Increase Your Profitability by Evaluating Site Managers Using Retention Metrics
Focusing on retention can help you increase client retention and profitability.
If you’ve learned anything over the course of this blog series from Kwantek and TEAM Software, it should be the importance of retention when it comes to your janitorial or security business’ profitability. When you’re faced with so many things you can’t control gaining visibility into something you can influence, like retention, is a game-changer.
Over the past several weeks, we’ve covered everything from the basics of determining cost per hire and the difference between retention and turnover, to looking at how you incentivize your site managers in relation to retention. In this post, we are taking a deeper look at the retention-related metrics you should use to evaluate your site managers to grow your bottom line and improve customer satisfaction.
Site Managers Can Make (or Break) Your Business
Site managers are critical to the success of any organization in the janitorial and security industries. Therefore, how you determine the effectiveness of those site managers is something you need to spend some time truly evaluating. But, if your evaluation method is flawed, the resulting data will be flawed, too.
You can spend years trying to build your business around a certain model, but if it’s not one that achieves a result that can help you scale your business, it’s not valuable. Ask yourself: if you’re evaluating your site managers solely on contract profitability (site revenue minus payroll costs), is that the best long-term strategy?
Increase Your Customer Retention to Increase Profitability
We’re not saying that site-level profitability isn’t important, but you may need to factor in other metrics as well to help you move the needle on the bottom line. If you’re looking to scale your business, you need to look beyond that one measure. We believe it can boil down to one simple question: What’s the most effective way to retain your clients?
Client retention is about making sure you’re delivering on your customer contracts and keeping your customers (and employees) happy. Happy employees serve your customers better – and they tend to stay longer. So, retaining your workforce allows the site manager to place a greater focus on making sure your customers are satisfied because they can spend less time on onboarding and training new employees. And, your business can spend less time and money on hiring.
Two Retention Metrics to Evaluate Your Site Managers
Here are two easy-to-determine metrics to guide you along the way in evaluating site-manager effectiveness.
Metric #1: What Percentage of Their Employees Have Been with them 1+ Years?
This is a number you should know for all your site managers as well as your entire company. Simply put, this is a measure of the stability of a site manager’s workforce.
Metric #2: Number of Hires Needed Per Active Employee
This metric will show you where you’re bleeding recruiting, hiring and administrative resources. Look at how many hires managers made in a set time period. Now divide that by their average number of active employees during that same period.
While not every manager is going to be responsible for the same number of employees, this metric standardizes your evaluation. This metric also shows you which clients could be most at risk. If the number is high, there’s a strong likelihood the client could be getting frustrated with the constant turnover and/or quality of work.
The Power of Accurate Retention Data
These are two of the most powerful data points you can monitor when it comes to your site managers. They’ll tell you which managers should be rewarded, and which should be reviewed. They can help determine where your profits are most likely coming from and where they’re being sucked away. And, they’ll indicate which clients are likely to be happy versus which clients are likely to be dissatisfied.
If you don’t pay attention to these retention metrics, it can impact your bottom line, customer satisfaction and site profitability. When you use a holistic software solution with workforce and operations data in one system, it’s much easier to get to these and other business metrics and keep an eye on them.
Now that you better understand your retention, it’s time to use it as a key point in your marketing collateral to increase sales and grow your business. In our final blog in the series co-presented by Kwantek and TEAM Software, we’ll talk about how to use retention as a key competitive advantage as you present your services to prospects. If you’re looking for even more insight into how you can use retention metrics to grow your business, check out the recording of our exclusive webinar with subject matter experts from Kwantek and TEAM Software.
Other posts in this series can be found below: