

I’ve seen pressure on service leaders to juggle both the needs of the day-to-day business while creating a strategy for innovation. Not only is this an impossibly tall order, but it also often isn’t realistic to ask your operational talent to think as creatively as necessary for true innovation.

“The skill that you need for digital transformation, the capabilities you need for digital transformation are not going to be sufficient once you’re trying to innovate. Let alone the talent. If you are trying to hire somebody and that particular person has an amazing track record of helping organizations digitally transform, they’re not going to be the right person for disruptive innovation. You need different skillset, different personalities. This is another reason it is important to make the distinction before you start investing,” says Toma.

Mattes explains the importance of each type of talent, as well as the degree to which overlap is needed, by segmenting into “red shirts” and “blue shirts.” This terminology was born of the book Blue Ocean Strategy, published in 2004 and written by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, which describes a new market with little competition versus the “red ocean” of cutthroat competition. “As we consider innovation, it’s helpful to say the day-to-day operations are the people working in the red oceans or what I call the ‘red shirts.’ Those working to find new value pools, they are the ‘blue shirts.’ You need both. You need to own the business NOW and in the future in the NEW,” explains Mattes. “One is not good and the other bad, they are both important. They are living in different systems that were designed for different purposes. So, we come to that million-dollar question in the truest sense of the word: how do we make them work together?”

#4: Companies Narrow Their View of What’s Possible

Another stumbling block of innovation is that companies unintentionally, even subconsciously, limit their perspective of what is possible. This can be habitual, rooted in legacy, a factor of long-term talent, sticking with examples only within one’s industry, or a variety of other reasons. To embrace disruptive innovation, we must be more comfortable thinking out of the box – often this can be prompted by expanding your perspective and seeking inspiration beyond your own industry.

“I think of some work I’ve done with a 150-year-old insurance company out of Germany where the head of the innovation lab was tasked to think beyond core and to build the insurance of the future,” retells Toma. “The problem for him was that despite the new lab that he had, the new processes that he used, all the thought leadership that he brought in, HR was only hiring people that had insurance written on their CVs. People that worked with other insurers in the region, sometimes even brought them from abroad. And he said, ‘I can’t innovate with these people, because these people can only think insurance in the way that insurance has been for the last 100 years. I need to have people that come from automotive. I need to have that come from the music industry, from entertainment, from travel, people that think differently about insurance, because they don’t have that legacy.’”

If your objective is disruptive innovation, often fresh perspective is incredibly important.

#5: Companies Attempt to Define Value (Versus Accepting that Value is Defined by the Customer)

If you aren’t innovating from the outside-in, you’re taking incredible risk in missing the mark. Your customers’ needs should dictate where you focus your efforts. This doesn’t mean your customers know exactly what they want or need five years from now – it usually isn’t as easy as simply asking. You will need to be creative and determine what value will hit the mark in three or five- or ten-years’ time – but the point is, it should all be centered around their challenges, opportunities, and needs.

“So many organizations are building it backwards from what we were used to doing in the outside world, in the startup scene,” says Toma. “Essentially, they were starting from a business plan. Financing the whole thing based on this plan and then after six months, they would put a prototype in the hands of a customer only to learn that it doesn’t work.”

This type of inside-out innovation is costly and can deter a company from future innovation because rather than the particular approach being deemed a failure, the overall effort is categorized as such.

Stay tuned next week for part two!

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

But while there’s inspiration and wisdom to be gained from triumphs like these, there’s also value in understanding the trials – what is preventing companies from succeeding?

#1: Companies Ambiguously Define Innovation

#2: Companies Fail to Realize Service Innovation = Business Transformation

#3: Companies Expect Operational Talent to Lead Innovation

#4: Companies Narrow Their View of What’s Possible

If your objective is disruptive innovation, often fresh perspective is incredibly important.

#5: Companies Attempt to Define Value (Versus Accepting that Value is Defined by the Customer)

Stay tuned next week for part two!

In a session from the Austin Live Tour, Sarah welcomes Sonya Roshek, VP Field Services at B+T Group for an open conversation about what it’s been like to work, progress, and lead in male-dominated industries. She discusses what she’s learned, what she wants others to understand, what has evolved and what still needs to evolve.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today’s podcast is another session from our Austin Live Tour event. This one is featuring Sonya Roshek, who is the Vice President at B+T Group. Sonya has spent her entire career from her start in the military all the way through to her role at B+T. Being very often one of few if not the only female in male dominated industries and spaces. In this session at the Austin event, she shares some of her firsthand perspective. I think stories like Sonya and our collective willingness to listen to them and understand what women’s experiences are like, is very important when it comes to making changes and evolving in a way that ultimately will help us to get more women into field service. So, I hope you enjoy.

Sarah Nicastro: Alright. So Sonya has had a really interesting progression of being a woman in roles that you were probably not surrounded by many other women.

Sonya Roshek: Or none.

Sarah Nicastro: Or none. And so I can't remember who it was earlier. They asked about, "How do we get more women in service?" So, we're going to dig into that a bit. And I do think that, I said at the beginning of the day today, "I'm a big believer in the power of storytelling." I think one important thing for folks like yourselves to do is to hear stories of women that are in service and understand, "Okay, so what got them here? And what can we learn from that? What has happened that maybe they didn't leave because of, but could dissuade other women from being a part of the industry, et cetera?" So, we're going to dig into a bit of that. But before we do, tell everyone a little bit more about yourself, your role, what B+T does, and anything else you want to share? And I know it's post lunch guys, I get it. If we had cots, I would let you all take a quick 20 minute nap before we kicked off, but we don't. So if I see any snoring, I will call you out. So just be aware. Okay.

Sonya Roshek: So, I'll start with B+T. B+T Group started as an engineering company for telecommunications and then has moved more into, I call it complimentary services or construction. So, we do all of the construction for towers, on the towers, in the huts, fiber, small cells. There's lots of new small cells going in. So basically anything that makes your phone tick is kind of what we do. I was brought into to actually run the construction. And I think there's maybe one other woman that I know of, of my same grade or caliber, if you will, that works at T-Mobile that still works in construction. There's a lot of women that are in different positions, but they're more in administrative. There are very few that are actually on the construction side.

Sonya Roshek: I started my career, coming out of college and going into the army, which I still can't really figure out how I ended up that way, other than it was a good way to pay for college. So coming out of the army, I went into work for US West back in the old days in the central offices. And those were those big buildings that had those massive computers, essentially that would fill this entire room, to service basically a city like this. I'm not even sure how I got hired because as the job description said, it had all kinds of technical things on there. And I was a nuclear chemical and biological officer, I didn't know what that was. So, I think to your point, I remember getting hired and they're like, "Okay, you're going to start." And it was in Portland, Oregon. And I remember calling HR and I'm like, "Can you read me the job description?"

Sonya Roshek: I had no idea what I got hired for, and it turned out okay. But they were hiring people coming out of the military. They were hiring people of different diversity. And there was a huge age gap. Because that was back in the time where people would start a job and stay in the utilities or the telephone company for 30, 40 years. Matter of fact, there had been so many layoffs, my least senior person had more years of service than I had at age. So I think I was 24, 26 maybe. And they all had 28 years of service or more. So, not only was it a generational gap, but also quite a gender gap as well. In the central offices there was more women, but not a lot. And especially as you went outside into the field services, there was very few women. Matter of fact, you can count them on your hand.

Sonya Roshek: So, as I kind of progressed through that, I moved into, Alcatel-Lucent was, they hired me and I ended up doing the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. Building the fiber optic rings there. And again, I think I had a 350 installers out in the field and might be five or six women at that point. And I actually remember having my supervisor in Idaho, he's like, "I don't want to hire women, they can't lift." I'm like, "Our job description says 50 pounds, go get a bag of dog food, put it in your office. They can pick it up, put it on their shoulder, you're hiring her." I mean, so just the discrimination and the mindset of, women can't do this. Not, "How can we engage women?" It was just, "Women can't do this." And so when I look at women in the workplace, I was talking to somebody in the back there and the reality is, it starts when we have children. We give girls a doll and we give boys a hammer and drills and a toolbox and let them go take things apart.

Sonya Roshek: We don't do that with girls. I mean, so why are we expecting girls to be in field services and be technical, because, we just don't train our girls to do that? I think it's getting better. Title IX helped a little bit. But even now dads don't want to see their girls dirty. And I think that's just a generational, I think it's a girls wear pink, boys wear blue. Why can't we just wear green and yellow? Or so I think that's where initially I think we need to start looking.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, no, that makes sense. So I think we've been at conferences together a few times. But what made me reach out to Sonya, because I've never interviewed you before. So this is happening in real time guys. But what made me reach out to you that I loved so much was, at the last Palm Springs event or maybe it was November, was it November or April?

Sonya Roshek: Palm Springs, April.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So, you were on a panel, and I'm not trying to throw anyone under the bus here. But this is just the realities of this topic. And it was about diversity and et cetera, and Maureen, and I love Maureen, but she, without realizing it. And I don't remember the specific question, but she was almost reinforcing some of the stereotypes in the way she was asking the questions to where I was kind of cringing. And you were the only person that was like, "Ah, actually I think no, and here's why." And I was like, "Okay, I love her." Because honestly, I mean, if anyone here knows Maureen, who's the event planner for that event, she's a fantastic human being. And that's the problem is a lot of this bias is unconscious. A lot of the stereotypes we have we don't even realize we have, and or are reinforcing. And I'll be really honest in saying, I have two boys and I'm not having any more kids.

Sarah Nicastro: And sometimes I get sad about the fact that I don't have an opportunity to raise a daughter in today's world. But I also realize that there's an equal opportunity for me to change this through my sons. And I recently had a big falling out with a family member who told my younger son to stop crying like a little girl, boys don't cry. And I was like, "Absolutely not. You can shut that down right now.” And he hasn’t talked to me since. But it's important for me as a mother to stand up to those things, because that's how that change happens. I don't want them thinking that they can't have emotions, or they love to wear pink and rainbow, like cool, I'm totally here for it. So, I absolutely agree with everything you've said.

Sarah Nicastro: And I think that you're right, that if we all really want to make a change in this topic, one of the things we need to do that has a longer term payoff is reflect how are we as individuals, even in our home lives and our family lives, reinforcing those stereotypes or those biases without realizing it. So because it is so baked in, especially like you said, this delineation of boy versus girl and what boys are allowed to do, say, where et cetera, and it starts with really reflecting on how we're living our lives and how that impacts what the next generation is growing up believing. I wanted to ask you, you mentioned that first role you applied to, excuse me, you had to then call them and ask them to redo back the job description, which I think is hilarious. But you also said you knew you didn't have all of the qualifications.

Sonya Roshek: I didn't have any of the qualifications.

Sarah Nicastro: Now, I want to ask you then how you had the confidence to apply anyway, because research shows that women won't apply for roles unless they meet almost a 100% of the qualifications listed for a job. Which is one of the issues we have with casting that wider net that Roy was speaking of. So, what made it different for you to just apply anyway?

Sonya Roshek: It was actually through a recruiting firm that did the young military officers. And so it was one of those places where you go and there's 30 or 50 different companies that are interviewing and it's like speed dating. You did seven interviews back to back, to back. So you didn't even know really what you were getting into. And then if they liked you, then they called you in for another secondary interview. So, I remember the recruiter though. I think you said character hiring for character. And the recruiter's like, "We're looking for somebody who's got the fire in the belly. I can't teach that. I can't change that. I can't create that. That fire in the belly of somebody that cares or that wants to go learn or understand things. We can't harvest that." So when they found somebody with fire in the belly they're like, "We want you." So, that matriculated a secondary interview where I think actually my boss at the time fell asleep in the interview. It was weird, but the long and the short of it is, he hired me and-

Sarah Nicastro: Also goes to show culture wasn't as important then.

Sonya Roshek: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: Because that would have been a red flag, right?

Sonya Roshek: Right, it was. And I mean, I didn't even know there was things called a central office and the mainframe computers. And I remember walking in there and it was so filthy. One of the technicians was training me, basically having me chase literally a piece of wire through the entire office. And I had a white sweater on and she goes, "Hmm, maybe we could get some cleaning around here." I'm like, "Hmm, evidently." So I think that, did I interview, or did I try to hire? At that point I was just coming out of the military, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I know I didn't want to be in the military anymore. Not that it wasn't a great experience.

Sonya Roshek: But to your point, the military was even more gender biased. I mean, you had, it was 10% women at that time. And as a woman you had to be not only the top 10% of the women, but you had to be better than about 70% of the men. So you had to perform better. You had to carry as much weight, otherwise you were just pushed aside. So, I mean, there was times where I literally, this big six foot guy he was like, "That radio is really heavy." I'm like, "Give it to me." And the cadre or the captains looked at me and he goes, "Hmm, you're going to be able to carry that?" "Yes, sir." Crying. You can't show fear. You can't show emotions. You had to buck up like the guys. And is that the best tactic? No. Is that how I survived? Yes.

Sarah Nicastro: Now, do you feel like the Sonya we see here today, so I can tell you have that fire in the belly, that's very clear. Do you feel you had that and that allowed you to succeed in the military? Or do you think the military shaped that?

