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Tracking Techs in Real Time

Getting your techs to enter time in real time is one of the first steps toward service delivery efficiency and success. You'll likely move from struggling to get your techs to enter time at all to a well-oiled time entry machine utilizing these techniques.

Video Transcript

" quick intro, these will get faster and faster intros, because you may have seen us already, but some of you may not have. So my name is Rex Frank, founder and CEO of C level operations. We are friends with char tech, we help out with the operational side of ops lab, I've been in the business about 30 years, from a director to kind of in the director services role, most of my career. And with sea level, we coach msps, on getting their operations in order. tourtech is sort of a one to many system where sea levels of one on one system. So it's very similar content, but we don't feel like we compete with each other. So. And yeah, Dan Martin, I am president of Connect smart, which is a dashboarding tools, you probably seen dashboards around on big screens or on people's monitors, as well as I have an MSP in South Florida called connections for business. So I've been in the MSP world for about 2424 years or so. And so, connect smart kind of came out of that. And so a lot of what we're doing, Rex and I met back in the 90s. And we're involved in some similar peer groups. And so we've kind of have have kind of evolved together in the whole MSP business in working together, you know, putting things back and forth between our you know, kind of ping pong and idea sharing best practices, best practices. And you know, we kind of forget sometimes was this my idea, his idea or somebody else's idea that we've all incorporated. So that's why we kind of like to do these together is to kind of break it up a little bit. And I also do have a pig farm in Texas. And so that was actually I was doing a consulting call with one of my folks, I just find it as a lot more fun to be smoking a cigar and feeding animals while I'm talking to somebody on the on the phone, there it is to have my, my professional LinkedIn picture up there. So all right, so here's our agenda for today, you'll probably notice some of the presentations are more mine, and I'm the main presenter, and Dan's the color guy. And some of them, they're more his, like on the metrics that matter, right? That's his world. So he'll be the main presenter, I'm the color guy. So this one is more of my presentation. But you know, in my coaching world, I've kind of discovered it, no matter where I am. And the concept of getting text enter time immediately is there doing the work is like a universal problem. So I decided, beginning of last year, to put together a presentation on just tips and tricks that I had used throughout my career. And we still use in my coaching career, to try to get engineers entering our time real time. Right. So I don't think any one of these is the silver bullet. But I my goal with this presentation was just to kind of put some more tricks in your bag of tricks. Right? So this is, this is a tough, tough one to tackle like, it's a universal problem. Any Yeah. I mean, question Who does anyone here not have this problem? Everybody put all their time in. Now, it's interesting if you're if you go onto social media and some of the social media things, it's amazing how many people talk about how well they have all their texts doing everything. It's kind of like when you meet somebody on the airplane, they know that they're probably never gonna see you. So half the stuff they say is kind of full of it. And so one of the things that I've appreciated when doing some of these with Rex is, you know, we kind of live through what works and what doesn't work. So sometimes we're not necessarily here as the experts of knowing it. All right, it's, you know what, this really doesn't work well. And some of these other things are some tips that it's not going to be like you said a silver bullet, but it gets us gets us partway there. I do want to ask the room. What are some of the things that keep our engineers and you from entering time? And then we'll see how many of those that we got in the deck. Okay, constant interruptions. Got it. What else? laziness. laziness. I don't think that one's on there. Honestly, I like Yeah. Tight scheduling, meaning I have another job I got to do, right. What else? A lot of times something is resolved in five minutes. So it was quick. Yeah, right. Okay. What else? I don't have time to enter time. Okay, what else? I think you guys are getting a lot of them. costing. Perfect. ation doesn't cost them anything. Oh, it doesn't cost them anything. Yeah, okay. Yep. Maybe your PSA system isn't set up properly and it takes work to open a ticket. Okay, so it's hard to it's hard. It's harder to open a ticket and log my time than it should be. Okay. Okay, so defaulting problems. And I heard something. What? lack of accountability? Oh, not holding the engineer. They're not held accountable. So why do they have to do it? Right? Okay. Those tickets are escalated without the actual procedure. So here's what I got up there pressure to solve the next, the next client problems. By the way, I'm not making excuses. I'm just sharing the excuses. You're going to hear, right? There's pressure, there's another ticket, another client that's waiting, so I need to move on to that. Oh, it's a flat fee service. Why do I need to enter my time? We're not billing them. Right. Is there anybody? That