Don’t Judge Your Next Technician By Her Purple Hair

By Danielle Putnam

“Yesterday was my birthday. I’m 17.”

I overheard those words last night at the skate park, standing a few feet from a girl with purple hair, a vape in one hand, and rips torn clean through both knees of her jeans. She was talking to a friend up on the ramp, and she kept going: After I got kicked out of school, I started trying everything I could to figure out what I actually liked. Art. Paint. Skateboarding. Now I practice every single day because I just want to land an Ollie.

I turned my head so she wouldn’t see me tear up.

There are no bad kids. There are only kids who got failed by a teacher, a parent, a system, or all three. Here was a 17-year-old who’d been kicked out of school, and in the same breath she was clearly smart, self-aware, and hungry to get better at something hard. She wasn’t afraid to try something new. So what happened? Who gave up on her first?

I couldn’t stop thinking about how often we do the exact same thing in this business.

We write people off before we ever give them a shot

How many times has a resume, an interview, or a first impression made us cross someone off the list before we found out what they could actually do? The kid with visible tattoos who’d be great with his hands and better with customers than half the veterans on your team. The candidate with a rough work history who just needed someone to actually train him instead of assuming he already knew flat rate menu pricing on day one. The CSR who mumbles through her first mock call but takes every piece of feedback like a sponge, because nobody ever bothered giving her real CSR training before.

Hiring a technician or a CSR off the signs we can see, instead of the potential we can’t, is one of the most expensive mistakes a home services business makes. Every owner I talk to says the same thing: good people are impossible to find. I’d push back on that a little. Good people are everywhere. What’s actually hard to find is a business set up to develop them once you’ve got them.

The system is what turns potential into performance

Here’s the part that actually matters for your business: talent alone doesn’t make a great technician, and neither does how someone looks in an interview. What turns a raw, unproven hire into a technician who can walk into a stranger’s home and present pricing with confidence on day one is the system you hand them.

That’s the whole idea behind flat rate pricing. A brand-new technician doesn’t need ten years in the trade to quote a job correctly if you’ve already built the pricebook for him. A well-built HVAC pricebook, or a plumbing flat rate menu built the same way, takes the guesswork and the improvisation out of pricing and replaces it with a menu a technician can present with confidence, whether it’s his first week or his fifteenth year. That’s the real value of menu pricing: it protects your margins, and it protects your new hire from ever having to wing it in front of a customer.

The same logic applies to your CSRs. Good CSR training isn’t about hiring someone who already sounds perfect on the phone. It’s about giving a coachable person a script, a process, and real coaching until she gets there. And it applies to your software, too. The right FSM software and a CRM built for the trades mean a new hire isn’t relying on memory or tribal knowledge to do the job right — the system carries the experience the job used to require.

A few honest answers, since these questions come up constantly

How much does it cost to build a flat rate pricebook for your business? Less than what you’re already losing every time an undertrained technician underquotes a job, or a CSR loses a call because nobody trained her on what to say. The real cost isn’t the pricebook. It’s running without one.

What is menu pricing, really? It’s a presented set of good-better-best options a technician walks a homeowner through, the same way a restaurant menu works, so the pricing conversation stops depending on any one person’s memory, mood, or years of experience — whether that’s an HVAC pricebook or a plumbing pricing system.

Do technician pay scales need to change if you start hiring less experienced people? Usually the opposite. A good flat rate system lets you hire people you couldn’t have hired before, and pay them fairly for the results the system helps them produce, not just the years listed on their resume.

Watch out for the missed opportunity standing right in front of you

That girl at the skate park is going to land her Ollie. She said so herself, and I believed her. The only question is whether the adults around her keep giving her real chances, or whether they see the purple hair and the vape and decide they already know everything they need to know.

Your next great technician or CSR might be standing in your lobby right now, and she might not look like who you pictured when you wrote the job post. Build the systems, the pricebook, and the training that let her prove you wrong.

Danielle Putnam is the CEO of The New Flat Rate. If you’re still building the pricebook for your FSM off memory and tribal knowledge instead of a real system — whether that’s an HVAC pricebook, a plumbing flat rate menu, or your first real CSR training program — that’s exactly what we help home services businesses build every day.

Want to see how it works? Book a demo with The New Flat Rate