Why Your Business Feels Chaotic (And How Systems Fix It) | FOCB Ep 10 with Jason Sanders

Most business owners know they need systems.

But what they really need…

Are systems they can trust.

In this episode of From Overlooked to Consistently Booked, Meaghan Chitwood continues the conversation with Jason Sanders to break down the systems that allowed him to finally step back — without losing control.

Because scaling isn’t about doing more.

It’s about building something that works without you.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN IN THIS EPISODE:

•  The unconventional “all-in-one technician” model — and why it builds trust with customers 
•  Why most service businesses feel disconnected (and how to fix it) 
•  The system that creates consistent customer experience without scripts or pressure 
•  How simplifying compensation improves performance and retention 
•  Why removing sales pressure leads to better long-term results 
•  The role of culture in attracting and keeping top talent 
•  How to build a team that customers trust — even when you’re not there 
•  Why mistakes handled well can create lifelong customers 

THE BIG IDEA

You don’t scale trust by controlling everything.

You scale it by building systems that deliver the experience consistently.

Jason’s approach is simple — but powerful:

•  One person owns the customer experience from start to finish 
•  Communication is clear, honest, and tailored to the customer 
•  Pressure is removed so trust can grow naturally 

Because customers don’t just remember the outcome…

They remember how the process felt. 

A DIFFERENT WAY TO BUILD A SERVICE BUSINESS

Instead of separating roles into:

•  Sales 
•  Diagnosis 
•  Installation 

Jason built a system where one person owns the entire interaction.

Why?

Because it:

•  Builds stronger relationships 
•  Creates accountability 
•  Eliminates confusion for the customer 

And ultimately…

It feels more human.

CULTURE OVER SCRIPTS

One of the biggest differentiators in this episode:

No scripts.
 No pressure tactics.
 No “sales school” mentality.

Instead:

•  Clear expectations 
•  Honest conversations 
•  Simple processes 

Because while pressure can close a sale…

Trust builds a business.

TURNING MISTAKES INTO LOYALTY

Jason shares real examples of mistakes — including costly ones.

But instead of hiding them or deflecting blame…

They fix them.

And that creates something powerful:

Customers who stay.
 Customers who refer.
 Customers who trust.

Because how you handle problems matters more than avoiding them.

IF THIS EPISODE RESONATES…

This is exactly why environments like BNI North Alabama exist.

Because businesses built on trust, relationships, and referrals don’t grow in isolation.

If you want to surround yourself with people building that kind of business:

Visit a chapter:
 https://northern.bnialabama.com/en-US/index

COMING UP NEXT

In the next episode, we take this one step further:

How leadership creates a truly referable business — and why some businesses get talked about while others don’t.

CONNECT & FOLLOW

•  Subscribe for more episodes of From Overlooked to Consistently Booked
•  Share this with a business owner trying to build a team they can trust 
•  Drop a comment: Which system in your business needs the most clarity right now?

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:10

I'm Megan Jwood and you are tuning in to From Overlooked to Consistently Booked, where we're talking to Jason Sanders about how he went from technician to business owner. And today we're going to talk about the systems you had to put in place to make this really work for you so that you knew the right service was being delivered and you could feel better about the control you were relinquishing. So tell us what kind of what systems have you put in place to make this work?

SPEAKER_00 0:38

The first system is a departure from what's typical in the HVAC service industry where you have, well, these guys are installers and these guys are technicians and these guys do this. I tell my guys, we are not that kind of company. You're gonna wear all the hats here. If you uh are the one who's diagnosing the air conditioner, you are also the one who's gonna have to fix it. Okay? And you can actually watch people when you tell them this, and you can their facial expression will tell you they're not right fit for the job. So when I say to someone, yeah, you say you have seven years experience making these diagnoses, but you didn't do the repairs. With my company, if you make the diagnosis, you're also gonna do the repair and have to look at that air conditioner in case it didn't work. And now you're standing there going, Oh, what did I just do? You know, and you can see their facial expressions, they go, Oh, I'm not ready for that.

SPEAKER_02 1:25

And what made you decide that that's how you're going to run it?

SPEAKER_00 1:28

Necessity. So my first hire was uh, you know, the one guy. And so I, you know, if I if I gotta go behind you and do it, I I don't need you, you know. So I need I need to trust that you're gonna be there and able to make this repair, able to talk to the customer. And and if it current turns out that the diagnosis is such that we really need to start talking about a new air conditioning system, you also have to be able to go inside and talk to the customer about that comfortably. You are very likely gonna be the one to come back and install it because you're all I got. And I'll come help you. But I also, it wasn't just necessity. I also think doesn't it feel a little impersonal if someone comes and says, I found some problems, but I got another guy coming and he's gonna explain everything to you.

