The following is the first in a series of articles published in NADCA Ductales magazine on approaches we use to build and to brand our air duct cleaning company. This first installment is focused on air duct cleaning training. Future installments will focus on the value of blogs, how to build a robust electronic client list and branding your company with an easily remembered toll-free phone number.
We’ve been doing training for a long time. Since 1985 our company has been conducting air duct cleaning training courses from our headquarters in southeast Michigan for companies wanting to improve their air duct cleaning services and for those businesses that want to become one of our licensed affiliates.
Most of our students include people from other parts of the U.S. and Canada, but some have traveled from Singapore, Australia, the Virgin Islands and other distant locations. We’ve most recently expanded our services to include traveling to our client locations to train them on their own turf. Our first offsite training sessions took place in South Africa where we trained our first international licensed affiliate, whose company launched late last year.
Our point of view has been that training is crucial to the success of our employees, our management and our advertising, and also very important to our prospects and customers. Here are four ways we might answer the question, “Why is training important?”
Even the smartest ones. Aside from compensation, what employees consistently say they need most at work is the knowledge and skills to do their jobs. If you don’t do formal training yourself, you cannot know that all employees are being repeatedly exposed to the knowledge they need and provided with the opportunity to practice needed skills hands-on. In addition you can and you should take advantage of professional trainers doing some of the training your people need. Make sure employees get it from you, but also make sure they get it from professionals whose track record you can check and confirm. You owe this to your employees.
I learned that most employees say what they need most is knowledge and skill from websites that aggregate responses to exit interviews. You don’t want to learn this lesson from your own exit interviews, it’s way too expensive and frustrating. Learn from the mistakes others have already made and make sure you are doing initial and ongoing formal training of all your employees.
By the way, in addition to functional training, employees also need structured, formal, regularly repeated training in precisely what you personally expect from them, in plain language, both spoken and printed. That training you must do yourself. You cannot farm that part of it out to a third party, no matter how skillful the trainer.
Ductales Magazine