Sonya Roshek: I think I had that. I mean, I think that's just innate to part of my personality, which I think goes to show that you can't train that. But I think that actually started with my dad. I mean, my dad would say, "Okay, come on, we're going to go do a chore today." I'm like, "Okay, are we going to go re-roof this house?" "We? Okay." I think I was 10. And it was an old, we called them the slums, but there was like seven layers of shingles on that. And we were ripping them up. And pretty soon I fell right through and my feet were dangling and my dad's like, "Well, got to get out of there." And I said, "Aren't you going to help me?" He goes, "Well, I'm going to fall through if I go over there and help you, get out."

Sonya Roshek: So, I mean, I think he shimmied the board over, but that just kind of goes to show that my dad was like, "You're coming with me. We're going to go retile." He didn't have in his brain ... Maybe I was the boy child that he wanted in the first time, because my older brother wasn't willing to go do that. So he didn't have in his brain a gender bias. And I remember even saying, or he used to say, he had the attaboy, he'd be, "Attaboy, girl, let's go." And to this day, I still think that's how the phrase should be said as, attaboy girl. And it just kind of stuck, so. But my dad was definitely part of that, "I'm not going to put a boundary on you. Let's see if you can go figure it out."

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Now, the fire in the belly, I would imagine is what kept you progressing through. So obviously you started in that initial role. You've worked in the field. So, tell us a little bit more about the trajectory?

Sonya Roshek: Coming out of the central office, and I think the other key that we don't do with women or that women and girls don't do is they don't put their hand up and say, "I'll do it. Let me try." I'd worked in the central office for about a year and a half and we were switching out the mechanical switches to a digital switch. And I'm like, "Well, I'll try it." They're like, "Well, you don't have 30 years of service. How are you going to figure this out?" I'm like, "Well, can I have this person and this person and this person and this person to build the team?" They're like, "Well, you're going to need a team, but what makes you think you can do this?" I'm like, "Did anybody else raise their hand?" So I think that's another piece that if you just try and you raise your hand, you're going to fail.

Sonya Roshek: There was a lot of things that we failed on, but giving yourself permission to fail and trying and standing back up is really a key. After that I went, got hired by the equipment manufacturer and ended up doing the services piece for the Salt Lake City Olympics, which included the fiber optic ring, the International Sports Broadcasting Center, they call them cows or cellular on wheels. And 9/11 hit during that time. And I remember getting a call from the VP and she says, "I need, how many cows can you send out to New York?" And I'm like, "None, it's four months before the Olympics. It takes about three to five years to build the network for an Olympics." And she said, "Well, you have them built, right?" I said, "Yeah, but if I send them out to New York, I'm never going to get them back." And about six months later, sorry. About six months later, I think I got it.

Sarah Nicastro: No, I just saw it fly behind you. I was hoping so.

Sonya Roshek: I know, here it is. Six months later I get a call. She actually moved me to Michigan, which was the most evil thing a person could do. And she came and had dinner with me and she goes, "I just had to meet the person that told me no in a national crisis." And I'm like, "Well, nobody would have cared four months later." She goes, "That's a good point. I didn't think about that. But she said, "That was probably the ballsiest thing I've ever had anybody do." And I think it was 28 maybe at that age. And she goes, "And did you just get out of school?" I mean, she literally couldn't-

Sarah Nicastro: Who are you?

Sonya Roshek: Yeah, that's kind of what it was. "I just had to meet you." And my boss was like, "Why is she wanting to meet you?" I'm like, "I don't know." But so after that I started into Michigan, went, did a tour in Israel doing system integration of their voice over IP switch and then came back Stateside and ended up doing a Greenfield build in Canada and microwave overlay. And now I'm running the, or rebuilding all the small cells and towers. So career wise, I think I've, I'm going to say stumbled through it. There wasn't like, "Okay, this is what I need to do next." It was, I remember being in Seattle when the first 3G network kind of came out and my boss said, "We're going to cut the staffing in two thirds." I'm like, "I think that's a terrible idea." And I gave him three different options. "Maybe we should come up with an interim term." And he's like, "Nope, we're going to cut it all off." I'm like, "Okay, you tell the customer that."

Sonya Roshek: And I remember sitting in that room and briefing the customer and every page of the PowerPoint, dead PowerPoint, went flawlessly until we got to resources. And he goes, "Well, we're going to cut by two thirds now that we're towards the end of the project." And I remember that customer, he was from AT&T, and he didn't hit the table. He's like, "Jim, every time you speak, you make me angry." And the whole table's like slid under. So we get out and he says, "Go ahead." I'm like, "Yeah, what, I told you so." I'm like, "You thought you were right. I'll let you stumble." So, I think having the courage to kind of stand up for what's right, not necessarily what the company needs or what you feel is right, but actually what is right for the end customer kind of I think definitely propelled me throughout my career.

Sarah Nicastro: I love that. So I want to give a shout out to Marnie Martin who is in the back of the room. So, in my former role, which I was in for, like I said, 11, 12 years, I was part of a culture that really disliked the same things about me that you're saying. Like speaking up, not because you want to be right, but for what's right. And having opinions and wanting to think differently or do things differently. And it was really frustrating and really soul sucking, and Marnie and I had known each other for a number of years because in that role, so I was a part of a publication. And so our advertisers were different technology providers in the field service space. And so I knew Marnie through one of her former roles. And so she reached out to me and that's how this all started. And it's been fantastic to have a mentor and a support that doesn't just appreciate that, but encourages it.

Sarah Nicastro: And I would say, the culture of the organization overall, in pockets, it is a little more challenging, but generally speaking, is a world of difference in terms of a company that actually values diversity of thought and is willing to allow people to have a little bit more of a voice and et cetera. So, I think it's, when you all think about who are you bringing into the company and who's staying, who's thriving, who's leaving, you also need to reflect on, you can have the goal of diversity and even diversity in a specific category like women, but do you have the work life, the employee experience that supports that goal and kind of dig into is the reality matching up to what the vision is?

Sarah Nicastro: And I think it, I have a lot of respect for you, because I can just tell that grit of never knowing what backlash is going to come out of being the person that is not the yes, man. That is always willing to say-

Sonya Roshek: Or woman.

Sarah Nicastro: ... what someone doesn't want to hear. Yes, the yes, woman, it does take a lot. And I mean, I feel like I spent a lot of time battling, so anyway. Okay, so let's talk about, so you progressed all the way from the military into sort of your initial role all the way up to the VP level, all the while being typically one of you, if not the only woman. What have been some of the hardest parts of that? When have you felt the most challenged, or have you ever felt discouraged, or what have been the tough parts?

Sonya Roshek: I'm going to say this and probably regret it, but there is a lot of truth to the good old boys club and not being able to be part of the good old boys or them saying, "We're going to drop you off, because then we're going to go out." And of course do some sort of suspicious activity. Or they go play golf and they don't think that women can play golf. So, I think that that's been my biggest frustration is it's not that, there's nothing I can do about that. That is just the culture. The other piece I think is sitting in a boardroom and I'll say something and nobody even acknowledges that I said anything. And about five minutes later a gentleman will say the exact same words, "Oh, that's a great idea. Fantastic. I wonder where you came up with that one." It's shocking to me how often that happens, and-

Sarah Nicastro: Still.

Sonya Roshek: Still, still. I appreciate my boss now for the fact that he does listen and will say, "I disagree, or I like what you're saying, let's talk more about it. Or it's not quite what I'm looking for. How can we change it?" So, and he's an engineer, of course engineers are always right. And I actually had somebody ask me that when I was interviewing, they said, "How do you talk to engineers?" Like, "With my voice. Is there a certain way you're supposed to talk to them?" They're like, "Well, if you're not an engineer, how are you going to get your mission or your agenda across?" And I'm like, "I can read a set of drawings. I can look at them and tell them what's right and what's wrong." But it's still very frustrating to me that there is a believed credibility gap. So, I think that's by far my frustrating point of the locker room talk and the, it's getting better, but by far we've got a long way to go. Especially at the executive level.

Sarah Nicastro: And Sasha, I mean, you said this about your objectives for creating that at the executive level you have better parody, but then as you go down it becomes less so. And to your point, it is really hard to change that good old boys club type of vibe if those numbers are staying in the 80 and 90%, right? Which then gives the 10 or 20% of women in those roles an experience that they're probably not enjoying. So then it becomes almost like a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Do you have any thoughts on, I know you said you as an individual living it can't change it, but do you have any thoughts on how these folks in the room as leaders in their businesses can help make progress?

Sonya Roshek: I think-

Sarah Nicastro: Specifically, sorry. I was just going to say, specifically with like the good old boys club mentality and then the perceived competence?

Sonya Roshek: I think it's really just sitting down and asking for opinions. It's getting other women engaged, not putting limitations on them, not presumed limitations. It's, I think people don't even realize when they start having the locker room talk or the good old boy network, they don't, it's totally unawareness. And I'm not saying that we need to change all of our rhetoric into politically correct or any of that sort. I'm just saying, acknowledge that in fact you have that natural bias and people naturally will open a door for you. It's like, "Can I open a door for you?" So, I think it's just a consciousness and it's society has ingrained in us so much that women aren't capable or are not available or not willing to do things. And most women are willing to do that.

Sarah Nicastro: I think it's a really good point of having the conversations and listening. I mean, that's why I said the value of stories, which is why I'm thrilled to be here with you all today. I think there's so much benefit in hearing each other's perspectives. And to your point about being politically correct, I think none of us are perfect and none of us are going to do it right all the time. So I think with that, when you talk about diversity, equity and inclusion and what you can address and how, when you actually dig into what are the things working against us, like the good old boys club and this and that, the goal does not need to be perfection or political correctness. It just needs to be, I think it comes down a lot to intent and authenticity, like is the person trying to make the change doing so out of good intent and are they authentically caring?

Sarah Nicastro: Because I think people sense that so much. And I think there's experiences that can happen that aren't perfect. But if the intent is good, it's okay if it's not politically correct or perfection, it's just, there's good intent. We're learning together. We're making progress. I think one of the biggest challenges is this is another topic area where everyone says they have the intent. Everyone says they want to improve diversity, equity, inclusion, but there's a difference between the businesses that are just saying it and the ones that authentically have the desire to change it and the actions they're taking. So, it's just a totally different ball game. So I asked you about the challenges. Have there been any positives of being the only woman or one of few women in any of your career experiences?

Sonya Roshek: Yeah, first of all, I can go to any conferences, and everybody knows who I am, I don't know who they are. Roy, same one. It's like, "There's the one African American guy right there. I know who he is." So, I think that's a positive in some regards is they definitely know who I am. "Well, yeah, we introduced ourselves six times. Sorry." I think the other positive is I get to have those little micro changes and have some of that change within just individuals. I used to always get put on the diversity panel or the diversity, whatever. And it's like we do better just having a conversation around the water hole than actually trying to force people to sit and listen to a panel on diversity. That doesn't help any, it's really sit down and ask the question. What's your background? How did you get here? What do you like? What do you don't like? Because I think that brings not only the cohesiveness, but the inclusion and helps you understand where this person's coming from, versus, "Let's sit on a diversity panel and talk about women and men."

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And I think it's, there's power in you being a strong enough woman to live some of these uncomfortable experiences and make those micro changes that will help other women. You know what I mean? I think about that a lot like myself. So, I get really frustrated with gender stereotypes, particularly as it relates to the dynamics of a marriage and motherhood. Because I, every time I'm traveling someone inevitably says, "Don't you miss your kids? Isn't it so hard?" And I'm like, "Yeah, but I also love what I do." And so there's that, like it's okay for me to have a career. But there are also times it's really hard for me personally.

Sarah Nicastro: And so I always try and remind myself that I can't want for a different perception of what motherhood or what parenthood looks like if I'm not actively taking part in creating that perception. So on the days where it does feel really shitty to be away from my kids for a long time or something and I'm kind of in my feelings, I will just remind myself that it's part of changing that perception. So yeah, I think it's interesting though how slow moving these changes are. So, how much or little do you feel things have evolved since you started your career?

Sonya Roshek: Honestly, very little, especially on the field services side. I think there's a whole lot more on maybe some more administrative, or retail, or that sort of thing. But I mean, we've talked about it before. It's like, "Oh, they have kids and they go take care of it." Well, when COVID happened, a lot of the mothers did go back and support their kids or do schooling. And why is that? Because women make 76 cents to the dollar. It's more cost effective for the woman to stay home than it is for the man. And I've even had an interview where a man literally said, "Well, I'm the man. I need to make this much money." Well, your qualifications don't say that.

Sonya Roshek: So, I think until we really stretch out and say, what is, and I've had to catch it in our own organization where it's like, we've brought in women to be project coordinators. And then we raised them through the ranks, but they're significantly below a construction manager, even though they're doing the construction manager's job or all the prep for the construction manager. So, why are we still putting them in a subordinate role? Why aren't we giving them that title and giving them the pay? And I mean, my poor HR gal, she knows that whenever I call she closes her door and takes me off of mute or off of speaker. She goes, "You are the reason why I stayed in business." I'm like, "You're welcome."

Sonya Roshek: But even having, I've had to change her mind of what to expect from women and leadership. And it's even interesting for her to have that change in dynamic where she's like, "I can't believe that we're still today in this time and we're still having these conversations." I mean, again, growing up I didn't have somebody that told me I couldn't, so I did. But I think we tell our girls, "You can't." Whether it's via words or actions.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. So, coming back to the question that got brought up earlier, what thoughts, I mean, let's do some brainstorming. How do we get more women into field service roles? Do you have any ideas?

