Courtney Hammer: It’s totally fine. I’m not practicing right now, but by trade and education, I’m a chiropractor. A learned doctor. [Both laugh.]

CH: About a year and a half. I got a little cupcake on my computer from our controller saying, “Congratulations, it’s your one-year anniversary!” I thought, My gosh, where did the time go?

CH: Injuries, really. I’m 5’ 2”, and I had six L&I claims in four years, surgery on both my wrists. I thought, I know what my wrists are going to look like on an X-ray in 20 years, and I’d like to still use them. I needed to find something a little easier on my body.

CH: Thanks. Well, Sutter’s been having a hard time with admin. We have a lot of people who come in, and you put a lot of training into them, and then they move to different states or different places, or they just say, “No, this isn’t my thing.” So you start over again. You spend all these man-hours training people on protocols and software and the way that Sutter runs, which is kind of a crazy labyrinth. Everything has this weird protocol that no one’s really sure how it started 30 years ago, and we just keep rolling with it. The good thing with me is, if you train me, I’ll remember it, and I don’t plan on going anywhere.

CH: A lot of what I did when I first started was just try to figure things out. I didn’t know any of the product names. I didn’t know the suppliers or the vendors or how those interconnect. There’s all these different departments—service, installation, sales, and estimates—and they all talk to each other, but they don’t always communicate smoothly. So it’s always, “Where’s this file? We have four different departments, and no one knows where this file is.” And it’s like, “Okay, but we’re going out to the job tomorrow. Where is it?”

That’s where the support staff can really make a huge difference by saying, “Well, we have a designated spot, and this is where it goes, so that everyone can find it.” That’s stuff I don’t think our hearth company is 100% smooth on.

CH: It was weird. Also, I want to shred everything because of HIPAA. I’m used to shredding anything that has a name or an address on it. You don’t have to do that. So I have to find myself going, “No, no, no, it doesn’t have to go in the shred.” My confidentiality is higher than it needs to be for a lot of what we do. But the rest of the organization is a little bit of everything, everywhere—random boxes in random places without set dates. It just drives me crazy, because I’m an organized person. If I look at something, I want to know exactly what it is and where it’s supposed to go. So that’s a lot of what I’ve been doing.

CH: We’ve actually been changing the support staff a lot over the last year and a half. Our old controller left last year, so our new controller, Angel, was learning the ropes at the same time he was leaving. And I came in at the same time. So she and I have been able to coordinate a lot of what we’d ideally like the processes and protocols to be. Our bookkeeper is offsite, and the only other person really in admin is our purchaser.

We’re all in the same spot, and we’ve been able to say, “I’d really like this to be a two-step process instead of a 45-step process.” Even just the office inventory—I now have it on a whole spreadsheet. So if someone says, “Hey, I need a new mouse,” I say, “Well, I just bought you one four months ago. Why do you need a new mouse?” And the person responds, “Oh, was it really that long ago?” I’m like, “Yeah, because I have to keep track of all of it—what I bought, who I bought it for, where it went, where I got it from.”

The same goes for the warehouse inventory. We didn’t have one before me. Our purchaser wasn’t always able to tell me where he got something. It drove me crazy—because then I couldn’t step in and make easy purchases when he was bogged down with a big Valor order. I’d ask, “Where would you get it?” And he’d say, “I think it’s here,” even though he had been doing that job for so long. So now, we have a total inventory. Anyone can find whatever part it is, the part number, where to buy it—easy breezy.

CH: A lot of it’s paperwork. I feel like we’re teachers: We’re grading paperwork all the time. It used to be that service did their own billing. The problem is, when you do your own billing, you just change the numbers, and there’s nobody keeping track of how many times we went back on something. Let’s say that our team gave a customer a $50 discount. They’d just changed the amount for a service call—but they wouldn’t add a second line saying, “It was our error,” or, “It was goodwill,” or, “It’s a warranty.” Things like that weren’t tracked accurately. Then Angel took over service billing about six months before I started, and we’ve further refined it. Now, we know exactly how many callbacks we’re doing and why.

CH: Yes. And when I first came in, I was only supposed to work on billing. But we have such a small admin team. Service is getting really good at being more organized—we have a new service manager—but when you’re out in the field, you don’t care about the back-end paperwork.

