Achieving Operational Excellence: The Top 5 Things We Learned from Our Conversation with Vince Nardo

As one of the most successful names in the remodeling industry, improveit 360 customer Vince Nardo sure knows what he’s talking about when it comes to how to run a home improvement business the right way.

Last week, we hosted a MasterClass webinar with Vince Nardo, CEO of Reborn Cabinets, to discuss how to deal with supply chain issues, manage customer expectations, recruit great talent and more. And while we learned boatloads of valuable information during the 1-hour discussion, we feel that these were the top 5 takeaways from the conversation: 

1. When leads are abundant, you have to know which of them to prioritize.

Can you really have too many leads? You betcha! The truth is that companies sometimes generate more leads that they can handle. In this situation, it’s crucial that you have a way to analyze your data to determine which leads have a higher opportunity rate to convert, and which leads you have a higher opportunity rate to convert at a lower cost. Using an industry-specific CRM like improveit 360 can be extremely helpful for this type of analysis, as improveit 360 offers several reports designed to help you compare the set rate, issue rate, close rate, and cost of acquisition of your different lead sources.

2. Choose your vendors based on how they communicate.

As frustrating as it is, vendors have their supply chain issues. It just happens – even to the best suppliers! However, the vendors you work with SHOULD be communicating honestly with your company when a problem comes up, as well as if they expect problems to arise in the near future.

“You always see who the best [suppliers] are when there’s challenges ahead of them . . . When its’ all easy, you never know if they’re really good or not. When a little bit of difficulty comes in, you really see who you have on your team as a supplier.”

-Vince Nardo, CEO of Reborn Cabinets

3. Always be transparent with the customer about problems that affect their projects.

As stated above, sometimes you’ll have to deal with delays or issues with supply chains. And when these affect a project timeline, it’s vital that you use more contact points with the homeowner into your customer journey. By leveraging improveit 360, you can take advantage of the system’s automation to send emails to customers or notify a team member to call a customer if their project start date is past due, or installation is taking longer than normal. Ultimately, being transparent with your customers about problems with their projects is the only way to have a controllable end result.

“When the customer is left unspoken to, or un-communicated with if you will, that’s when their mind starts to wander, and we lose control of the experience.”

-Vince Nardo, CEO of Reborn Cabinets

4. Always be transparent with your salespeople about problems in the organization 

Dealing with backlog issues (i.e., a manufacturer can’t keep up, things aren’t getting installed as quickly as they used to, etc.) can be distracting and negatively affect your sales reps’ mindsets. And since your reps can’t sell if they’re not in the right mindset, it’s important that you keep them in the loop on what products are causing problems with the supply chain, which aren’t, how the company can address them and how everyone can work together to get things installed quicker. By using improveit 360, you can leverage report scheduling and automated communications to send information to your sales team about bottlenecks in your operations, ensuring they stay updated about what’s going on across your organization.

5. Someone looking for a job is no different than a person looking for your product.

When someone shows interest in working for your company, you have to respond to them quickly or else you risk losing them to the competition – just like a lead. And according to Vince, people want to work for companies that are going to respond to their inquiries quickly and not after several days. If it takes you several days to get back to a candidate about a position, they’re going to look at your company and think, “if they couldn’t get back to me for several days, how are they treating their customers?”. The bottom line: handle an influx of resumes like you would an influx of leads: promptly and professionally.

If you’re interested in hearing more from Vince about key tactics for achieving operational excellence and setting your business up for success, you can find the recorded version of the webinar here. And if you really want to take Vince’s advice and apply it to your own home improvement business, it’s absolutely necessary to have a tool like improveit 360 in place. improveit 360, an industry-specific CRM system built for contractors, has everything you need to manage lead and customer information, streamline internal and external communications, and obtain a birds-eye view into every corner of your home improvement company.

To learn more about how you can leverage improveit 360 to build a successful business like Vince has, schedule a demo with one of our team members today!

P.S., We have more MasterClass sessions coming up in the near future, so keep an eye out for more information if you want to continue learning how to optimize your business!