Sonya Roshek: I talk about it. I mean, people ask me what I do and I talk about it. I brought more women into our industry than probably men, mostly because I talk with women and they're like, "Well, what do you do? How do you do it?" I'm like, "You want to do it? Let's give it a go, because it's not rocket science." So, I've brought in three women that climb towers. They actually didn't stay with our company, but moved to another company and they had an entire crew that's all women. Because it's a pretty intimate time where you're with that same four or five people for three or four weeks at a time staying in hotel rooms. And there's not porta potties out on the site. So, I mean you get pretty intimate and you have to kind of break those barriers. So I think it's just talking about it and giving people the opportunity.

Sonya Roshek: I have a young gal in Texas, and every day I talk to her I'm like, "Oh my gosh, that's me 30 years ago." I shake my head and I just throw more at her and see if she catches it. So I think it's really just encouraging those women in general and say, "Hey, do you want to try this?" I think when we think of leadership roles we think of men, we don't think of women. When we look for promotions, we think of men, we don't think of women. It's shocking to me when you are in those conversations and they do bring up a woman, they go, "She's kind of bitchy." "Well, you call it bitchy, I call it strong." You know, I think that-

Sarah Nicastro: And those are the type of unconscious biases that really exacerbate this problem. It's, I mean, it's so true. It's, at my old job I had a note in my file that I had poor emotional control, which wasn't true. I just was very, I had very strong opinions and I would voice them and they are, coming from a man that was fine. And coming from a woman, it was-

Sonya Roshek: Correct.

Sarah Nicastro: ... out of step. So it's, what are our expectations or our perceptions that we have that maybe we're not surfacing and examining? I do think you brought up a really good point. Other than just talking about it more and addressing what Roy pointed out, which is sort of like the marketing problem, I think leaders are in a position to help the change in terms of looking, proactively looking for people to become a part of it, women to become a part of it. I'm curious for those of you here, like Sasha spoke this morning right off the top about the metrics of male versus female in different categories of the business. Do you all know those by heart? Everyone? Yes? No?

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Because I think that's another good point. We change what we measure. So, does a company, or does an individual even care enough to know what those numbers are to work toward change? I think, the other thing, so I think Roy brought up a really good point when we get to travel. So if we talk specifically about field technicians, I think there's some potential depending on industry to get creative there. So maybe you can do a rotating schedule. Maybe you can do a four day work week. Maybe you can do, I don't know what, right? But again, I would urge each of you not to just stick with the historical and the assumption of, "Well, it is what it is and it can't change."

Sarah Nicastro: And I would also say like, I travel a lot. I mean, I'm not a field technician, but I travel a lot and my husband stays home with our kids. I mean, he works, but he doesn't travel, and I do. And so that isn't the norm, but it's also not necessarily a deal breaker if we're doing a good job of explaining the opportunity that exists in the profession, particularly as it relates to that path and the trajectory. So, I think those are some important things to think about. All right, so if you were to take your lessons learned and give that woman you said you see as yourself 30 years ago some advice based on your experience, what would it be?

Sonya Roshek: Don't let anybody tell you that you can't. I mean, she's living proof that, I mean, she started as a coordinator three years ago and she's now running a major program in north Texas. So, it's asking questions. It's, don't be afraid to say, "I want that job." When I interviewed, I just promoted her, but when I interviewed her I had never really, she was three or four levels below me. So, when I pulled up her resume I was actually shocked. She had her master's degree out of London, and I also had her personality profile and I was like, "Her degree didn't match her personality profile." And I'm like, "What? This doesn't make any sense?" And she goes, "Yeah, I hated that degree, did not fit." I'm like, "Okay, now it makes sense."

Sonya Roshek: But I think just, I mean, what I thought was going to be a 15 minute interview of, "You don't have enough experience. You don't have blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." All the reasons why I was going to dismiss her all of a sudden just turned. So listening and putting herself out there saying, "I think I can do this." And she has just blown me away every time. And it's interesting when you want something done detailed, a lot of times we give it to the women, because they're very detailed and they're very conscientious of what it is they need. I won't really give it to a guy because they'll go take a hammer and smash it. So, and again, that's my own biases, but I think is also real and we do that a lot where it's like, "Oh, I need my assistant." "Oh, okay. It's a woman." Rarely is an assistant a man. So, but I just, don't let anybody say you can't.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. If you had to give these folks one piece of advice on what they could or should do differently or in addition to what they're doing, what would it be?

Sonya Roshek: Understand and know your own biases, because even what comes out of my mouth sometimes I go, "Ooh, I shouldn't have said that. Or that's not what I'm thinking or that's not what I feel." But we're so ingrained with messages on TV or on Facebook or ads that it subconsciously just works in your head. So, I think you have to actively change the way we think.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. What are your current areas of focus at B+T?

Sonya Roshek: A couple years back we did, the industry as a whole had a huge safety problem. We had people falling off the towers left and right. And a lot of that was based on the fact that before you didn't have to tie off and now you have to tie off. Shocker, you don't fall. So, I had my safety guys coming into the office and yelling at me saying that people aren't climbing safe and we had hired literally into the industry hundreds of people and trying to train them and get them up. And the only thing we kept saying is, "Make sure you're tied off in two places." And sure enough, the guy was tied off in two places, but he was not tied off accurately. So we kind of retrained and said, "What do we got to do something different?"

Sonya Roshek: And the safety guys locked me in a room with all the directors and went through all these safety issues. And I was like, "Okay, I don't need a checklist. I don't need a PowerPoint, because they don't read and they will pencil up all your checklists. So we need something that's hands on, that's tactile that we can teach and learn." So we kind of came up with a, I called it safety-based skills training. That changed, about six months later we got the entire industry engaged and it's now a certification. So, and I think I'm the only female that's certified all the way up through foreman, but it is a tower of communications certification. It's ANSI certified and it's no different than the crane operators. They have to go through, after about six, eight months of training they actually go through a test, both written and practical, and have to pass that. That's now also getting written into the contracts with AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile of having to have somebody certified on the job site.

Sonya Roshek: It's already in the last five years changed how incident rates, safety falls significantly. And I know it's cliche and I'm not probably the biggest safety person in the world, as I climbed on a ladder and used a chainsaw to cut down a fence. But I think that the reality is people go to work to provide for the family. They don't go to work to get hurt and become potentially life crippled. So to me that's kind of changed the passion and how I view what I expect out of people, whether it's they're limiting their hours to 60 hours a week so that they don't fall asleep driving, or don't cut themselves because they're not paying attention. So, really what I'm trying to do is change that culture so that it's not like a safety guy walking around saying, "I'm going to save your life." But more of, "I value your life. I value what you're doing and how do you do your job safely."

Sonya Roshek: So, and the other piece of that is just mentoring. I used to kind of be a knuckle-dragger and power my way through everything. And now I kind sit back and just ask questions, "And well, how come we're doing it that way? Why are we ordering it this way?" Instead of saying, "I know what the answer is." But letting them get there and doing a lot more mentoring. So both for women and men. I wouldn't have got through my career without some amazing men in my path that had gave me a chance. Sometimes I didn't let them, but I just told them I was going to do it. So, but I mean, safety is paramount. If you get hurt, your production goes down, everybody gets down.

Sarah Nicastro: That makes sense.

Sarah Nicastro: Alright, I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Sonya. I really admire her “fire in the belly,” as she refers to it, and her willingness to share so openly, So Sonya, thank you for that and thank you for tuning in. Be sure to visit us at futureoffieldservice.com for more. You can also find us on LinkedIn as well as Twitter @thefutureofFS. The future of field service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more at ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

I’m confident in saying my husband doesn’t regularly consume the content I create, but if any article I’ve written catches his eye, it will be this one. He played hockey in high school and college and is a die-hard Pittsburgh Penguins fan. Early in our relationship, he tried tirelessly to persuade me to fall in love with the sport – but once our sons were born, settled for watching a game here or there in silence.

While my appreciation for hockey is via my husband’s passion for the sport, I’ve always loved a good quote. So, when Frank Mattes referenced a Wayne Gretzky quote during our recent podcast, I knew I needed to seize the opportunity to create an article from it. The quote he brought up is, “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.”

I don’t know many service organizations today that would claim they are satisfied with “good” and don’t desire to be “great.” Quite frankly, customers won’t allow that kind of complacency. So, if our aim is to be great, we need to determine where the puck is going to be and work on getting there. These are three areas of service where I feel it is especially important for organizations to think about how to get ahead.

All Outcomes, All the Time

Where the Puck Is: We recognize that customers desire more than just products and services and are really demanding more outcomes. They want overall solutions from companies that meet a particular need, solve a specific challenge, and compliment the areas of expertise they have by filling in gaps of expertise, execution, or insight. Essentially, they want you to be able to guarantee you’ll deliver value in whatever form that is you provide. Transactions have become less appealing, partnerships more. Companies today are at varying stages of sorting through how to meet these more advanced needs. This is complex, because it requires not only service transformation but business transformation – which brings about layers of change.

Where the Puck is Going: With few exceptions, I believe we’re going in the direction of almost everything As-a-Service. Customers want to be able to pay you for the value you deliver, no more. They want transparency on exactly what that value is, and that means the value it brings them – not the value of the output. To determine where your puck is going, you need to think about what your service does for your customers – what does it enable, solve, or change? That’s the outcome they want to purchase from you – not a line item of product or service. There are some great examples of organizations making strides toward where the puck is going, like Kaer, Baxi, and Cubic Transportation.

Technology-Powered, People-Focused Service Delivery

Where the Puck Is: To consider where the puck is, let’s think about where the puck has been. Historically, field service was a manual effort – you relied in many ways on your people to go out into the world and do what you needed them to do. There was little to no visibility into when, where, or how it was done, but you and your customers trusted your workforce to get the job done. Then came digital transformation, and our focus shifted entirely to how digital could change the game. What can we automate? How can we drive efficiency? How do we connect, assess, and deliver insights in real-time? To some degree, we took the focus off our people and became distracted by digital in the sense of considering the tools we could use to control our workers rather than enable them. Today we are reconciling the reality that service success is technology-powered, but people-focused.

Where the Puck is Going: Organizations who deliver outcomes realize they cannot do so with manpower alone. Mike Gosling of Cubic Transportation said so himself in our interview, “Adding field engineers to meet the demands of outcomes is not reasonable – technology is critical in today’s service landscape.” We need the power of modern digital tools to create the future of all outcomes, all the time – but where the puck is using digital to arm our employees with knowledge that compliments their passion for helping customers. To automate basic tasks that they find daunting or frustrating, so they can spend more time on what matters. To capture their incredible insight in a way that it can be shared easily with others. As much as our customers want the seamlessness experiences and real-time reactions that digital allows, they also want relationships with someone they trust. The puck is going to where our frontline workforce is more of a knowledge worker, a relationship builder than just a hands-on repair technician.

Elite EX

Where the Puck Is: I haven’t spoken to a business leader in ages who isn’t struggling with the talent gap. We can brainstorm new ideas for where and how to recruit the next generation of employees, but the reality is that without really digging into your employee experience, you won’t win the talent war long term. Most organizations today realize that to meet their CX objectives, they need to take a harder look at the engagement and satisfaction of their employees. On a podcast with Eduardo Bonefont of BD, we talk about how the company dug into what its employees were frustrated with and took real action to improve the EX and what benefit that has brought.

Where the Puck is Going: To win the talent war sustainably, we need to genuinely acknowledge the irreplaceable role our frontline workforce plays in not only our service success but our brand persona and customer experience. Where the puck is going is a frontline workforce that is acknowledged, respected, and rewarded commiserate to the value they provide, particularly as companies shift toward the trusted advisor nature of outcomes-based service. Where the puck is going is a collaborative relationship with these employees versus top-down management because they hold insights about your customers – and a perspective on your business – that no one else does.

In a session from the Austin stop of the Future of Field Service Live Tour, Sarah talks with Katy Chandler, VP of Learning and Development at DuraServ and Roy Dockery, VP of Field Operations at Flock Safety, about the tactics they’ve implemented to not only find new talent, but also accelerate their time to value and maximize retention.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today we are sharing a session from the Austin Live Tour, that features Roy Dockery, who is the Vice President if Field Operations at Flock Safety. And Katy Chandler who is the Vice President of Learning and Development at DuraServ. This is a conversation about different ideas to tackle the talent gap. We talk through both Roy and Katy’s experiences in a wide range of areas of this topic from recruiting and hiring, to retention, training and development. We take some interesting questions from the audience related to how to speed time to value for new employees. So it’s a great discussion, I hope you enjoy.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay, I think this is one that likely can be very interactive, so no yawning and feel free to interject, shout out questions, etc. Before we dig in, why don't you all say a little bit more about your role, your organization, and anything you want to share about yourself, Katy I will start with you.

Katy Chandler: My name is Katy Chandler. I work at a company called DuraServ, a mid-sized company based in Dallas. We have about 30 locations through the Sun Belt, from Phoenix up to New Jersey, and one in Toronto, so technically, we're international, but just barely. But we are in the commercial overhead door and dock equipment space, so just like a garage door in your house, but in a commercial application for receiving, distribution, warehousing, food service, all sorts of businesses that have doors in their receiving area. We sell, service, and install those. No manufacturing, but we have about 800 employees right now, and about half of them are field service technicians.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. Roy?

Roy Dockery: I'm Roy Dockery, I'm the VP of Field Operations for Flock Safety, which is new now. I worked at Swisslog Healthcare for the last 12 years in healthcare automation and technology, but now I'm in public safety operating systems, and working with police departments to eliminate crime and mitigate bias. So, I've been in the field service space for the last 12 years, like I said, largely in healthcare. Sarah and I have been beating the talent gap drum. I think I've been talking at conferences now on it for five years?