one sound familiar? Yeah. Okay. If we have a history of not entering time, why, why do we suddenly have to start entering time now? Right? My job's always been here, they're gonna be here. Like, why? Why do we have to change? Right? Here's the I don't have time to enter time, the poor time management. And I didn't hear this one from you guys unable to split up when I'm multitasking. Does anybody have any questions on any of these that we can kind of hit on or I can debunk some of them? Like, is there one up there that you're not sure how you would debunk that and multitasking? multitasking? Okay. So, show of hands, please. Everybody hand has to go up one of two questions. Okay. One question is, it is possible to multitask and we should be billing multiple clients at the same time. And it is not possible to multitask. You know, science is proven, you can't multitask. So, so Show of hands for Yes, multitasking as possible. Okay, and now show of hands for multitasking is not possible. Yeah, it's interesting. It's always a 5050. Split. Right? Dan, you're on the it's scientifically impossible to multitask. I'm on the, it could be possible to multitask, right? I could have started a workstation download patch on this computer, while I'm doing a help desk call with this person. And I'm doing two things at once. Right. And the interesting thing is, is every room I ask it's always a 5050 split. And my perspective is decide what your belief is, and make it the law. This is how we do business in our company. And don't do don't switch back and forth. Do you agree with that? Absolutely. And that's one of the things too, that you'll see. We don't always have the same way to get at it at an issue. And I think that is really important. Because many times there's the thing with consulting, if you guys are familiar with despair, calm, you know, the six, you've seen the success stories, you know, the inspiring photograph, and you know, the little pithy saying, despair, calm has some great ones, where they kind of turn it on their head a little bit, they have one that's one of my favorites that says consulting, it's the classic picture of the two business suits, you know, shaking hands, says consulting, if you can't be a part of the solution, there's good money to be made and prolonging the problem. And that's something that we see a lot, right. So sometimes it's not the method that you're taking, you know, how, you know, what are the service boards that I'm using? What are the time you know, what are the the details of the time injury of how we put them on, there's not necessarily a right or wrong, but the consistency is the is the absolute key. So you will see in a lot of our presentations a little bit different a perspective. And and on that on the multitasking side, right? There are things that can be done very close in sequence, right? So the key is simply making sure are we accounting for all of our time? And how are we going to how are we going to manage that? And what are the legal ramifications? In some places, it's illegal to have overlapping time entries. So that's just something to keep in mind. Yeah, and actually talking about your daily differential, this would be a good place for that. Yeah. So one of the things that we do is every Is anyone here not connectwise. So few, not connectwise. I think this actually applies to all of the PSA systems we personally use Connect wise, but we require everything to go into a ticket. So the very first thing when person comes in in the morning, there's a ticket that's created that every single team member is assigned to it's called the daily differential. That first record starts at let's say, eight o'clock, you know, the beginning of the day. So when they first walk in on their on their calendar, they click the first time entry, or the first activity calendar activity, and they just put the start time of when they started. A new time. Record. Start Time save, save and close the They're going about their day. So they pick up their first ticket, they're doing their second ticket, they're going through putting all their time in. At the end of the day, they go back to the timesheet. And when you look at the timesheet, you'll have you know how much time you've accounted for during the day? Well, there's at the very top of that list is going to be one time entry that's in red, and it has zero because it doesn't have a in time for that time entry. But it calculates, let's say, they've taken a count of six point whatever hours. So they take that number, go back to that first entry, and put that in the deduct field, hit the end time. So now we have what the time they first got there, the time they're leaving, and then they're deducting the amount of time that they've already taken into account. So what this does for us is now I have a complete, you know, the eight hours of time that they're there, I now have a complete record of what it is, if it's, you know, an hour to an hour and a half of time for that daily differential, that's your your lunch, your breaks, you know, all the various and sundry things. If it's more than an hour and a half, they have to give an accounting of what that is. And so they have to now start thinking about where is my time going, kind of a side benefit of that is, they can also see how much time has gone against the daily differential. And that's something that we review on a daily basis on our daily huddle of the previous daily differential. And if I have, you know, if I have 10 hours, that means I'm one body hot, right, I've