Rugby vs. Football

Why don’t more installers get into the O&M business? Perhaps more would if they understood that while the business is different, many basics are the same.

In my ad agency life I once worked for a loading dock leveler company. Their bread-and-butter products were platforms that created a bridge on which forklifts carried loads of goods from the dock to trucks at factories and warehouses.

It was equipment that essentially every customer needed — the only questions were: what size, what capacity, what brand? And the sales force knew exactly whom to sell to and how.

Then the company introduced a new product designed to enhance safety for forklift operators carrying heavy pallet loads onto trucks. The exact nature of the product isn’t important here. What matters is that now salespeople were offering a product that customers didn’t even know they needed.

The buying influences were different. The selling points were different. And often, purchases had to be approved by upper management, an audience salespeople hadn’t dealt with before. Not surprisingly, the sales team struggled.

Then the company developed what it called the Rugby Program. The premise of it was simple: The process of selling this product is different, but in the end it’s still selling. And they created a sports analogy: We all know how to play football. Let’s learn to play rugby. And it worked.

Looking at O&M

Are installers looking at the onsite O&M business in a position similar to that of those loading dock leveler salespeople? Is O&M intimidating not mainly because it’s difficult, but because it’s different?

“O&M Matters,” a series of articles now running in Onsite Installer, is designed to provide insights to the O&M sector and encourage practitioners to get involved. But before involvement must come interest and desire. While some installers have jumped in readily (as evidenced by cover stories in past issues), others seem reluctant. Perhaps they could benefit from thinking in terms of the football/rugby analogy.

For example: Both football and rugby use a similar-shaped ball — the rugby ball is just a little bigger and plumper. Both installation and O&M involve onsite treatment systems. O&M just revolves around certain types of systems.

Football and rugby have the same basic objective: Getting the ball across a goal line. In football, a touchdown counts six points, and the rugby equivalent (a “try”) counts four. Installation and O&M have the same aims: Protecting the environment and keeping the owner’s home and property clean and healthy. The routes to success are different.

There are 11 players on a football team and unlimited substitution. A rugby team has 15 players and substitution is restricted. Onsite installation and O&M mean dealing with different groups of people — the chief concern in O&M being homeowner relations.

Changing the mindset

All right, let’s not work the analogy too hard — after all, it isn’t perfect. The point is that installers have little to fear from venturing into O&M. Largely it’s a matter of embracing a different way of doing business, and doing it with different people. But in the end, business is business.

O&M certainly takes more people skills, or a different brand of them — as dealing with homeowners one on one is not the same as dealing with, say, a handful of building contractors for the vast bulk of installation projects. O&M also requires different tools, different employees, different work schedules, different billing and so on. But different need not mean forbidding.

And even if the move over into O&M seems daunting, it’s essential to consider the plus sides, chiefly the regular and reliable income stream and the superior ability to withstand down cycles in the economy — because even when people aren’t building new houses, their existing systems need to be maintained.

So here’s a word of encouragement to read our “O&M Matters” series, ably written by “The Septic Guy” Kit Rosefield. And it might not hurt, sometime before or after the current football season expires, to search the cable or satellite TV listings and tune into an occasional game of rugby.



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