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.

Roy Dockery: Roughly, before The Great Resignation started. So yeah, so that's my background, field service, technical support, software support, kind of the whole span of service from a customer face perspective.

Sarah Nicastro: Perfect. All right. So, let's kind of start off with just each of you talking a little bit about what you're seeing within your own organizations related to this topic, so how it's sort of impacting you, and if you need to speak historically at all with Swisslog, that's fine. I know you just recently transitioned.

Roy Dockery: Yeah. So, for me, I think, and it's been touched on a little bit and I think it's an interesting continuation, I think one of the main things that I see, and it was mentioned earlier, is that there's a lot more focus on purpose and the mission of an organization when it comes to recruiting, because you can recruit for behavior and for attitude, which I've also talked about for years, and then you can train for skills, which I think even Mr. James said earlier.

Roy Dockery: So, but I think one of the problems from a recruiting perspective is that we're used to just advertising jobs, and then filling jobs, and now people want purpose, and we are in field service, and Sarah and I have talked about this, we really suck at marketing in field service, right? All of us who are field service managers and executives, you could be doing it for 10, 20, 30 years, once a week, you are still explaining to somebody what field service is, because no one understands what it is. And so, just marketing the job, I think isn't hitting the bar anymore. You really got to talk about the mission of the company, the impact to the community, kind of like how does this impact affect your family? Because generationally, people don't just want a job, right? They want something that they can feel motivated and connected to.

Roy Dockery: So, even when I was in healthcare, I saw where people would just sign up for a job, and then the interviews became more like speed dating, right? It was kind of like, "Well, what do you do for the community, and what's the impact?" And so, even that transition started to happen, and we see it even more now. So, as leaders within the organization, we have to be able to train those, whether it's in recruiting or hiring managing, to kind of navigate that space, especially when there's technical jobs, of being able to connect it to the mission, social good, some benefit.

Roy Dockery: So, that's one thing that I think is consistent, even for healthcare, and now being into public safety, is that when we're recruiting, we've got to go a lot further beyond the job to really get people's interest and attention, because I found the people, and we were just talking a minute ago, the people who come for the job don't stay, right? Because somebody else will offer them another job that pays more money, and then they will be gone, and now you're back into the recruiting and the training aspect again. So, that's one thing.

Sarah Nicastro: Katy?

Katy Chandler: Absolutely, same, but what I would-

Sarah Nicastro: Ditto.

Katy Chandler: Yeah, ditto. There we go, done. What I would add to that is we are not seeing... We actually call them a unicorn, someone who has experience in our industry and has been working, they're unicorns, they just don't exist. We've had to shift to trying to hire people who don't have experience, and train them up, just as you were saying, try to hire for that fit, and then train them on the skills. So, that's been a very notable shift in our organization, because we're not used to doing that. We're used to saying, "This is someone who has some experience, and we'll put them with someone who has a little more experience, and they'll just kind of learn it over the years, and be better at it," and we've had to really take a strategic step back to consciously come up with a way to structure that a little bit better than we've previously done.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. So, when Roy mentioned, I think you were guest number two, maybe on the podcast, two or three. So, that was a while ago, and we did talk about this exact topic. I think you saw early on something that people are now just beginning to accept, which is that the practice of hiring based on experience is not sustainable. Okay? So, it's a failing strategy, and I think people now are beginning to understand that and put measures in place to change what they're doing, but there's still this need to really become more creative, right?

Sarah Nicastro: So, talk a little bit about the why and the how. So, I want to focus right now on bringing people in. So, I want to be careful that today in this discussion, we don't only talk about recruiting, because I think that's one of the missteps. When we think of the talent problem, everyone just thinks about, "How do we hire, how do we hire, how do we hire?" The question Rudy asked in the last session is actually digging more into the issues of retaining, and keeping employee morale up, and keeping people, and that's also an important part of the conversation. But to start, when we think about changing our strategy for hiring so that we're not dependent upon experience, what do we need to be thinking about?

Katy Chandler: I think we've really tried to be thoughtful about who and how we publicize our jobs, and working with trade organizations, or trade schools, excuse me, to find some alignment in some skill set, or at least some mechanical aptitude. People who are interested in welding, we can take that skill set and build on it, and translate that into our industry and what they need to do in our workspace. So, that has been somewhat of a shift for us to really try to build that network, to get the right kind of people who have the right aptitude, even if not the exact skills we're looking for.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm.

Roy Dockery: Yeah, and then that’s why, and I let katy go first because she's over in training and development as well, I think one of the things that we miss is that we might shift our traditional recruitment model, right? We might update our job posting, and then we want to attract a different type of talent, but then we're not changing the way that we train, right? So Sasha had said they were 10-20-70, but it was really like, "10%, I'll do some onboarding, and then 90% go figure it out in the field." But when you're no longer hiring for experience, you also have to adjust your training, because that's why you wind up having retention problems, because first of all, they can't come up to speed the same way. It doesn't mean they can't come up to speed quickly, it's just that they don't come up to speed the same way, the same type of training, right?

Roy Dockery: You get into micro learning, people who are used to watching short YouTube videos to learn, versus people who stand over somebody's shoulder and try to watch, right? Even back, my undergrad was in education as well, right? There's different ways to instruct and teach people as well. So, I think there was a very traditional way that we taught people in field service that was very much vocational school, kind of apprentice, the novice journeyman kind of pathing, and we've got to switch that and allow it to be more dynamic, because you might bring somebody in that will actually attach to a more complicated idea than your traditional technicians, but then struggle with the basic things, just because they're more digital, they're more software oriented, they're more IT oriented. Right? So, looking at that, I think helps as you can recruit them, you can get them an offer, but if you know you're hiring a different type of people, and a different skill set, and a different behavior, then you also need to be different as a company and be dynamic, and shifting.

Roy Dockery: And I think the other thing important from training is that there is a lot of... I even, I was in Dallas yesterday and visited one of our former customers from my previous company while I was in town, because there's overlap in our current technology. But the one thing that we started finding out, especially when we started kind of having to bring in that second generation of technicians, somebody, I think Sasha had mentioned, you have maybe some dedicated technicians. So, I have two technicians who worked full-time at Parkland Hospital for a decade, but then that technician leaves, and then the new technician comes in, but we're only training them on the systems, right?

Roy Dockery: But your culture of how you interact with your customers, now we had to figure out how do we train on culture? How do we train on the way that we talk to the pharmacy directors? How do you train on the way that you interact with a police chief, right? Because, well, even now, I'll get escalations like, "Who the heck is this new guy?" The new guy isn't doing anything wrong, right? They're doing the job to the books, but there was something that we were doing before that we didn't document, that was kind of a part of the culture that somebody did based on experience, that we never codified, wrote down, and then formalize into that training. So, the fact that that experience isn't there, especially if you're in food service or whatever industry, we also have to understand from a training perspective that we've got to loop that stuff in as well.

Roy Dockery: So, I can't just train you on the technology, I also need to train you on our customers, and what our customers expect, and how we interact with them, and like, "Here's examples of some of the communication that we have," and almost kind of letting them see the way that that navigates, because they can be traveling with somebody training, but they're only looking at the equipment, right? So, they're so busy staring at the machine that they're terrified about how knowing how to fix, that they're ignoring all of the interaction with the customer. I mean, we had to go down to how do you check in in security? Because they would just be following the person they're training, and the person training has a badge, and you try to come back to a hospital and walk through the front door without a badge on, security's going to hunt you down.

Roy Dockery: So, it's just even simple things like that, to how do you walk into a facility? Who do you contact? Those are things as well that I think as we're shifting this dynamic and hiring different people, different generations with different backgrounds, that you also have to focus on training the customer experience, and kind of onboard people to the culture and the way that you expect them to interact not just with your systems, but also with your customers and other people in the field.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So, that makes sense, but I want to just take one step back, because I do think that people here probably also want to hear more about how do we get more people, and then we can talk a little bit about how do we train them, how do we keep them, right? So, you brought up the point, Roy, that in field service, we have a bit of a marketing problem. Okay? And so, I agree, and I think that when we were hiring on experience, it wasn't as big of a problem, because you were trying to bring in people that were already familiar with what it meant. Now it becomes a bigger problem, because you're trying to bring in people that have no clue and no awareness, right?

Sarah Nicastro: And so, I want to talk about one of the things I know you did when you were at Swisslog, which is you changed the way you were writing the job description, so that they didn't mention field service. So, it was more , and I think you said you were targeting people from Chick-fil-A or something.

Roy Dockery: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: But you kind of focused it more on the customer service, the aspects of what were the fundamental requirements for the role, versus calling it field technician, etc. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Roy Dockery: Yeah. And so yeah, on that recruiting side, yeah, she mentioned, I always joke that like, find me somebody at Chick-fil-A with a screwdriver, and I'll hire them in a heartbeat. They've got the service stuff, if you can fix anything, I will train you. We literally have done that. I actually have a manager that's in Dallas that got banned from local Best Buys, because he kept recruiting their Geek Squad members. But so, he was going a little rogue.

Sarah Nicastro: Hopefully there's no one here from Best Buy.

Roy Dockery: Yeah, I think his photo might be up at a local Best Buy. And so, the main thing is when you talk about a job description, people are looking for jobs. We know we've got a branding problem, people don't know field service exists, but then we put very field service-specific stuff in our job descriptions, right? The way that we describe them, we talk about sometimes proprietary equipment that there's no way anybody would've ever worked for it. I call them "Dear John" letters, like you read a job posting that's like, you must be trying to hire your former technician, because no one else would meet these requirements. I spoke at an event, and I put up companies that was at the event, I put their job description up on a PowerPoint presentation, it was like, "Literally, no one who's never worked at your company could meet 80% of these requirements."

Roy Dockery: So, knowing that people are using search engines almost like Google, if somebody has a customer service background or maybe they worked in hardware, what we started doing and even, I mean, a lot of people in field service hire ex-military, there was a giant military friendly, all caps block at the top of our resumes... So, if you typed in that you were in the military, it would literally, it would pull our job posting to you because of the words that we put in it.

Roy Dockery: So, it's not focusing on experience, focusing on customer service, the ability to use hand tools, right? It sounds really rudimentary, but can you read a schematic, right? Do you use a multi-meter? Do you understand basic software? And then when people look at what the company does, the expansion of, I called it we didn't necessarily change where we were fishing, but we changed the net. So, when your job description is very specific, it's like you're using one lure that only your trout will bite, but when I need to fill a hundred positions or double the size of my service organization, I need a net that'll catch anything that's relatively around, that I can then bring in and train.

Roy Dockery: So, it's getting specific in those job descriptions, removing your specific equipment. A lot of people vote themselves out, even though you're willing to hire people with less experience because you see it work in your organization, but we don't go back and change our job description, right? We started comparing our best performing new employees to our job descriptions, and they didn't match. So, we used to have an associate's degree as preferred or desired, and then I went and looked, I had managers in field service who didn't have associate's degrees. So, I'm like, "Why is this in our job description?" Right? Like two to five years of experience, or three to five years in the military, I have people who are our top performers right now that don't meet any of those requirements.

Roy Dockery: So, it's even taking some of your top performers, and even your new top performers, and saying, "Okay, our hiring managers hired them, but normally it's because they were referred or they knew somebody. Interestingly enough, they got in around your recruitment process because your normal recruitment process would've screened them out, and they would've never gotten interviewed." So, I think the job description and the job posting both, right? Your recruitment team kind of memorizes your job description, and that's what they're going to. So, review the job description, change the job description first, then update your job postings, and stop being so specific with your job titles. It doesn't matter what you call it within the company, right? You can call the job whatever you want in the company, like post it as a couple of different things, post it as field service, post it as a field technician, post as an install technician, because again, this is keywords, people are looking for different roles.

Roy Dockery: And the last thing I'll say, in my current company, I got there, we're tripling the size of the field service organization, but they were struggling hiring people, and I was like, "Well, what are you recruiting for?" And they were like, "We're recruiting for install technicians," and I said, "Recruit for field technicians." Five times the number of applicants applying, just because we changed one word, the description exactly the same, one posted as an install technician, one posted as a field technician, and we've got mirrored postings in the same areas, all the field technician roles are getting filled, just for changing that title.

Roy Dockery: But when you put engineers, some people exclude themselves, "Well, I'm not an engineer, so I can't be a field service engineer." So, even being specific about the words that we're using in those posts. So, you can hire them and call them whatever you want, but when you're recruiting, use terms that people will come across and not feel intimidated to apply, right? I think that's one of the things, people feel intimidated to apply, and you're hiring managers would hire them and be willing to train them in a heartbeat, but they're not getting through the screening process, they're not getting the recruiting process, so you're not landing the talent.

Sarah Nicastro: Makes sense. All right. Now, Katy, you said you've had some success working with trade schools, and Roy, I know not only are you former military, but I know at Swisslog you had success recruiting military. Are there other sources either of you would point to as good potential?

Katy Chandler: Well, we also have used military. We're partnering with several different military organizations. We also have really ramped up our referral, internal referral program, which has helped us to some degree, but those are always pretty good hires. So, even if the stats don't necessarily reflect huge levels of hiring, they're usually more committed. We have, I think a 50% success rate from just a recommendation, "Here's someone that I know," to a hire, which is better than any other applicant stat there. So, that's been helpful for us to help supplement some of that, so we're really trying to push that, and we'll pay referral bonuses to our own employees for submitting people.