CH: Exactly. And then I’m reading notes thinking, This doesn’t make sense. Part of it is, I know nothing about a hearth, but it says right here that you went out for an electrical issue—and you bring me back paperwork that says nothing about an electrical issue. Did you address it? And the tech’s like, “Well, of course I did.” And I’m like, “But I don’t have any documentation that you did.” So if the same electrical issue comes up again, we don’t have as much room to say, “This is a new thing,” or, “It’s the same thing.” It’s nice to be able to track that.

For field techs in install and service, I wouldn’t say paperwork is their favorite thing. So that’s where we come in. We’re back and forth. We say, “Hey, we need more. This isn’t enough for our records.”

CH: It gives a little more clarity, too. Was it a service error? Was it goodwill? Was it an install error? Did install not attach the gasket quite well, and then it came loose, and we had to send out service? We’re asking those sorts of questions right now, and we’re figuring out where the weak links are.

CH: A lot—honestly, to the chagrin of the service techs and the old service manager. They weren’t used to having to think that way. In their brains, they knew what they meant—but if somebody else can’t read it, it’s not super helpful. There were times I was pulling my hair out. They’d do it well for two weeks and then immediately forget everything we just talked about. Patience is not my strongest trait. But Daniel is so patient. He’d say, “Court, you’ve just got to calm down.” And I’d say, “Again. Again. We did it again!” So he kind of helps me balance that out.

CH: I think it actually worked pretty smoothly. A lot of our admin issues were that people didn’t really know where they fit. I just knew that I did fit, even though I didn’t have a defined job description. I made my own job, which is how I accidentally got promoted to office manager. But because of my position, I have comfort in the fact that I’m most likely not going to get fired tomorrow. I don’t have to keep asking permission. I’m not sitting in meetings to get approved to do things. I can just do it, so long as it’s reasonable. That’s been the huge difference, and it’s how we’ve been able to progress and get things organized.

CH: And we have some employees who are still struggling with it. They’re so focused on not making a mistake that they make these mistakes because they’re too focused. It’s been really nice to be able to say, “Hey, here’s my problem,” and then, “Okay, well, here’s how we can fix it.” I don’t need to run it up to the manager. I don’t want to take anything to Daniel that isn’t already solved. If we have an issue, I want to say, “Here’s the problem. Here’s the solution we came up with. Can we run with this?” That also takes down the meetings. Daniel’s working really hard at bringing down how many meetings he has, which increases his efficiency, because he shouldn’t have to deal with all the little day-to-day things.

CH: Yeah, it’s the first one. It’s at the top of our values wheel, so everyone sees it first.

CH: It’s hard for me to say, because the core values got started about six months before I started. I feel like there’s still more work we could do when it comes to empowering people to make their own decisions. A lot of people have been there for so long, and they’re used to having someone say, “These are the five things I need you to do, and this is how I want you to do it.” So it’s hard to flip that mindset. We’re making good strides at it, though. And gosh, if everybody just does that, it makes everything flow so much easier.

CH: I don’t think any of my predecessors in my position really had that, which was hard for them. It makes it so much easier to coordinate too. All our departments are separate but interconnected, and there are weird gaps in between. Now I can say, “Okay, this is what you need. Got it. I’ll order it.” It used to be, if a purchase was over 50 bucks, you had to submit a written thing to our controller, and she had to take it to the weekly meeting with Daniel to get it approved. Now I just do it. Our warehouse manager asked for a heater for his desk, because it’s the warehouse. I just bought it, and he said, “Hey, you didn’t ask for that.” And I said, “Yeah—because I love our warehouse manager, and I want him to stay. I’m going to give him warmth, because he makes everything easier.” It would be silly to waste everyone’s time over a heater for someone I obviously don’t want to turn into a popsicle.

CH: Oh gosh. It really depends on the person. We have a couple of people with self-confidence issues, and in those cases, the question becomes, “How can you set yourself up so that you’re proud of what you do?” That’s huge. You need to find joy in the successes and try to minimize the hiccups as best you can. As far as I can tell in the hearth industry, there’s always a hiccup. Which, I guess, is kind of the same as working with chiropractic patients. There’s always a hiccup in healthcare. You go up the hill, you’re doing great, and then you have a little backsliding, and then you’ll come back up. It’s the same with this. It’s how you deal with the hiccup without letting it destroy you. You’ve got to problem-solve and set up systems to make it better. If you can do that, you’ll have better confidence, and you’ll figure it out.