got maybe an extra person, because that's an eight hour day. If I'm in a larger organization, I've seen many times where there's 2030 hours of time going against a daily differential. Well, I've got looks like I'm at least three people heavy, which three of you need to go because you don't have enough work to do. So I want to take a minute and share my personal journey over 30 years of time entry at all vaca networks I was there 19 years, so long before we had any PSA. So I'm talking paperwork orders, right, I remember, we had to move from three copies to four copies, we had to add golden rod to our list, right? I was a CTO there. I had a whole bunch of engineers reporting to me. But I was terrible with my time entry. Even after we got Connect wise, my first time entry was January 1 2005. In Connect wise, and, you know, when it came time, the timesheets were due, the CFO was calling me like, Where's your timesheet? And I'm looking back on this calendar that has no time entries in it because I didn't do any the whole week. And guess what I'm doing? I'm looking at my Sent Items to try to figure out what I was doing. I'm looking at my calendar, I'm looking at all these different places that we know, what was the quality and my time entries? Pretty bad, right? And so guess what the standard was being said, guess what the standard of my engineers was pretty bad. Guess what I was even doing? I was even defending my engineers. Why? All those excuses we saw a minute ago, right? Don't have time the entire time. I like I used every one of those excuses with the CFO. And so that's that was kind of my career at all vaca networks. So then I jumped over to a 50 person company Northwest computer support up in Seattle. Okay, I was the VP of managed services. And I remember, the first time sheet was due I started there on January 1. So somewhere around January 7, or eighth, I was asked, where's my timesheet? And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll get to it. And the CEO looks at me and goes, Rex, you're the only one that doesn't have your submitted. Right? And that was like that moment, right? Because it was simply nothing was acceptable, except immediate time entry. Right? So I was there for 18 months working in an environment where nothing short of immediate time entry was acceptable. Right. Then, I went to work with GW CS, now called arterian, as the Director of Operations, and after being conditioned for a year and a half of immediate time entry. What do you think I brought with me to jccs immediate time entry, and I'll tell you what, I was not popular at first, okay, because I was walking into an environment with all this lacks time entry with all those same excuses. Right. And I walked but I held everybody accountable. And once they started seeing the benefits that we'll talk about in a few minutes of immediate time entry, I just kind of became a non issue. But it probably took four or five months of really being aggressive about immediate time entry, and being the bad guy, as the new guy as the bad guy, which was hard. But it really did shake out that, you know, it just became a non issue. But my question is, at each of these three companies, what was different was the were the engineers. Different. Now. Same engineers write expectations, right? And I'm gonna say it's leadership. The whole point of that me telling that story is the difference was the leadership. It was the leadership's expectations. And what they were okay with them what they let slide, it didn't have anything to do with the engineers. Okay, that makes sense. And, you know, it has to be everybody. And I'm saying, including the owners and management, even, I had to enter my time, all day while I was working at the end of the day, because I had to set the example. And this second one for the bottom here is, especially your respected engineers, you know who your leader, whether they're in charge or not, you know, who your leader engineers are, they especially have to be setting the example. Because your your other engineers are going to follow that person's lead, whether or not they're going to follow that lead, and at least kind of this last one, no bad examples. So yep, so who has a problem with the whole owners entering time piece? A couple of you? Right? So let me let me help you just maybe give you a different perspective on that. And one of the reasons why I believe in this so emphatically, do you care about the profitability of your contracts? One of the things that's really why it's so important for that owner to be entering time is who is the most expensive resource in your entire company by a magnitude of time? Right, the owner is the most expensive person. So one of the things that we found is when we're when we're doing compensation plans, and there's a whole thing on comp plans, performance compensation plans, usually about the second quarter, when we're developing these four people, one of those pieces is going to be agreement profitability. So now that we have real time time entry, we actually know how much you know how much profit we're actually getting off of all of these. And every time you as an owner, or as an executive spending time with a customer, your time should be going against that contract. And when you're now when you're being how many people are escalated to too quickly from the technicians like, oh, they're upset, you know, owner needs to go call them. Right, everybody's had that issue, I don't have that issue. And the reason is, well, one, because I'm in a different state that