Roy Dockery: Yeah, and the same thing, referral bonuses, pushing incentives, trade schools, and also, and depending on the role, I've always really wanted to deal with technical high schools. There's a lot of high schools now that basically want people to graduate with an associate's degree, if you have jobs that don't require travel, right? That's the other thing about field service, we kind of unintentionally age discriminate, because you can't rent a car in most places until you're 21, and in some areas, 25, depending on what rental car company you use. So, and then they require credit cards, and all of this other stuff for travel.

Roy Dockery: And so, the one thing I do like about our current company is that we went... Because we had personal credit cards at my last company, now we have purchase cards that are given to all field service technicians, through a platform called Liquid, so that's allowing us to hire some younger people as well. So, I think that's the other thing is that there are a lot of different avenues, but you also have to remove internal obstacles, whether that's a credit requirement, and things like that as well, because if you want to hire younger people with less experience, they're more than willing to come in, they'll cost you less money, they'll work harder, but they're not going to have a credit card.

Roy Dockery: So, do you take the risk and then do something with the finance department to offer that? Because that's the one limitation we had at my previous company with trade schools or technical schools, it was, "Are you old enough to rent a car, and do you have a credit card?" And that would eliminate a lot of my younger candidates, and now that's not a problem at my current company, with the exception of a rental car. But yeah, so with our standard positions, we can hire, and then they have access to credit through the company, which can be a limitation as well when you're trying to grow your organization.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that's a good tip. Okay, so I don't want to focus too much on this part, because it came up in the conversation with Sasha, and we won't have a lot of time to get into it, but just to kind of go linearly, so we're talking about how to bring people in. The other part of this is what do people today want, right? So, this is the part we've kind of touched on, which is it's important to note it's different than it was five years ago, 10 years ago, right? So, people want a good company culture, people want purpose, people want career development opportunities, people want flexibility, right?

Sarah Nicastro: So again, the same way we're talking about becoming more creative and examining how you're posting jobs and what internal barriers might exist, you need to do the same with what's the value proposition for the employee, and is it what it should be? And if not, is it because you truly cannot accommodate some of the things that they want, or is it because you're just refusing to evolve what you're doing? I had a gentleman on the podcast not too long ago, that is the creator of jos.com, and I thought this was a really good piece of advice, is the best source of feedback for what you need to do differently for recruiting, is to ask people that don't accept positions, offers, why, and then really take that seriously, and see if you can incorporate that into your value proposition.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay, so let's talk a little bit more about training. So Katy, I know this is your key focus.

Katy Chandler: Wheelhouse.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes. And so, as DuraServ has kind of accepted the fact that it's becoming unicorn-like to find people with experience, how are you changing what you're doing from a training and development perspective, to bring in people and train them up?

Katy Chandler: Sure. So, just as a historical sort of example, a lot of the growth that we've had over the last 20 years has been by way of acquisition, a lot organic as well, but you really see the contrast when you acquire a business. And one example that we had of this when we acquired a particular business maybe eight, 10 years ago or so, we were having a conversation with the former owner, talking through a little bit of due diligence on their people, and he referenced a particular technician and said, "Well, he's been with me for six years. He's almost ready to go on to his own vehicle and be on his own."

Katy Chandler: And even 10 years ago, my jaw dropped and I'm thinking, "This is not sustainable. There is no way that this can be our process," and I wasn't even in learning and development at the time, but recognizing that that's where a lot of our competitors are at, and that's where a lot of our particular industry is at, is really sobering. And so, even if we take a slight step in the direction of building some structure around some training process, we're doing good. So, I think for us, just recognizing that we needed to make a move, even if we don't have the program perfect, we're stepping in the right direction.

Katy Chandler: So, we have started to build out really a career progression, starting with our field technicians. Ideally, we want to do this in all the departments, but starting with the largest group of people, and the ones that have the highest turnover, and the hardest to recruit, and do the actual work for our customers. We built out apprentice up to master technicians, so tech one, two, three, four, and so on, develop the competencies of what that means behind the scenes, assign pay scales behind the scenes, and then give them a plan where they can do that 70-20-10. We have a learning management system where they can watch video courses, learn, kind of take the edge off, because that is still just 10%, but understand the basics of the product that we work on, and then give them a tool.

Katy Chandler: We actually give them what we call a demo book, where they take that around and they ride with another technician, they're seeing this in the field, they're participating in it, and when they are competent, they actually get signed off in their demo book in the field, to advance further along, so they have control. And to your point about what people are looking for, I think in current times, people are looking for a little more involvement, not waiting for a year for an annual review to be able to say, "Here's what I did," or "I get a dollar raise," or whatever that looks like, but to be able to have some ability to move that needle faster, if they want to.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, if they want to.

Katy Chandler: If they want to.

Sarah Nicastro: And that's the thing, I like the word you said is "control," so they have control over how fast they want to progress, or if they just want to hang out a bit at the initial level.

Katy Chandler: Then that's kind of up to them, and we've sort of framed it that way, and you can take your own initiative here, and for some of those people who don't want to, then they know where they're at. They know where they can go, and the next step, and if they're kind of happy where they are, they're going at a slower pace, and that's okay. They don't all have to become master technicians within five years. We're not expecting that we're going to just completely turn everybody into master techs that quickly, but it gives them a path, and it also gives the leadership a little bit more tools in their tool bag to be able to have those conversations on performance on, "How are you moving forward?" or "How are you choosing to not develop?" They have some stake in the game.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think I was just thinking about something Roy and I have talked about before. So, I think another change to all of this is thinking about the fact that this is really ongoing farming of talent, right? Because people aren't going to want to stay stagnant in roles for 5, 10, 15, 20 years like they have historically, right? So, the idea of a very transparent, intuitive sort of self-paced progression like, "What is the opportunity, and how do I achieve as much as I want, as fast as I want?", is certainly smart.

Sarah Nicastro: I think the other thing, and Roy, we talked about this with your experience at Swisslog, is to maybe just accept the fact that the majority, or at least a certain percentage of field technicians just aren't going to remain field technicians, okay? And so, I know at Swisslog, you almost used that role as a farm for talent, not in progression, but within different areas of the business. So, it was a way to bring people in, get them exposed to the Swisslog culture and technology, and then when they wanted, they could move to different areas of the business.

Roy Dockery: Yeah, and I think, and yeah, as she was talking, that's exactly where my mind was going as well, because the one thing, even just from a generational difference, we talked about it before, people don't really want a job, a lot of people are kind of pursuing a calling, right? They're like, "There's purpose, there's mission, that's what I want to do." And so, we can't just develop people in kind of these very binary things like, "You're a technician, so let me train you in being a technician," because you've got a technician who likes to sell things, or likes to train customers, and so, you have all of these different variables, or you have a mechanic who builds computers in his free time.

Roy Dockery: That was always the weird thing about being in the military, right? I had mechanic friends in the Navy who built computers, so I'm like, "Your job is to be a mechanic and to work on a turbine engine, but in your free time, but when you got out the military, nobody would know that. Everybody would think you were a mechanic." And so, that's why one of the reasons I started recruiting that way, because I knew electricians who were mechanics, I knew mechanics who were computer technicians, right? I knew throttle men that ran boats, who were computer programmers in their free time. So, that whole full skill set, people want to use them all at work, right? So, I think even from a training perspective, it's how do we also give them exposure to things outside of just their own space?

Roy Dockery: So, even now, or even at my current company, when I coach and when I talk to our teams and our leaders, I'm like, "Everyone has two paths in a career, in my opinion. You can be a leader of people, or you can be an individual contributor," right? So, a leader of people, you can go lead a group of people in any function, but as an individual contributor, what do you want to do? Do you want to do sales? Do you want to do support? Then it's our job as leaders in the organization to make sure that we get you exposure to it, because it might be a skill you have, but it's not something you want to do at work. There's some skills you have, you just don't want to get paid for. I have a podcast, she has a podcast. I don't want to get paid to do a podcast, because I don't want do it consistently, right? I don't want to have 148 episodes, right?

Roy Dockery: So, it's that drive of what's there, and so, I think creating that space where even if it's a learning module that they can take to just figure out what your customer success managers do, what does a day in the life of a project manager look like, right? So, I have people from my team that have gone into project management, customer success, sales. I used to say I like infecting the DNA of field service into the other departments, and at my last company, I did it in every department, except for finance. So, I had someone in my team literally in every organization in the company, and it's just that farming of talent because they come in, they understand the customers, they understand the products. So, for them to work in sales, or inside sales, or account management, or in product management, solutions engineering, our sales consultants, our professional services people come from the field, it's a great place, but it also gives that career path where a lot of times, we look at retention as a departmental goal, and not an organizational goal, right?

Roy Dockery: So, are we trying to retain talent at Smart Care, or at Flock, or at a company, or am I trying to keep them on my team, so I don't have to bother to continue to hire people? So, one of the shifts for my hiring managers were, "No, we want to hire people and keep them in the company. I don't care if they stay here." Right? So, "Give me a year, do the job well, and then I want you to go be successful other places within the organization," but that requires some exposure, some communication, allowing them to shadow a project engineer or a project manager, go have lunch with a salesperson or a customer success manager, because yeah, maybe it's a one-on-one that they need to have, but it's not a one-on-one with a field service manager, it's a one-on-one occasionally with someone in project management, because that's their interest.

Roy Dockery: So, it's connecting that relationship, understanding what the interests are, but yeah, farming talent for the entire organization, because coming out of field service, I think in any company, there's a lot of places where that level of exposure and understanding of the customer can drive success to the overall business long term.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I think the point you brought up about people have different strengths they want to lean into, or different passions that they want to lean into, it takes me back to Sasha's point about the importance of one-on-ones, and that direct manager engagement and commitment, right? Because that's how you find out what those strengths and what those passions are, in a way that allows you to look for how they can use them either in their current role, or somewhere else in the business, instead of letting them get frustrated, or bored, or disengaged, and just go elsewhere, right? So, I think that's important.

Sarah Nicastro: I think the other element here is thinking about what does the role or roles of field service look five years from now, 10 years from now, right? That is definitely changing. In my opinion, it's going to be more segmented, right? I think as we move into a world where there is more remote service, and where the role of the technician is more of that trusted advisor role, I think you can see sort of almost different segmentation of roles, right? So, maybe you have someone at a certain level or title that stays responsible for the actual mechanics of whatever it is that you're fixing, but then you have someone that's more of a trusted advisor or customer success role that's more customer-facing. Maybe you have remote field technicians that don't go in the field, et cetera, right? So, starting to think now about what that future looks like, so that you're at least aware of, or starting to think about what skills and capabilities you need to be thinking about bringing in.

Sarah Nicastro: So, what about retention? That's kind of the other side of this, is how do we keep the people we have? And we talked about career paths, and sort of mapping people either in an advancement, or to other areas of the business. What are some of the other things related to retention that we should touch on?

Katy Chandler: I think one that we've just recently started talking about is what you were just saying, like remote technical assistance, that would be relatively new for us, but thinking about, especially in our aging tech force, when you've got someone who has all this knowledge and they want to share it, and just physically might be getting to the point where this isn't what they're able or wanting to do anymore in the field, trying to tap that knowledge in a way that it can still support the people who are younger in their career and excited about learning, to kind of create another layer of technical support for those younger, or earlier career, may be a better, more PC way of saying that, but trying to tap that knowledge and really create a career path for that person who's been in the field for so long, to still use their expertise and share it with others.

Roy Dockery: Yeah, and to tie to that, I had a policy which took me a lot of fighting with our executive team, because I would retire technicians in tech support. So, if they're aging out, like you said, someone had a back surgery, shoulder surgery, and now they're limited, and they physically can't do the job anymore, but the reason I had to fight it, because the average salary of a technician who's been here for 30 years is significantly higher than the average salary of what you would be hiring somebody on. And so, we tried it out and then, but that's almost our policy now.

Roy Dockery: So, our process, and even at our current company, I have somebody that goes out on medical leave or has restrictions. Our new company, we do a lot of outdoor installations, they've got to dig holes, because we put poles up, but my first reaction is always, "Can we use them in tech support? Can we be utilized in tech line?" And if they go there, if they want to stay there, then stay there. I already have somebody fully trained. So, I think that that's a good transition. And yeah, so from a retention perspective, definitely trying to keep as much of that information within the organization as possible is helpful, and sometimes it's a cost benefit, but it's definitely beneficial to retain that, and people see that, right?

Roy Dockery: So, when we talk about the longevity, and I had mentioned it when I was talking to Jim over there, if you look at your attrition, your people who have been there for the long time aren't the ones leaving. So, the other thing I would say with retention is yes, I think exit interviews are good, but when you start focusing on fixing all the things of the people who are exiting your organization, who have been there for a year, but you're not actually asking questions on what's making the people stay, who have been there for 15 years, you'll wind up changing the company that was driving your retention. So, there's something that they're staying about, right? Because it might've just been a bad job fit, maybe we're just not hiring the right people, but then you start adjusting business processes and culture, because the people who you hire resign within a year.

Roy Dockery: But so, that's the one thing, just make sure you don't just focus on the attrition, that you actually make plans from a culture perspective, based on your retention, right? Because we tend to focus on attrition a lot, and then we start doing stuff for the 10% that are leaving, and we ignore the 90% that have stayed through economic downturns, and recessions, and everything else, especially in field service. So, I think you've got to do both. Don't ignore what people are saying, but also ask the question to the people who are still there.

