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Don’t Just Do the Thing Right, Do the Right Thing

Don’t Just Do the Thing Right, Do the Right Thing

Today, at Tech Systems, Inc., we are proud to affirm that when we have a choice to make or a job to do, we do the right thing. Always. No matter what. However, we were not always driven by this commitment. To understand how this has evolved and how we have become the Evergreen® company we are today, we have to go back to 1995.

We are security integrators. In 1995, we were fairly small and, like all security integrators in town, we were continually chasing projects. The low dollar always got the job; we won some and we lost some, just like all of our competitors. When it came to service contracts, after a purchase, we provided a service contract that basically listed all the exceptions to what we agreed to provide. “You pay us X dollars and here are the things this contract does NOT cover. We can do that, but you have to pay us more.” That was standard protocol in our industry at the time. We thought of ourselves as pretty customer service driven in those days, but then something happened that changed us, and set us on a course to become who we are today.

We had been in business for about eight years, and I had become the sole owner of the company. Our largest client called on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend and said, “Hey, all my cameras are out in our parking deck.” The service person on call said, “We’ll be there the next business day, which is Tuesday, because that’s what our contract says.” Our client didn’t protest and that was the end of that. I happened to talk to this service person shortly after the call, and he shared the conversation he’d just had with our client. My initial thought was, “Well, that’s the way it’s structured, that’s the way it’s supposed to work.”

I was only about a mile from the facility when I spoke to him, so I decided to swing by and see if there was anything I could do. It was still within an hour since the initial call had been placed. I walked in and greeted the guy at the security console, and he said, “Hey, don’t worry about it. We got all the cameras up and running.” It turned out they had just blown a simple little fuse, and they had been able to diagnose and fix the problem themselves. I thought, what a great resolution.

A couple of weeks later, my contact at the same client called and asked for a meeting. I figured they wanted to talk about a new service or some other new business opportunity. To my complete shock, once we sat down, she announced that they were going to end their relationship with us. They fired us. I was stupefied. We talked it through, and she brought us back to Labor Day weekend. She said, ” I know what the contract said, and I know you guys did the thing right, but you didn’t do the right thing.”

She explained that they had a bunch of employees, mostly women, working in a call center. They had 34 cameras out in the parking deck, which created a false sense of security. If they went to their cars and somebody was attacked or something, that would be a huge liability for their company. As much as I didn’t like it, I had to admit that she was absolutely right.

Coming out of losing our biggest client, and of realizing what kind of situation we’d put them in, we committed to making a change. We had to do better, and we had to do the right thing, first and always.

It took eight or nine months and more than one iteration. We started by making a list of commitments we were ready to make to all our clients. There were only about 20 of us in the company at the time, so we sat in a room and we brainstormed: we’re going to guarantee our response time; we’re going to get there within four clock hours around the clock; if we don’t do that, we’re going to give the client a $250 credit memo, because we’re not going to profit on failure. It was an all-inclusive agreement; they pay one price per year, no exceptions. There were lots of other details in there, all aimed at always doing the right thing by our clients.

When we laid this all out and adopted it, we knew it was a financial risk. We were small and not at all sure we could afford this, but we took a leap of faith. Of course, we stubbed our toe several times getting started, but in a very short period of time, it started to become contagious throughout the organization. The team became fanatical about hitting these performance metrics, because frankly, at that time, we couldn’t afford to give up $500 of credit. It was all hands on deck

On the other side of this work, we finalized and implemented what we now call F.O.C.U.S – “For Our Client’s Ultimate Satisfaction.” It has made us into an entirely new company. When we implemented F.O.C.U.S, we thought for sure our competitors would copy us and we’d have a new fight for business on our hands. But they haven’t, at all. In fact, ours is an industry where many of our competitors are public, and beholden to their shareholders, and the ones who aren’t are now being rolled up by Private Equity. Neither of those structures have room for an agreement like F.O.C.U.S. We have remained unique in our commitment to complete, consistent, and excellent service.

As a result, we have been able to grow the company an incredible amount, from about 20 employees in 1995 to 515 today. We have clients throughout the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico and 90% of that growth has been purely organic, based on client referrals. Our clients see us as the guys who do a fantastic job understanding who they are and meeting their service needs. It makes all the difference in the world and has become our greatest competitive advantage by a huge margin.

To bring this story full circle, I have one more story to share. About eight years after we were terminated by our client, we had deployed F.O.C.U.S. and it had begun to gain momentum. We hosted a lunch-and-learn presentation in Atlanta where we invited many local security professionals to show them our new products and new technology, but also to talk about F.O.C.U.S. We did a presentation on F.O.C.U.S. and the lady who had terminated us in 1995 was in the audience. After the meeting, she said, “That’s incredible. I wish you guys had had that then. We wouldn’t have fired you.” I replied, “If you hadn’t fired me, we wouldn’t have it today.” They hired us back.

Now at Tech Systems, the spirit of doing the right thing is so deeply ingrained in who we are that it has become the lens through which we make all our decisions, including engaging new clients. If we have a current or prospective client who solely values the lowest price over a long-term service relationship, we will decline their business or even terminate their contract. It’s not common, but it’s an easy decision when it happens. Do the right thing, first and always.

When I look back to 1995, I see clearly that the worst thing that ever happened to us became the best thing that ever happened to us; it allowed us to become the industry-leader we are today. Even though it takes time and can cost more along the way, it pays to not just do the thing right, but to do the right thing.

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