helps now. But when I was in the same state, one of the things that we had is, you know, a anything could be escalated to me, I will, I will jump in my car, I will drive down to Miami, I'll go talk to coffee, equip, whoever it is, I'm going to, you know, drive down, we're going to have a conversation, I'm going to bring doughnuts and bagels, leave those at the office, I'm going to take the owner of the company, we're going to go out, we're going to go have a nice lunch. And you know, after we've had a nice lunch, we're gonna go back to the office, and we'll have a little discussion, that's probably going to be four or five hours, I've got my travel time, I've got my expenses for my car expense, I have all of my time that I spent is going against that contract, what do you think I just did to the profitability of that contract. I kill it, it will not be profitable if I'm personally having to spend four or five hours talking to a customer. So it fixes a lot of those. Needless escalations. And later we'll talk about in another presentation, how comp plans are tied to profitability, right? So, so they don't want their comp plan is going to get hurt if the owners can have to get involved building the contract at the highest Labor Rate possible. Right. And I'll just add one other thing on. I've had this discussion with one of my business partners and asked him how much time is being spent in sales versus, you know, the other stuff that you're doing. And the comment was, you know, 80%, sales 20% in tech. So I challenged him because he was not good at doing his time entries. I challenged him for two weeks to have a complete time accounting the way that is required. And it was interesting to note that he actually was a 3070 the opposite way. And so that was a real eye opener, once you start actually tracking what you as an owner or as an executive are doing, you will most likely be surprised about where your time is going. Same thing with backups, I try to convince our clients that they always say Oh, they don't we don't have a problem. Our backups are working. And I said I want you to track it individually on a spreadsheet for one month. And if it's what you say it is that it's not a problem, then I'll apologize that I wasted your time for a month. And every single time they discover Oh crap, we had no idea how much our backups were not working. But anyway, remember, we said it's just gonna be tools in your bag, right? So tool number one in your bag is where it is the problem start at the top, you have to look inward. That's where the that's where your number one problem is, is it's not. It's partially that you have to entertain yourself, but it's mostly your expectations are just set way too low. Okay. Okay, item number two. What I'd like to talk about this is this is going to be I'm describing tool number two in your bag here. And that's the time is an inventory item with no shelf life. Right? Let's look at it this way. Let's say I buy eight computers every day, right? They show up from ups, we, we live in our warehouse, and we put eight computers in the corner. And then we go throughout the day, and we use some of those computers. Okay, we keep track of some of them. But whatever's left over, maybe we only sold three of them, we take the other five, we carry them outside, and we throw them in the dumpster. Right. And then, and then we do that same thing again, tomorrow, eight new computers are gonna show up, and then stack them in the corner. And again, if we only sell four of them, I'm gonna take the other four, haul them outside and throw them in the dumpster. Right? So this is a little bit of a question that you ask your team, you describe that. And it's a little bit of a trap here, but you say so you think we should have some way to track our inventory items, we should track the ones that we sold, you know, should we just give the extras away? Right, we paid for him? Should we give him away? And usually what's the engineer gonna say? No, no, be crazy, right? So you think we should have some way to keep track of where we use them? And who we sold them to? And make sure we got paid for him? Right? And what's the engineer gonna say? Yes, right. So you can't use this line of questioning, to little bit trapped the engineer. Okay? Because, guess what, I buy eight hours from you every day. And if we don't sell them, we throw them in the dumpster. I'm paying you for eight hours a day. That's the company buying an inventory item from you called an hour. And if we don't sell them, they go in the dumpster. It's an inventory item with no shelf life. Okay. And guess what, we do have a way to track our time inventory. Right? It's called auto task or connect wise, it's your timesheet. So what do you guys think of this little story as a tool in your bag to talk to the engineers about the value of their time entry? Yes, you guys gonna use it? Okay. All right. How many of you came to work today, with the goal to make everybody else's job that you work with? harder? Right, that's my goal. I'm gonna make the job harder for everybody else that I work with only Rex. Rex was the only. Right. So who wants to be that guy? Okay, so this is our third tool is kind of understanding the things we're about to talk about. So my question to you is what breaks in your company? What breaks in your company when you start? When you don't enter time, real time? Let's kind of go around the room. Okay. He said communication. What else? work process like you start doing? Oh, so you're not working on the most important