Katy Chandler: I would want to add just one thing to that. I think there's so much about leadership in the retention process, and stay interviews, or however you want to phrase that, on tapping into why the people are staying, is a leadership aspect. So, really investing in your leaders, the middle management you were talking about earlier, specifically those frontline managers who may have come up in the ranks from field service themselves, and may not feel fully confident in that, that's really paid off for us. So, really making those people feel very comfortable, building cohorts where they can interact with one another, and really feel like they have support, has really helped us in that way.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that's a good point, and I think I was just going to say, Rudy, the question you asked about pay equity, I mean, it's something to really think about, because we're talking about how hard it is to hire, right? And so, they always say it's easier to keep the customer you have than to get new ones, and the same can be said of employees, if they're doing quality work, right? So, that's another area to focus on. Okay, so we are going to run out of time, but any other aspects of this puzzle that we have not touched on that we should?

Katy Chandler: I would say one thing, just kind of going back to culture and a little bit of what Sasha was saying, we talk about our organization a lot in terms of the technical service side of the business, the sales side of the business. The third tier there is the support staff, the everybody else, and historically, we've just kind of called that admin, and it's just become the catchall. If you're not in sales and you're not in service, then you're in this group, and we've recently, just through employee engagement surveys and other things, we've recently realized we need to put our hands around that group, because they support very much the service side of the business, and drive our internal culture a lot.

Katy Chandler: So, we have really made a concerted effort to remarket internally, brand that group, give them an identity. We call them shared team services now, we do a quarterly event for them. It may seem counterintuitive when we're wanting to focus so much on field service, but we have found that that's starting to pay off, because they support and interact so much with the field technicians, that building up that group and giving them some sense of purpose and identity can drive the retention there in other ways, that I think the hope is that that drives retention throughout the business as well.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. Questions for Roy and/or Katy? Yes.

Audience member: Okay. Well, two questions. So, you talk about we have the generations changing the problem outside that, we have the generation Y for a while, and now we have a new generation, Millennials and Zennials, but we have a commitment problem, right? That generation has a commitment problem. So, how are you tackling that commitment problem? That's the first one. And second, many things were mentioned, as I think as a transformation in your organizations on pushing new things and how to recruit, how to retain, how to ensure we keep and attract new talent. How do you push those changes in organizations, making sure that the new ways of attracting talent are sustained in the organization?

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So, first question talking about generational differences, and particularly, you're saying the commitment from the young generations. So, any thoughts or advice on that?

Roy Dockery: Yeah. As the Millennial field service executive, one of three probably seemingly in the country, I actually disagree with that statement. I think one of the problems is we need to stop generalizing generations, right? So, the level of commitment and engagement that you can get from younger people, if they believe in what you do, will exceed anything that you've probably seen from people that'll come to work and clock out. They'll work 16 hours a day if they're passionate about it, but the difference is what they're committed to. They're not committed to a job, they're not committed to the income that's required to take care of their families, and remember, these people are the children of your committed employees, who are telling their children, "Don't be committed and underpaid," right?

Roy Dockery: So, that's the generational problem. You've got hard-working dads and moms that are like, "I don't want you to work as hard as me, because I don't feel like that commitment was reciprocated." So, I think some of that is driving that generational thing, and so, you've got to give them something to commit to, right? And if they don't really have it, then they'll get the money and they'll use it, and then they'll just keep trying to find something that benefits them, or that they can resonate with. But it also differs from people, like you'll hire people from different generations that are all military, ex-military, and they all behave the same.

Roy Dockery: So, some of it is behavioral, and I think you've got to understand the behavioral profile of your existing employees, which Sarah knows I talked about for years of doing behavioral assessments, of your technicians and understanding what their attitude and what their behavioral profile is, so that you can hire people across generations that have similar behavior. We don't know why our older people are committed, but we're assuming it's because they're older, and again, that's a generalization, it's not. They're committed because they have a certain behavior and culture that they ascribe to, and you can find that same behavior in people across generations, you just have to know what that behavior is.

Roy Dockery: And on the second part, if the organization wants to do something, you really have to, and anyone here that's in leadership, you have to teach the rest of your company what field service is, and what the impact is, right? So, you've got to be able to speak to finance, you got to be able to speak finance, but in field service terminology, right? When they talk about revenue recognition, I've got to talk about technician count and utilization, right? So, it's being able to navigate... I see someone over here nod like, "Yep." When you talk to engineering, I talk to engineering in a field service context, but based on the impact to the field, and the attrition rate, and all that other stuff, because everybody wants the work to get done.

Roy Dockery: So, it's like you've got to learn how to navigate in those spaces but get them to understand it. The stuff that you're pushing down, at the end of the day, there are physical people who need to do this, and that is a limitation. I can't do more work than this amount of people can actually execute, so then you've got to roll that mentality up through the organization, so we're not overcommitting, burning people out, and then not appreciating the sacrifices of the people in the field.

Katy Chandler: I think that was all very well said.

Sarah Nicastro: All right. Any other questions? Yeah.

Audience member: Yeah. So, thanks a lot. Thanks a lot, Roy and Katy. Katy, question to you. So, you mentioned not being able to find unicorns, which I think we all have that problem. What's your experience from accelerating the time that it takes to being able to send somebody up by themselves to the customer? What's your experience of accelerating that time?

Katy Chandler: Yeah. So, the program that we're putting in place is helping to accelerate that time, and what it's also doing is giving us more consistency. So, what we found is maybe a local manager thinks this person's ready to go independently on their own, and then they do, and then all of a sudden, we find out there was just one little piece that somehow they missed in their first six months somewhere, because we didn't have it well-documented on these things have to, have to be done before this person can be independent.

Katy Chandler: So, not only has it accelerated that time and shortened that a bit, our goal used to be somewhere around six months, we would get someone to be able to do some of our work independently up to a certain level, and that was kind of what that would look like. What we've done is said, "Okay, within an eight week onboarding program, you should now at the end of this eight weeks with this accelerated plan and program," somewhere around eight weeks, some people take longer, that's fine, "You should be able to go independently and do some of our work with a set list." So, that has compressed that quite a bit for us, and then as it goes up the train, shortening all those other advancements.

Roy Dockery: Yeah, and one thing I'll add to that, and to your point, I think when you talk about trying to get a technician to revenue recognition, we used to try to peanut butter spread training. So, we got to the point to where the first step of your certification, because we used a qual card because almost everybody on my team was ex-Navy, but we'd get you to maintenance first. So, we'll get you to be able to do maintenance on these products, and then okay, then I can start recognizing revenue, having you do maintenance, you understand the product, and then once you understand maintenance, then it's installation, and then okay, if you can do maintenance, you can do an install, I can trust you to do a service call.

Roy Dockery: And so, we started kind of fragmenting it a little bit so that we could get somebody really good at something, and then put them in the field and let them do it where before, it was three, four months, we give you relative exposure to everything that we do, and then you're really good at none of it, and then we kind of throw you out there and be like, "Figure it out." So, I think even breaking that up to say, "Okay, start with this activity, and I can recognize revenue there and then build from there," it also helps with their confidence. I found that and it's self-paced, like if you do maintenance and you're able to do that without breaking the machine, when it comes to doing install, you're more comfortable and you learn installation faster, you learn troubleshooting faster. So, breaking some of that down and making that the onboarding process, I think it helps a lot as well, especially if you have complex technology, to segment it a bit.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. Anything else?

Audience member: Yeah. It was mentioned about 96% of the workforce being male, and 4% being female. You mentioned changing one word changed your entire script with people that came in to hire. Have you had any success breaking the barrier with females at the technician level?

Roy Dockery: No, because one of the main things that I see in limitations for, because a lot of times, women are the primary caregiver, it's to travel. One thing I did find, it was harder for us for fill, but when you talk about remote technical support, that's the job. When we start hiring systems analysts, that's the job. So, the same skill set, but the travel requirement wasn't there. So, now we have probably half of the tech support team, and even now my tech line team, our operators, people who are doing similar functions that don't require the travel demand and short notice to go fly somewhere, we can fill them in that regard, and then if we had any dedicated resident technician roles where this is your site and your responsibility, so it's more of a kind of controlled environment that people can plan for, that's what allowed us to hire more women in the field.

Roy Dockery: But in technical roles in general, we made sure that we were pivoting and honestly focusing on, okay, do we have female candidates applying for tech support roles, or these other roles where we know that the field service job, it's like everyone's been dealing with it for years, but I mean, because they really, they honestly don't even apply. Right? You don't even get a lot of applicants. So, we started getting a lot more on the tech support side when we reduced those experience requirements. They haven't traditionally been in the roles, so you reduce those experience requirements, and put customer service, and things like that, you'll get more female candidates. But if you have resident technicians or roles that don't have to travel out, I would say you'll start seeing more women apply for that, especially if they have families and things of that nature as well.

I hope you enjoyed that discussion with Roy, Katy, and some of the audience members from the Austin Live Tour. This was episode number 175 of the podcast which means there is 174 others that you are welcome to check out. You can find those and a lot more of our content by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. We're also on LinkedIn as well as Twitter @thefutureofFF. The future of field service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more at ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

While we could all use a break from anxiety-inducing headlines, business leaders have no choice but to digest and react to the news about our economic state. The degree of economic turmoil varies across the world, but with talk of numerous countries entering or nearing a recession, proactive steps to bolster business are important for all service organizations.

This McKinsey article suggests that no matter your current business outlook, “To start responding to the challenges of the present, any company can benefit from establishing a core team to read and comprehend the economic signals, translate them into a range of business implications, and serve as the fulcrum for agile decision making.” It goes on to provide thoughtful guidance for companies specifically in the United States looking to build resilience.

The term agile is an important one, and my hope is that our collective experiences building muscles of resilience and agility throughout COVID have left companies in a stronger position to survive economic turmoil. During the pandemic, we became accustomed to new information every day – and were forced to learn how to react adeptly to continually changing circumstances. Those lessons weren’t learned with a temporary purpose, but to forever change the competence businesses have in adapting and overcoming challenges.

As I think about what could help service businesses weather an economic storm, a few things come to mind:

Keep your customer focus. The companies during the pandemic that I spoke with that experienced the least negative impact were those who reacted quickly to how their customers’ needs had changed. They focused in on the opportunity to tout the value of service in extending the lifespan of assets. They offered greater flexibility and played up OpEx offerings. They brainstormed creative marketing to highlight their abilities to meet new customer needs. When a panic button is pressed, the instinct to turn internal can be strong – but don’t forget that your customers are what will pull you through. Staying in tune to their needs, and how those needs may be evolving due to current circumstances, is critically important.
Make targeted investments to increase efficiency. Spending money to save money can seem counterintuitive when pressures are high, but there are ample scenarios where a targeted technology investment can achieve quick and significant ROI if you have particular areas of the business where productivity could really be bolstered. In this Deloitte article about resilience in manufacturing, there’s discussion around how targeted investments to increase productivity can be worthwhile. In fact, their data in this sector shows that higher investments before recessions bear higher returns during recovery periods.
Protect company culture. When stress is high, often the burden can be passed to frontline employees, which can have a negative impact on productivity. In economic turmoil, your employees are just as stressed as you are – and often feel powerless. Remain conscious of their emotional wellbeing, and work to protect company culture. This doesn’t mean paining a rosy picture where there isn’t one, but rather communicating openly and honestly and – most importantly – remembering to acknowledge their hard work and effort even when the bigger picture might not be overly positive.
Stay data driven. Insights and data should be prioritized over emotions and be used as the cornerstone of decision making. Being proactive is important, but so is being patient and pragmatic. It’s important that the entire company have an accurate picture of where things stand at any given time, both for decision making and general awareness.

I wish you all the fortitude and stamina to face any challenges you’re up against. If there are topics that would be helpful for us to find experts to interview, please reach out and let me know.

James Galloway, Head of Product Marketing - Commercial, UK & Ireland at BDR Thermea Group, talks with Sarah about why and how Baxi (one of BDR Thermea’s brands) has introduced Heat-as-a-Service and shares his thoughts on what makes this business model transformation both challenging and worthwhile.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today, we're going to be talking about what it takes to bring the as-a-service vision to life. I'm joined today by James Galloway, who is the Head of Product Marketing for Commercial, UK and Ireland, at Baxi Heating. James, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast.

James Galloway: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

Sarah Nicastro: That was a mouthful. Okay.

Sarah Nicastro: Baxi is on the journey to bring heat-as-a-service to its customer base. Today we're going to talk a little bit about James's experience and Baxi's experience in terms of why we're on this journey or you're on this journey, what some of the drivers for that are, what some of the reasons or ways are that you think it will benefit the various stakeholders, and then just some of what you've experienced thus far. Before we get into all of that, tell everyone a little bit more about yourself. Anything you want to share about yourself, your role, and then for those that are not UK, just a little bit about Baxi's business.

James Galloway: Cool. My name is James Galloway. I'm the Head of Product Marketing for UK and Ireland business. Now, that's with Baxi Heating, one of the major brands for BDR Thermea Group. BDR Thermea Group is the owning company. We operate worldwide in more than 100 countries with turnover of just over 2.1 billion euros, so quite a sizable company, market leader in commercial heating, and also in a major company in residential heating as well, we also do cooling. So it is really about HVAC heating ventilation and air conditioning is our sole focus as a company. Now, in the UK, we've been present for a long time, more than 150 years now. We've got the long legacy through merchant acquisition as well. We've grown, but we've got a lot of experience. Really we're a manufacturing company. That's what we are as an organization. We're extremely good at making millions of products exactly the same high quality and selling them as a transactional sale. That's our business model. We employ almost 9,000 people across the world, largely within Europe, but a global presence.

