Business View - November 2014 37
made it difficult for our trainees, but that’s the point.
When they eventually go out into the real world they
aren’t surprised to see how difficult some facilities are
to locate and they’ve been trained on how to do the
job right.”
Powell said the company spent about $50,000 in sal-
ary for the prolonged training period and a month of
ride-along demonstrations with partners, before any of
the employees got into the field to produce revenue.
But, he said, the first subsequent transaction with a
new customer saw that customer’s damages from a
single state’s worth of work plummet from $2.2 million
to just $400,000.
Reducing those damages, he said, halts an entire
chain of problems before they begin.
“What happens when you have a damage?” Powell
said. “You have an upset customer because they want-
ed to watch the Super Bowl with their buds and all of
a sudden they lost their cable TV or their telephone
service. They lost power, so now there’s no game to
watch and their beer’s warm.
“Bad things happen from a customer standpoint.
When you have gas and electric damage, sometimes
things burn up, blow up and people get harmed. Then
you’ve upset our customer, the utility who’s providing
those services, because now they’re sending people
out there at their expense and overtime to do the re-
pairs and everything.
“Bad things come out of not doing the right thing,
and that’s just a prime example of the way we look at
things. This industry really has legs, and it’s got legs
for people, we think, that do right things the right way.
Our ‘We’ve Got This’ slogan is what we think will sepa-
rate us from the rest of the field.”
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APG INC
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CONSTRUCTION