stuff first. Okay. What else? accountability. You forget what you're working on. You forget what you worked on. Billing becomes a problem. What else? I'll get you getting the workload to where everybody's kind of nobody's super overworked and nobody's underworked? Well, you said utilization, utilization it? You can't track it. Right. What else? The resolutions aren't documented. Let's keep going. repeating, repeating work. Yep. Customer, your customer service. Good. Point. I said number one, it's how we communicate with our client. Right? That that's how our client knows we're doing work with them. As we put our time in we, we document and close the ticket and sends the notification off to the client, right? That's how a client knows we're doing work for them. Okay. And then I heard this one, the other engineers on the team rely on current information. So that's exactly what you said over there, which was that person just did some work. They didn't document it. Now they're at lunch, or they got on a plane or their unreachable cell phone died. So what's happening with the next, when that client calls back What's happening? The another tech is doing the exact same troubleshooting steps that they already went through rather than picking up where they left off, right? You guys actually had this happen, right? We've all had this issue, right? Joe leaves the customer and get a call that you know, he was making changes on the firewall. Now they can't get to the internet, Joe's unreachable. We don't know what changes he made. I've got to send somebody down to Miami, you know, 45 minutes away to go figure out what he did because it can't be reached. Yeah, what's worse is when another technician calls the customer. In case you didn't hear what he said. It's like Somebody worked on it and didn't document that they worked on it. So somebody else picks up the ticket calls the client, and the clients like, No, you already hold me. Don't you guys know what you're doing? Right? How about this one? A symbol of quality on managed services, right? So I learned this one from one of my clients, there's a Newport Beach Marriott. They taught me about symbols equality, which is in a hotel, they do a bunch of work for you to prepare your room, but they do it behind the scenes. Right? Are you watching them get your room ready for you to check in? No, they're doing it behind the scenes, with managed services where we do a lot of work behind the scenes, right? So when you check in your room, you slide your key and you open the door and you you make this immediate assessment. Did they prepare my room for me? And what are the some of the symbols a quality that they leave behind? Anybody? the meantime, the pillow, although I haven't had a mint in a long time. Everybody says that one first. What else? Yeah, I'm gonna come back to that one. What else do you see? Fresh towels. But it's the way the towels are folded, right? It's the way the sheets on the bed are folded. It's the way the magazines are spread out evenly on the table. Right? It's the way the pin is laid diagonally across the notepad. Right? They do all these things very, very carefully, because they're communicating to you that they've prepared your room. Right? The toilet paper? Why do they fold over the toilet paper? aerodynamic, aerodynamic? That's a new one. I haven't heard that one. makes you look clean. It looks clean, clean to feel good. Yep. But they're communicating something to you. That they checked it, to use an IT term they did capacity management. Right? They made sure that they communicated to you that they checked it. Right. And that's the same thing. You know, think about what symbols are quality? How are you leaving behind symbols a quality that you're doing work for the clients? Right? How many of you are letting your clients know, you check their backups 20 times this month, and they were successful. And you did a test mount to the image and it was successful. Right? How many of you are letting them know that you did that work, and it was successful? To me, making sure they get that email every month, like clockwork is no different than you walking in the hotel room and seeing the toilet paper folded over. Right? It's the same reinforcement that you're doing quality work behind the scenes. So time and materials billing, there is a immutable law in our business. And it sounds like this, the value of service diminishes over time. Okay, might want to write that one down, the value of service diminishes over time. an immutable law was and what I mean by that is, they could call you on Sunday. And like, if this is a TNM client, it's down. You got to get out here right now. And you're like, you know, it's gonna be double time. And they say, I don't care. Get out here. If you give me your if you build get your time entry down and you give him a bill right, then what are the chances they're going to pay it? Pretty much 100%. Right? But what if you let time go by what if you let 3060 days go by? And then you send them a bill? How much do they value that work you did on Sunday? You're gonna get the call? Well, why is it double time? Why is it a two hour minimum? Why? Yeah, this happened again, you didn't even fix it. Right? Whatever it is, the value of service diminishes over time. There's block time agreements. And then there's the unlimited fixed fee agreements. On The Block time agreements, the client is paying for eight hours a month, or they've they've prepaid for 100 hours or whatever. So most of us have our PSA setup to give us a notification