SPEAKER_02 2:14

Well, I was actually thinking about it as you were saying it as kind of twofold. Yes, I agree with you, it's like who's the next person who's gonna come and show up? But also you're building a closer relationship with the customer being the same face coming back. So you're so you're actually that consistency can actually really help with the customer experience.

SPEAKER_00 2:33

And even, you know, even in the summer months when we get just so busy that we have to bring in subcontractors, if you were the one who made this transaction happen, I want you to go and introduce the subcontractors to the homeowner, make sure they got a phone number if anything goes wrong, call us. I just feel like it's uh I I I think it's just poor form to let seven or eight different people handle one transaction, you know, and that's the way a lot of the competitors do it. You know, for example, they'll run to your house and they they've come up with a problem with your air conditioner, and you they've identified it as eight years old. Well, they really don't worry about doing an actual repair any longer. They come to your home and they stall and they bring in the closer. And the closer comes to your house and starts talking about the age of your air conditioner and how much you might need to replace it, and they start really applying that pressure. Customers will go for it, then another completely different group comes in and does the actual work. And to me, that entire process just feels so I hate to use the word dishonest, but there's just something about it that doesn't feel hometown to me. And I like hometown.

SPEAKER_02 3:42

Well, I was gonna say it doesn't feel corporate. It feels corporate. Yeah. Because everybody's got their job and they're doing their job, and and they're not, you're not thinking about me, the customer in that particular case. That's really interesting.

SPEAKER_00 3:53

So that was the first system. The second system that I had to bring in was a simplified pay structure. So a lot of these companies will have a really high hourly rate, but then they do everything they can do to minimize the number of hours that you get, and you only get X amount of time on a call. And if you want to make any additional money, they have these little spiffs, they'll call them, but they're hard to make under the workload they give you. Other companies will give you, uh, for example, a straight commission. Well, what do you do with that guy in the wintertime when you don't have any work for him? You know, so we we came up with a a meager hourly rate, it's you know, something, and then very basic, easy to understand flat commissions. And employees like that. Employees like to know I should expect about this much on my next paycheck. And it doesn't take a degree in engineering to figure out what my paycheck's gonna look like. Um, and the next one is you know, I call it the KISS method. I don't know where I first heard that, but it stands for keep it simple, stupid. Yeah. You know, you don't have to overcomplicate things. If you don't load your employee up with a bunch of pressure, they don't have to memorize scripts and make sure they deliver every line and get grilled if the sale didn't go wrong. You're not gonna win them all, you know? Yeah, but we'll win enough. And if I'm being real with you, those things right there take a lot of pressure off an employee and you start to see the real person who you're gonna be dealing with. Because we all we all know that it's a different person sometimes in the interview, as opposed to when you put them in a truck and put them on the road. Well, disarming people by just saying, look, we're people too. You know, keep let's let's keep it simple and just be honest with our customers and with ourselves, we're gonna be okay. And then the last one was I I kind of had to swallow uh up a bit a painful pill and just pay them well. Um if you don't pay for top people, you're not gonna get top people. And that actually solved two problems. That I now when I say, hey, I'm hiring, generally speaking, I'll have somebody call me in a day or two. I just put the word out and I'll have somebody call me. I don't really have to advertise for hiring positions any longer. So there you go.

SPEAKER_02 6:00

One of the things that I have also found is that if you get really good people, they usually know really good people in the industry, right? And you can you can go far as a small business owner, you know, looking at less than 10 people, you can go really far with just who who else do you know who's really awesome? And then it sounds like you've also created employees that are real advocates for the company in general because you're letting them be them in the whole process. So those advocates can probably sell them before the interview even starts.

SPEAKER_00 6:27

Yeah, you know, and I didn't mention this, this is not, you know, it's part of the process. I tell them, would you send you to your grandmother's house if you were out of state? And that's the guy that I want to go to and knock on on every door. And my supply houses know it, my employees know it. And so I I can tell you that there's been times when my supply houses have referred people to me. They're not really supposed to do that.

SPEAKER_01 6:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:50

But, you know, because they know what we're gonna do and they know what we're not gonna do.

SPEAKER_02 6:54

Yeah. One thing I love about small business is that we can create whatever we want, right? We can it can be a little bit more expensive. You said pay them well, right? It can be a little bit more expensive, but we can create exactly what we want. Um, how have you been through the whole creation creating the culture and what you want your company to be stand to be standing for?