Sarah Nicastro: Good. Okay. We're embarking on the journey of transitioning from selling these products to delivering them as a service. How would you describe where Baxi is on that journey today?

James Galloway: It is a journey. We've got a roadmap which we've developed together with some of the academic partners and industry partners as part of a servitization project, which we can talk a little bit about later, but it describes this journey towards servitization. And in very simplistic terms, I think we're on step maybe one and a half or two out of three in super simple terms. We've got a product, we offer servicing, we service, we have a service level agreement where we go and fix maintenance issues of our heating products typically within 24 hours, typically much faster than that actually, mostly ourselves, but also with service partners. We're doing that really well today. What we are not doing is we're just starting to explore leasing, so finance models, which we can combine with the servicing to offer products on finance and also almost guarantee the heating.

James Galloway: So almost guaranteeing because if it's a failure, we're not yet able to predict that. We're pretty close with predictive maintenance and preventive maintenance. We're just starting to do remote diagnostics one-way and two-way. Now, heat-as-a-service, it's all of that and more. It's actually being able to share the usage of heating, which is controlled by the consumer. And then we guarantee the delivery of whatever the consumer is asking for typically through an app or some kind of control interface depending on the customer type. That's quite a big leap actually from steps one and two where we're offering the products on a transactional basis, but also the maintenance side. It is quite a big step largely through... Well, we can talk about it in more detail, but largely because of that, the systems that you need to have to actually make all of that work, millions of data points simultaneously being analyzed to make sure that you can respond or predictively and proactively prevent a maintenance issue from coming up to guarantee that heat outcome.

James Galloway: But it's a really exciting point because it's the hockey stick moment. I'd say we're just on the cusp of that hockey stick moment, very close to being able to actually feasibly and viably demonstrate heat-as-a-service in its full form.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. That's really exciting. Let's talk a little bit about some of the drivers for this journey. If we take a step back from where you are, let's talk about what were the reasons that Baxi decided to go this route?

James Galloway: There were lots of strategic risks that we're following, but this one specifically, it's on our strategy and we've invested in it because it solves a really important customer dilemma. And one is largely because it's about affordability of specific technology types that help to decarbonize. Now, Baxi and BDR Thermea predominantly customers buy gas-heated products, gas-fueled products from us. We also manufacture heat pumps, direct electric heating. We're investing a lot in hydrogen heating as well with live perception and demonstrations in the field. But our customers, they are buying gas products from us most of the time, because it's the cheapest. And a lot of our customers, they really want to install lower carbon forms of heating. Let's take heat pumps as an example, they are however much more expensive. The hardware is more expensive, much lower volume. So the cost of manufacturers is higher.

James Galloway: There's a dilemma for a customer who wants to decarbonize, but they can't afford it. And that's where heat-as-a-service can really help with that. What's different from heat-as-a-service from a finance model, because a finance model also solves that dilemma. A finance model, you can amortize that the upfront capital cost of a contract that term, and so you also solve that issue. But heat-as-a-service specifically puts the control in the hands of the consumer. And that is the key bit is because that... Especially today's world, recently we've seen global events, geopolitical events, which have really increased the cost of fuel. And so we've got the cost, especially in the UK, the cost of living crisis, which is in the news all the time.

James Galloway: It's exacerbated this customer problem of A, wanting to decarbonize and reduce dependency on gas, but B, have it affordable. And then there's a third point. C, you're having control of that. And being able to decide, okay, do I need to... What's more important for me, save money or have more heating comfort? Or even better choose when you really need the heating and hot water comfort. In a household context, that would be, well, maybe you don't need to heat your study or your back bedroom or something all days of the week. You can really choose and select how you economically heat your home, or if your commercial business, how you heat and provide hot water for your premises. For example, a hotel might not, depending on your occupancy rates, you economically heat and provide hot water for your property. It's the dilemma, but also improved control and improved usage. It's been quite clever about how we provide and use heat and hot water.

Sarah Nicastro: Ultimately, the primary driver or drivers are really around how heating is evolving based on environmental factors and the fact that that makes the product itself more expensive. So we need to look for different business models to make the new products affordable for customers to be able to leverage.

James Galloway: That's right. Yeah. On a very simplistic level, we exist as a company to solve problems for our customers. And heat-as-a-service, an outcome-based service business model in general, it's simply a solution to fix a problem. There are other solutions which fix that problem, but we feel that specifically, heat-as-a-service is one of the best solutions for A, helping to reduce that upfront cost, and B, put better control in. It's just a solution. If we can do it really well and it satisfies that problem, of course, as an organization, we will prosper from that as well.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. And it's a good point. You said there are other solutions and that's almost always the case, but I think one of the big benefits of as-a-service is the simplicity. Rather than the idea of, okay, well, we could finance your product, then you could pay for this service, it becomes more effort for customers to understand and track, et cetera, when it's just, you need X, we provide X, and you pay Y. It's a simpler customer experience really.

James Galloway: Right. And we're really used to that now. Look at Uber, for example, I suppose it's a good example. It's done exactly that. They formed, when is it, about 10 years ago now? And they're really taking advantage of technologies, which are now, everyone has got a mobile phone now. You've got that ability to use technologies. And also you've got customers who are familiar with it so that there's a level of readiness to adopt a new way of doing things. It's making it simpler. It's about using the technology around us to do what we've done before but in a simpler way. I think you're right with that.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And I think in some areas it's not only a readiness but a demand. That varies industry to industry, but I think the message at least for us, for service organizations, is, hey, this is the path that we're on. We used to say, "Well, customers don't care about products. They just want service," meaning the experience. And I think now it's customers don't really care about products or service. They just want the outcome. Right?

James Galloway: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: Obviously, both are imperative to the outcome. But they don't care about the details. They just want to be able to trust that whatever you do is going to work how they need it when they need it. Period. And the onus is on companies like Baxi to figure out, okay, if this is the demand, how do we meet it? And that almost always means doing things differently. Yeah.

James Galloway: I was just going to say that most consumers don't know or care about their heating product. You've always got technically oriented consumers and you've always got people who do have genuine interest in what the heating product and technology is, not just at the point of purchase or coming up to the point of purchase, but through the lifetime, but the majority don't. You're exactly right. It's just, what's the outcome? That's what people care about. You know?

Sarah Nicastro: For sure. Okay. We talked a bit about how this as-a-service model, benefits Baxi's customers. It allows them to move toward a perhaps cost-restrictive environment, more environmentally friendly option, and it allows them to have better control over their usage and ultimately, what they're purchasing from Baxi. Let's talk a little bit about how you feel it will benefit Baxi as an organization.

James Galloway: Well, we're really trying to sell more heat pumps. And by the way, heat-as-a-service, it's not just for heat pumps, it's for all technologies that provide heat and hot water. Heat-as-a-service applies to all of them, but it's specifically useful as a solution for heat pumps because they are more expensive. And we want to sell more of them. It actually helps us to sell more because our cost of operations goes down, our fixed costs reduce. We can do that better. But until we can help customers to overcome those cost barriers which they're currently encountering, the uptake is going to be restricted. It helps us as an organization because we can increase the uptake of the product. And that helps us.

James Galloway: It helps finance our projects. You know, you have to have strong commercial viability in any project, new development when you're looking to invest, so if you can demonstrate a higher uptake, that ultimately helps us, not just with our current what we're doing, but also future strategic choices, investments, things like that. As a business model to introduce that, it will help us to accelerate the investment in that new technology type. And that's something that as an organization we must respond to. There's another side of that in the form of legislation. In the UK as a total government, we have a government that have set out a target to be net-zero by 2050 and a 78% reduction in CO2 by 2035.

James Galloway: In terms of product technology, legislative effects, or impacts for commercial buildings, you will not be able to put in gas-heated products from 2030 onwards for a residential new build, that's from 2025. So really near-term legislative significant impacts. That's also really significant for the organization. By introducing a new business model, which helps the uptake of heat pumps specifically and other zero or low carbon technologies, it helps us to be on track and ready for these legislative timelines that are coming up pretty quickly.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And if we think about the reason those legislation regulatory things exist, it's because we know that we all need to be doing more to protect the environment. The third benefit is also to the environment itself. First, you're taking a technology that's cost prohibitive and finding a way to make it affordable for people to put in place to replace some of the less environmentally friendly options. Two, you're allowing customers to have more control over usage, which obviously has an impact as well. And then the other thing that we see in the trend of servitization in terms of how it impacts the environment is it gives companies more freedom over putting measures in place to provide service more efficiently because you're providing the outcome versus billable hours. There's the more latitude to say, "Okay, well, let's look at remote diagnostics, let's look at remote service. Let's do these things," without customers saying, "Well, we're not going to pay for that because you're not on site." It doesn't matter because they're paying for the outcome.

Sarah Nicastro: Then you have an opportunity to become more efficient, both environmentally and then also cost-wise for the organization in how you deliver service. It is a really interesting conversation. James Galloway: And those are the big building blocks that underpin the offering of that service, the effective offering of that service. Heat-as-a-service sounds great. And also, by the way, what does heat-as-a-service mean? Sounds great in the strategy document. We should talk about how you get through to consumers into really what it means. I don't think a lot of consumers when you say heat-as-a-service, they know exactly what it means, but let's come to that in a moment. But the building blocks are actually effectively offering that. Like you said actually it's about remote diagnostics, it's about preventive diagnostics, and the next step of remote diagnostics. It's about taking all that data and having a really slick and effective and efficient field of operations, especially in the context of maintenance. Today we have hundreds of field engineers, all in vans, stocked with components every hour going to visit customers in the UK.

James Galloway: That just, if you can imagine, it’s improved scheduling and going to site, not twice, because you go once to investigate and go back a second time with the right part. But just going once, that's a huge saving on fuel, you increase your utilization of the team. That's a cost saving for us, and it's an improved experience for the customer as well. But all of those operational ingredients are necessary before you can even get to that effective offering of heat-as-a-service. Those are really, really important parts to being able to offer that service.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And just reflecting on what you said, I think we talk about that part quite a bit. Some of the things that underpin the ability to deliver this model, but it makes me... There's two things I want to ask you about specifically. One is going back to the point you just made, which is how do you articulate the offering to customers in a way that they understand and find valuable?

James Galloway: We did a trial in 2019 together with the Energy Systems Catapult, the UK government organization, which is designed to help private companies to trial innovations. We did this trial with them in 2019. And part of that research and project was that we changed the naming to Warmth Hours. Warmth Hours is something that is tangibly understandable away from heat-as-a-service, which is it's not what it says and that means something to us, but it doesn't mean something to the typical customer. So Warmth Hours was something, and there were lots of different names that were discussed, but Warmth Hours, it really neatly said in a simple way that's understandable. And by doing that, we found that we had better engagement from customers because they knew what it was really about.

James Galloway: When they were using the app, which is something new and different, then they were able to understand, okay, I'm selecting the Warmth Hours that I want in that room as a schedule, almost a bit like an alarm clock on your phone. You've set the times. It's very similar, but for heating it and setting the temperature. That was a really important insight that we got from that project about how we enhance that awareness and engagement with the consumers. Yeah, that was good.

Sarah Nicastro: That makes sense. And I think it's a really important point because it's one of the struggles I see companies having, which is for an organization that has a deep, rich history, this level of change can be challenging. So you do all of this work to understand it, to communicate internally, to get everyone on the same page, to set a strategy, et cetera, and then take all of that internal talk and just send it out. And then wonder, well, wait, why isn't this resonating? It is really important to understand that the way we talk about this as an industry, as a business is not necessarily the same way our customers will want to hear the value proposition.

Sarah Nicastro: And that doesn't mean you're starting over; it's just reframing it into what matters to them. I always point to this example, I had a conversation once with a gentleman who was super frustrated because he was saying, "We've invested in IoT, and I don't understand why none of our customers want to buy it." And it's because they don't care. It doesn't mean that having IoT isn't important to whatever the value is they were trying to deliver. It's just that you're talking about it in terms that your customers don't connect with. I think that's a really important aspect.

James Galloway: A really great metaphor I heard once was and an easy one to think about is you design the key for the lock, not the other way around. And heat-as-a-service, certainly for BDR Thermea, it is a business model transformation. It's different to how things have been, are being done today, and how have been done in the past. That's effort. It's not like it was just the easiest thing for us to do and we're looking for customers. It's the other way around. And that's so important to have customer-led problem statements that you're thinking, okay, well, how do I solve that? And then challenging your assumptions and going and seeking that insight and really being thorough with that, to then frame your proposition and how you build a solution around that real genuine insight and take on the challenges and challenge your preconceptions is so important.

James Galloway: And it's taken us... 2019 is already now three years ago and that was already when we did the project. It was already thought about before that quite a long time, but I think it's really important to take the time to understand, take a step back, redesign, move forward. Yeah, absolutely customer first, really think about the problem statements that you want to solve, and then what's the right way of doing it.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. The other thing I wanted to ask you about, James, is related to the revenue model. Because this is another aspect of moving toward as-a-service or true servitization that I think companies get hung up on, manufacturers. It's one thing if you're a service organization or service business that is just transitioning from a contract or billable hours to a subscription model. That's a bit simpler. When we're talking about a product manufacturer who traditionally has operated on a CapEx model and recognized revenue that way, reconciled revenue that way, planned, et cetera, it's a far bigger leap. I just am wondering if there's anything you can say. And I know you're not a hundred percent there yet, but obviously, as a business, you understand what that means, what it will change, et cetera. Can you talk a little bit about that aspect of things and how you wrap your heads around what needs to change internally to be able to provide that?