that those block time agreements are running low. What happens if the engineer hoards their time until the timesheets due? Are we ever going to get this notification? Right? So when we don't get the notification? What's that doing? It's making the job harder for somebody else in the company. Right? You see where all of these we're making the job harder for somebody else in the company. Here's a couple more. And I have one to add to this that Dan, we didn't get it in the presentation again, but I'll let you describe it but flat fee agreement profitability. So we we have flat these flat fee agreements, right. So time entry doesn't matter because it's getting charged against the flat fee contract anyway, right? Well, here's the problem is if we're measuring the profitability, we'll know Oh, my gosh, this clients paying us $1,000 a month, but we're doing $2,000 worth of work every month, right? If you know that, what are the chances you're going to fix stat as fast as you can. Pretty good. What if you don't know that because the time is not getting entered, and you don't know you have an unprofitable agreement, clients renewal comes along, you just let it renew, do you ever fix the problem, you're never going to fix the problem if you don't know it, because the time is not getting entered. And that is super, super, super important. These next ones ticket closing time approval invoicing procedures. This is kind of kind of gross, but it's the best analogy I could come up with. I think about a snake eating a rabbit. You know, that giant bowls, it just has to work its way through the snake. Right? I know it's uncomfortable for the rabbit. But it's also pretty uncomfortable for the snake of this giant thing coming through. And I think about all the ticket closing time approval and invoicing is kind of the same thing. It's the last day of the month, we got to get our bills out and that we're trying to get all these time entries, they all get submitted in the same moment. And then the admin department has a nightmare of hundreds of tickets 1000s of time entries that all need to be processed and turned into invoices in a very short amount of time. Right? If you were the admin department, would you rather get 100 tickets a day that need to be processed? Or would you rather get 2000 tickets a month all at one shot that needs to be processed? Right? That's hard. That's hard on the accounting department. I'll tell you that Northwest computer support 50 employees, okay. Myself, the VP of managed services Chris, the VP of professional services and the bookkeeper. We could not leave on the last day of the month until invoicing for that month was done. And it took us about two and a half hours after five o'clock, we'd go home by about 730. They have all the invoicing for that month done. And the only way that could happen is if time was entered real time. And we processed all the ticket review and time review every single day throughout the month. So that on the last day of the month, we had one day to do and then make the invoices. Okay. And the only way that was possible at Northwest computer support is what immediate time entry? Right? Yeah, another thing, you know, there was a lot of comments when we were talking about what breaks and some of it had to do with you know, chaos and doing things twice. And you have you know, all this. And it could be that a lot of people are talking about chaos are also the people who are pro multitasking, but I'm not judging, there's a there's a terminology that you'll find in some of the would you call it gunfighter type of some of the military terminology, which is that slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. So if you are shooting, it's not about how fast it is, it's about how smooth it is. And when you slow down, you actually speed up. And that is really, really true, in my experience with time entries. And with putting in the time where you have people say, Oh, I don't have the time to do it, I had a call had to run out of our previous one to for a pre scheduled call. And this was exactly this conversation, the growing company, you know, doing really well, they just broke their quarter million a month, you know, so they're, they're starting to get on track. And the issue that he's got is he's got some, he's getting some problems with customer satisfaction. And he's having some issues with, you know, some of these tickets are not really being executed the way that they're supposed to be executed. And so we started looking at this, and I said, you know, well, the problem is, it's three o'clock at three o'clock there right now. And you've got all of these top people, you only have two people who have their time in as of right now. And so how do you expect anything to work properly, you don't know that, you know, we're the metrics that we're using, you know, any ticket that has more than two hours of time on it has to automatically be escalated, you do an escalation at 42 minutes, you have, you know, values that are requiring people to put their time in. And if at three o'clock in the afternoon, they only have an hour a time in how accurate is any of that ever going to be. So that's why you've got disgruntled employees, you have disgruntled customers, because you're not able to execute because you're just working so hard trying to handle issues that are never actually being documented. So you got to slow down, get your time in, that's the number one priority that will fix this problem. So this is the well the one we left off of the list was