SPEAKER_00 7:14

Well, the first thing is, you know, we we really just beat into their heads that we don't do sales schools. We we sometimes come in and we'll make fun of some of the things that they'll teach you to do in these sales schools. There's the the four-quarter trick. I don't know if you want to hear about the four-quarter trick. We laugh about the four-quarter trick. But it basically boils down to this, where you've put a bunch of pressure on a customer and they're feeling the pressure. And their their little internal meters telling them something doesn't quite add up. You're supposed to pull out four-quarters and lay them on the table and get real serious and try to get real personal and say, can you afford a dollar a day to make sure your family has blah blah blah blah blah? You know, and we laugh about those things because on its face it's absurd. And there are companies who push that, and you know why they push it? Because it works. Yeah. It does it does work, but we just think it's silly. Uh the other thing that we really kind of try to do is is when we're when we're slow enough to do it, I try to take everybody to lunch. And we just laugh and have a good time. There it's it's a it feels more like a well, a band of brothers, yeah, you know, in my shop than it feels like uh, you know, a big corporate stuffy office. Yeah. And we like it that way. Well, I just feel like we get honesty.

SPEAKER_02 8:29

Yeah, you really get to know everybody and get all get really honest feedback as well.

SPEAKER_00 8:34

And I always try to be very approachable. I've worked for people who well, I know this a company that I worked for before, before I came on board and was the manager there, the employees were making some serious mistakes and would do everything to make sure the boss didn't find out. You know, so they were losing some profitability, paying for time that they shouldn't have been paying for because people were unapproachable. I just think that's an issue.

SPEAKER_02 8:59

Well, and you mentioned a couple of episodes ago about how you uh allow people to make sp mistakes and you debrief on those. How do you how have you created the system to for people to feel comfortable saying, oof, this went up? How do we how do we ultimately fix it?

SPEAKER_00 9:14

Catch them in a few mistakes and let them see how you respond to it. Let them see you're not gonna beat them over the head with something, you're not gonna show them the door. Just handle it, you know.

SPEAKER_02 9:25

And your last big system, how do you get that feedback so that you identify those things? Do you have a system for figuring out when something goes wrong?

SPEAKER_00 9:33

Generally the guys will tell me.

SPEAKER_02 9:34

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

Um, the customers will tell you a lot of times too. You know, customers are not usually afraid to call and make a complaint. You know, we don't get a lot, and then we take we take those complaints and we take them all seriously. Sometimes, you know, we had a customer, for instance, we put a new air conditioner in for him and he called, it ain't never work right. And he was complaining, he was so upset about it. We'll come to find out it was he he changed the thermostat and he didn't program it properly. You know, um unfortunately been there and done that. Yeah, you know, thermostat's one of those things that uh man, they can really get you. Yes, they can really get you. Um but we still don't try to make the customer feel stupid. Yeah. You know, what we basically I empower my employees to know that if a customer's upset about something, they say to the customer, hey, let me call Jason and we're gonna take care of it. Yeah. I'll tell you, the first employee that I hired uh was just a temporary guy because it had to be a job that I needed help on, is I made a huge mistake. I ran a screw right through somebody's air conditioner coil and lost all the refrigerant. And I did that on an air conditioner that was working. You know what I mean? I was there for a maintenance. How do you go up to your customer and say, hey, I need you to buy a new one? But you don't do that. You don't do that. I had to go to the customer and say, hey man, I made a bad mistake. It's gonna be inconvenient for a day because we're gonna have to bring the part in, but we're gonna fix it. You know, customers don't they don't get nearly as upset when you say, but I'm gonna fix it.

SPEAKER_02 10:57

Well, not nearly upset, and I would venture to say, you probably have a customer for life.

SPEAKER_00 11:01

We do. That guy still 100%.

SPEAKER_02 11:04

I always tell people, like, don't don't run away from the what don't run away from that because it's your biggest opportunity to get to build out a raving fan.

SPEAKER_00 11:12

I always tell my my employees there is almost nothing that's so bad that we can't fix it. Yeah. Just last week, we just gave a guy a new air conditioner because we had a consistent problem with it. We don't know what it is. We believe it's a manufacturer issue. But we just told the customer, so hey man, we're tired of dealing with this. And what I don't I don't mean to say we're tired of you calling, we're tired of you having to put up with it. We're just gonna put you a new one in here. Are you okay with that? You know what that guy said? Uh yeah, I'm okay with that.

SPEAKER_02 11:37

Exactly right. Exactly right. Well, these are fantastic systems that you have created to really make this work. Um, and next week we're gonna talk about your leadership and how that creates more referrals for you ultimately, which we've already gotten a few of those nuggets, but I want to wrap that up for everyone else as well. Thank you so much for tuning in for tutorials from Overlook to Consistent Lab. And again, next week we're gonna continue thinking of talking about how to get the leadership how to turn it on.