CH: Well, there always has to be a quartermaster. We don’t get gold unless we bring it in, and then we distribute it. Our controller actually made a diagram for Daniel listing everybody and where they are in the pirate-ship hierarchy on his wall. I just always try to tell people, “If we bring it in, it goes around. If we don’t bring it in, we can’t share it.” Everybody wants new tools, everybody wants new fancy things. I want to get them for them. But I can’t if they broke something at a job site, and now we have to spend another $1,200 buying new glass. Going back is always going to be a huge cost suck.

People in the field think, I got it in, and it works. But it’s the small things, like a handprint in the middle of the glass. The customer’s going to say, “Dude, it works great, but I have a handprint in the middle of my glass.” One of our service techs actually put a handprint in the middle of the glass at our house, and I was like, “Okay, guys, come on.” It’s those details that are usually the problem. The embers aren’t spread quite right, so the flame’s bigger on one side than the other. So it’s about wrangling them into tuning into those last little things. Pack everything up, and just look at it one more time. Do the logs look great? Is it completely flush? Are my I’s dotted? Are my T’s crossed? It’s usually that last 10 minutes on the job site that determines whether or not we have to go back.

CH: We watched a little show with my son, who’s 10, about how pirate ships worked. One thing they said is that everybody on the crew got a portion of the gold, so everybody was equally invested in manning the ship and the hours. That’s exactly how it is with any business. You want to spend gold on your key people, because they’re hard to train and they’re indispensable. We don’t want to go through staff constantly.

CH: I think we kind of pay for ourselves. For example, just by running an office inventory we saved about $3,000 last year. And that’s just from Post-its, pens, pencils, batteries from Costco, all these random things. Just keeping track of where they were and how efficiently they were being used made a huge difference. It’s the same thing in the warehouse—we’re not buying eight million of the same thing we already have anymore.

CH: Yes. We’re still doing handwritten service invoices, which is insane. Hopefully we’re getting new software this year, and we’ll get rid of half my job. I’m only supposed to be working part-time, but I usually drag in some extra hours because there’s always so much more to do.

And it’s simple stuff, like making sure you’re not getting tickets for expired tabs on the rigs. I have a whole spreadsheet that tells me when they expire. The Seattle area sends out renewal tabs in a way where we missed two of them, and we would have, had it not been on a sheet I checked. So we didn’t get a ticket. It’s also more efficient billing—billing goes out faster and more accurately, so we don’t have people contesting bills. So I’d say that we pay for ourselves.

CH: Ooh, okay. You must love paperwork, because there’s a lot of it, and field people don’t enjoy it. Most people who aren’t in the field don’t enjoy it either. So paperwork is really big.

Organization is another big one. You have to be able to keep track of things, even things you don’t fully understand. I’ve learned a lot about the hearth industry, and I have so much more to learn.

You’ve also got to be able to communicate with people—to say, “Hey, I’m not exactly sure what this thing is, but I need to know more about it so I can help this move smoothly.”

Finally, you can’t be afraid to ask questions—because you have to ask so many. When you come into the hearth industry, almost nobody has hearth experience.

CH: Yes. It helps to learn things, because then you don’t have to ask as often. Once you ask fewer questions, you save time for the service manager, the field techs, and the install team. But if you’ve got those four things, and you’re not afraid to get in there and try to figure it out on the fly, then it works.

CH: Yeah, we catch that all the time. And I’m highly motivated to make sure we’re not spending money on things we already have. The support staff are the unsung heroes. We make sure the rigs get their tabs. We make sure the paperwork is set if there’s been an accident with one of the crews. So we make everything so much smoother.

CH: Yeah, exactly. And this might be the most important thing: You shouldn’t underestimate snacks.

CH: You have to find out what people’s favorite things are, and then you keep a stash of them. Whenever someone’s having a hard day, or they’ve done something super awesome, you can magically pull out that Girl Scout cookie in July. Our service manager, Aaron, he and his wife are on a diet at home, so I keep a stash. He solved a problem on a really tricky electric fireplace that was being wonky, and I said, “Well, here you go, Aaron.” He said, “Both these have to stay here.” I’m like, “That’s totally fine.” But he doesn’t know I have two more boxes stored. Peanut-butter cups from Trader Joe’s is another one. You hand them out on the hard days, because we all have hard days.

CH: You’ve got to find a way to cope when things go totally wrong, without just despairing. Because that doesn’t help anything. If you can go, “This sucks, but this is the solution. We can get to the other side, and I get a cookie”—it’s perfect.

CH: Thank you, Tim.