you can't measure any metrics if you don't have your time entered real time, right? We can't measure SLA is we can't process it measure. How long does it take us to move tickets through? No metrics that you ever want to measure are going to be usable, right. And then I got this last one on here the value of leaking time. Some of you we did this math in the last session. $150 an hour. What is 15 minutes a day missed on your timesheet? Right that one time you round down? What time did I finish? I don't remember I'll give the client the benefit of the doubt. And I'll round down 15 minutes once a day. Okay, or I leave that one time entry, because it only took five minutes. I leave that off my timesheet, right. So at 150 an hour and a quarter hour a day is $37.50 of lost revenue opportunity. times five days a week is one $887.50 a week, times 50 weeks a year is $9,375 a year of lost revenue, right? Well, here's the point to the engineer. I expect my gross margin to be about 65 66%. Right in service gross margin. That means my direct labor is going to be about 33%. Meaning if I pay an engineer $5,000 a month they need to build $15,000 a month that will give me a 33% direct labor or a 3x multiple right? Well fire engineers aren't building $9,000 a year. Guess what? I don't have to pay them. I don't have $9,000 in revenue to pay them an extra three grand they want to raise bring me an extra nine grand a year. I'll give you three of it. It comes from 15 minutes a day. What do you guys think? Okay, again, these are just tools. I was at Connect wise it nation a guy named Simon Sinek was there talking about his book leaders eat last and he was talking about in the human brain that you've got endorphins. He said the bottle the the drugs that your own body is producing? Right? endorphins, mass physical pain. We got dopamine that causing the feeling of satisfaction that we accomplished something right? And guess what that is? That's the client saying oh my gosh, misdoing engineer, you're the best. Thank you for fixing that. Right? What's that engineer getting? They're getting a shot of dopamine right at that moment, right? serotonin positive feelings from public recognition. You know, that's what the measuring metrics is all about and praising people when they do the good, good work. Right. And that that's because you're, you're giving your employees a serotonin shot. oxytocin is that that, you know, is what your body produces to make you feel safe? cortisol, it's what creates your fight or flight reflex? Right? So in his book, he's talking about how people respond to different business environments, based on what their the drugs or they're getting from their own body, right? I walked out of that, relating it to time entry, right? If I get my shot of dopamine, my brains, if my body's giving my brain a shot of dopamine, when the client says, You're the best, thank you for fixing that. What's between me and that next shot? time entry? Right? And the thing is, you, you actually want to create an addiction on that dopamine, right, so your engineers or any of their time, but you want to work with them to get that shot. And this is what I did internally for myself, was got myself to get the shot. When I click save on my time entry. Right? I literally trained my body to give me a little shot, because I click save on my time entry. So again, it's a weird one. But it's just another tool in your bag. I want to talk about process a little bit. I'm not gonna talk about the process. What I do want to talk about is there is a process, right? There is a process that you've defined for your business, can you hold anybody accountable without a process? Now, and these are some points that I think have to be in your process. The engineers have to take accountability, they have to acknowledge the ticket. So they have to take ownership, there has to be some step where they take ownership. Right? And they agree, I understand the SLA, I understand where this on side of remote, I understand what the budget hours are right? I understand that. I agree I can get this done. Right. And then they need to enter their time, real time as they work. And then there's this note in here about who pays to enter time. If you're starting your time entry, and then you enter your time, then you enter your into your time entry who pays client. If you started it, they finished at 10. But you're entering it later who's paying for your time to enter time? The businesses Right, exactly. So is it possible to have accountability without a documented trained in implement process? No, it's not. It is simply not if you haven't documented your process trained your team implemented it, use Connect smart to measure it. Is it possible to hold them accountable? Can you wish that they did it? Absolutely. Can you actually say, you aren't meeting expectations if you haven't trained him? She haven't documented it. So that's the point of that documentation slide. I'm a big believer in the pub public display of metrics. You're not shaming anybody for doing a bad job. You're not praising anybody for doing a good job. You're just sharing the raw data. Right? Yep. So tying it to a comp plan, we're gonna have a whole session on the comp plan. Some of you might appreciate this. This is the 12 step program, free time entry anonymous. All I did was went to the AEA website and substituted the word God for PSA. Because all of it applies, right. So we're a couple of minutes over, but I want to thank you guys for coming to spend time at the presentation and thank you "