James Galloway: It's a good question. I think there are a number of different aspects to that. First of all, how do we manage the finance risk, and what kind of finance partners are the right ones to work with? Going from 100% upfront revenue margin to potentially zero upfront, those are choices. And I think that depends on the customer type. We segment our customers and all customers have a certain level of credit risk. There are decisions there regarding how much risk are you willing to take on. Or if not yourselves and the business, the finance partners, what does that risk profile look like?

James Galloway: I think what's interesting is to think about not just the segmentation, but also how you go about getting the finance. Within the UK, we're well regulated, we've got Financial Conduct Authority, FCA that's very well regulated. And there are ways about getting financed for projects within the UK. I was speaking with the account services group, we just launched a project, actually, a UK government-funded project through Innovate UK for heat-as-a-service demonstration. We call the project Digital Servitization Demonstrator, and it's an all-sector demonstrator of outcome-oriented services. It's not just for heating-as-a-service, but first, that's what it was about. And one of our partners in that project, Koolmill, a really great company check them out if you're interested to look at what really progressive as-a-service looks like, it's K-O-O-L-M-I-L-L. They're a rice milling company.

James Galloway: They are looking at cross-border finance. They manufacture in the UK, but they're selling outside of the UK. One of their challenges is how do they find finance for cross-border trade? And it's unregulated. It's not regulated. There are no frameworks in place to really support that in the right way. Those are challenges as well. It's because it's so new, this business model it's not yet well established, and so that's a challenge. I think when you're looking at how to handle that, those are real issues in terms of a scale-up of a model when you're looking at expanding your business model into other markets. Unless you're willing to set up an organization within a country so that you can operate strictly within that country, that seems to be hard at the moment. I think there's work to do in terms of governments introducing the right legal frameworks around finance for cross-border. And that's what Koolmill are looking at now or facing at the moment. There's some work for us to do there as well, I think, within industry to understand what's the best method for that. That's another aspect.

James Galloway: I think one important aspect regarding organizational business decisions or choices is also cost of finance. Finding the right finance partner is important, but a consideration currently is that if you are looking for finance, which meets certain ESG criteria, sustainability criteria, then you will get better interest rates. One of our customers that we were speaking to recently, they were telling us, or one I'm trying to partner with, telling us that actually they can get finance half a percentage cheaper or more if they're able to show certain sustainability benefits. That's in an environment where interest rates are increasing, the cost of finance is increasing. There are significant benefits from being able to actually use a different business model that requires finance, but decarbonized or improves sustainability. I think there's a new perspective that this is this all new. Finance has been very cheap recently but as that changes, how will that change the decision-making of finance directors?

James Galloway: I think a lot is happening. It's happening, it's all now. I think it's the environment for scaled-up as-a-service. It's a bit harder because of some of those legal frameworks that are not yet in place, but absolutely is possible within a country. And in fact, it's incentivized. You can get a better interest rate. That's really great. We're starting to see banks really take that very seriously. It's quite a big question. It's a really good question. And it's a big unknown. For a company which is a manufacturing organization familiar with transactional sales, it is a bit of an unknown, but that's the role of partners. We see significant importance in collaborating to help us filling in some of those maybe strategic gaps that we have.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. No, it's a good point. And I think it's also worth mentioning that it is an unknown, but it hasn't stopped you from moving forward because the recognition of the need to evolve to this model is stronger than the fear of the unknown or the potential, whatever, hurdles of the unknown. That's I think a good point because sometimes companies try to answer every unknown before they start and that presents some really big challenges as well.

James Galloway: That's true. And I should add, on reflection, look at Rolls Royce. Power by the Hour, that was done in the seventies half a century ago. It's new for us. That's actually a better way of framing it.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.

James Galloway: And that's one of the real significant, I think, barriers to internal uptake of a new business model is familiarizing with the unknown, which is risk. There's a lot of uncertainty in that. And that's a key, that's why this project that we've recently done, the Digital Servitization Demonstrator project, it's really important because it means by having a physical environment that's basic to go and see working examples of digitized service of hardware, show the business models, and then discuss the steps and challenges. It's there, it's right in front of you. You can have that discussion. And that's really important to talk out those challenges from every functional perspective, from an internal stakeholder buy-in perspective, and collaboration from all the different functional perspectives, that's really important.

James Galloway: We've just launched that, so it's really new for us, but we've already seen a lot of benefits just in a month already of having that space available to actually go and challenge internal preconceptions and then try and solve some of those internal issues.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. We've talked about quite a few of the challenges that Baxi has faced, that companies can expect to face. Are there any we haven't touched on that we should talk about?

James Galloway: I think it's worth talking about collaboration and partnerships, an acknowledgment that if you do want to scale up, but your organization isn't big enough for the opportunity. If I look at heat-as-a-service, there's 28 million households in the UK, residential dwellings, we cannot do maintenance on 28 million households at the same time to serve maintenance issues. There's a reliance on third parties there. And one of our research partners, Donaldson Engines, really, they're also looking at this. They're also a great company really worth looking into and they've gotten very progressive with what they're doing. They were telling us how they go about finding the right partners. And they've got a really interesting model, which is pay-as-you-go, or we will fix it for you, or we will work with someone who will fix it.

James Galloway: And just the way that they've split up their business model, or take to market approach specifically, was really on the back of understanding their liability. When you're working with third parties, how do you ensure the quality of the work being done? Because ultimately, you have financial liability for the outcome. I think that's almost like thinking out upfront what is your contractual liability that you want to build into a contract? How do you go about safeguarding yourself as an organization, through training, through auditing? Finding the right partnerships where you already haven't established a way of working together. There's that cultural fit. All those aspects are really important. Again, it's new for us, but in a way, it's intuitive because it's a human thing, but there has to be that legal contractual side of things as well.

James Galloway: I'm expecting that I want to go and make... I don't want to make mistakes, but I'm expecting to see them, but they're learnings and that's okay when you're going... and especially in the scale-up side of things, you can think in advance for what you're likely to encounter and build it in upfront to try and avoid that, but you expect the unexpected. I'm expecting to see little niggles of things that don't quite go right. So finding the right partner who's also prepared for that so that you can resolve those issues together, that's the key bit. My real point is when you've got that partnership model and you might have multiple partners, are you ready to fix issues together as you explore something new? I think that's a real crucial point, especially for the scale-up side of things.

Sarah Nicastro: That makes sense. What would you say, James, is your biggest lesson learned in all of this?

James Galloway: Oh, good question. A, that it takes time. Probably the biggest lesson learned is that we started with one customer segment because it seemed the most obvious to us. And we took a pause to reflect, look at what we've learned, and then we reassessed. And then now we're actually focusing on a different customer segment because of, well, some built-in assumptions that we had early on, largely about, well, some unknowns such as contract liability, loads of things. But we changed the customer segment group as our key target group. And it's a totally different segment. That was a big lesson learned that I wouldn't have expected, what didn't seem to be the obvious customer segment initially, but it was quite refreshing. It's a genuine, it's an authentic lesson that you learn by doing this.

James Galloway: I think really that came out of testing, trying it. Start small, test, learn. I use the word learn as an exchangeable term with fail and learn, but it's learn, you don't usually fail. But you learn, but do start small and take on those learnings and build it and step by step because also with a significant transformational change, a business model change, you need to get that internal senior stakeholder buy-in. Especially when there's a lot of risk or an uncertainty, it can be you don't want to inhibit the internal uptake of that new business model if there are too big mistakes that get made, especially once that impacts your planned image and the loyalty that we have with customers. I would say that we had some lessons learned, but the root cause best learning was just keep trying, small steady steps, and that will, will be the path to being successful. I would say that's the best thing that I could advocate to others who are looking to do as-a-service.

Sarah Nicastro: Now, you mentioned earlier that you are at step one and a half or two. What comes next? What's next on this journey for Baxi?

James Galloway: Well, like I said, we took a pause moment to reflect. We're looking at a different target customer group. The next is run trials in this customer segment. The real next step, the strategic one is okay, upscale operations, and that's... With some of your blogs you've done in the past and your research and work, you've talked about talent acquisition, recruitment, internal culture. That's a really interesting one because, okay, within a strategic timeframe, if the business model, like as-a-service, is it going to become a dominant business model to work with? What does that look like from your organization? And by the way, three steps is too simplistic. There are many steps, but effective step three, is your organization ready to run with it?

James Galloway: It's about the systems. You have all your data lakes and cloud infrastructure in place. Are you turning data into insight? Do you know how to work with the insight? Is that true CRM experience internally? And can you do something to satisfy the customer expectations? Like the customers, are you able to do that? Can you meet the operational demands at scale? Do we have the right talent coming in? What's the next step? How do you ensure that you've got market differentiation going forward? What AI experts, or what are we doing with AR or VR to ever improve that experience both from the operational side, but also from the customer experience perspective.

James Galloway: I think the real next step is operationalizing it and being efficient and managing that because otherwise there's a real risk that we get too big, too quickly without having that infrastructure in place. And suddenly, your business as usual gets harder to do because so much time is taken up right with this. I think there's probably an understanding or acknowledgement of that around boundary conditions about, okay, how big are we willing to get at this point in time, and synchronizing with our organization and capabilities. That's the next step for us as an organization is preparing ourselves for a potential real scale-up.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Whew. The journey carries on.

James Galloway: No, yeah. That's a strategic thing. It's not going to happen every night.

Sarah Nicastro: Get it though. That's the thing. It's like you said bit by bit lesson by lesson, and you just keep forging ahead. And I think that's for sure the right approach. It takes courage, it takes patience, it takes perseverance, persistence, so good for you for spearheading a lot of that, and good for Baxi for recognizing the need to innovate and working hard to make that a reality.

James Galloway: Yeah. Thank you. I'm lucky to work for a company like BDR because they're in a good place. They've got really strong, progressive sustainability targets built into our culture. We've recently done a culture rollout across the whole organization with three core values, one team, sustainable feature, customer focus. Those are simple and it's really relevant. There's already that environment to do all that stuff. By no means am I doing this by myself. I'm surrounded by some wonderful people to make it happen. That's a really key point to hold that vision. And there's a lot of values and ethical values that are deep on this mission to decarbonize for a more sustainable future. It's easy to get traction with that.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. It gives you something to dig into. All right, James, well, thank you so much for coming and spending some time with me-

James Galloway: For sure.

Sarah Nicastro: ... and sharing with our audience today. I appreciate it.

James Galloway: A pleasure, an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much.

Sarah Nicastro: Thanks. You can find more by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn as well as Twitter at The Future of FS. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more at ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

Do you remember the two-part podcast I recorded with James Mylett, SVP, U.S. Digital Buildings at Schneider Electric? If you haven’t listened, there are many nuggets of wisdom throughout the conversation. I read an article the other day, though, that brought back to mind one of his points – how much he values root cause analysis (and how often it is rushed past). During the podcast he said, “When you think about a problem, everybody wants to go to ideation, and we don’t spend enough time first identifying the root cause of the problem. And so, my bias is to start at the problem and work backwards from that and put a solution in place that’s supported with data.”

This article by Sabina Nawaz in Harvard Business Review examines an even deeper layer of leadership misstep than failing to analyze root cause – discussing leaders who insist employees “bring me a solution, not a problem.” As Nawaz states in the article, this mentality can be chalked up to wanting to avoid employees complaining or “whining” and the hope to empower employees more by forcing them to solve problems.

But there is power within problems, and leaders who don’t want to dig into root case – or worse, don’t want to even hear about problems – are overlooking a critical source of insight and perspective. Now of course we don’t want to create a culture where employees are whining about every minute “problem” they encounter – but if we are hiring strong talent and empowering them, would they? Doubtful. The problems your employees surface are important to them for a reason – and being open to listening and engaging is not only key to employee satisfaction but can reveal opportunities that would otherwise lie dormant.

The Frontline Perspective

In field service, the importance of this topic is amplified because you are relying on a mostly remote workforce to be the face of your brand. The deal with customers often and encounter questions, thoughts, opinions, and yes – problems – others within your business don’t. They have an especially powerful line into what customers think, want, and need. Their take on what problems customers have can point you in the direction of how to improve and evolve your service offerings.

At the same time, they play an especially impactful role in the Customer Experience; so, listening to their “problems” is also important. If there’s a frustration or issue keeping them from doing their job well, a leader should want to understand that so that it can be resolved and the employee experience – and customer experience – protected.

This tendency of leaders to want to silence problems feels like an outdated mentality in a category along with fear of failure. Modern leaders who recognize the importance of culture and value the perspective of their talent don’t want to avoid hearing of problems, they want an openness to surface issues along with a collective willingness to dig in and solve them. They know that innovation doesn’t occur without failure and encourage employees to talk and think and try because they know if the responsibility to make the business better is shared, success is more likely.

I often say, a problem doesn’t go away because you aren’t willing to talk about it. Employees who feel silenced will stew about whatever it is that is challenging them – and that will inevitably cause diminished performance than what they are capable of. We need to be not only able but committed to digging into problems because we see every one as a learning opportunity, and we need to take James’ advice to really understand their root cause before we jump to a solution.

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