When a new tool makes a technician's day harder instead of easier, the first thing it costs you isn't productivity. It's people. Technicians who feel like the technology is working against them start looking for the exit, and replacing them is far more expensive than most service leaders admit.
In Episode #140 of Frontline Innovators, David Bishop joined Justin Lake to unpack the real cost of poor frontline technology adoption in the HVAC service industry. David is Managing Partner at Twin Bishop Strategies and spent more than 45 years in the field, including a long run as a general management executive at an OEM where he built high-performance service teams.
Attrition is the hidden cost of bad technology
The biggest operational consequence of poor adoption, David says, is attrition. When technicians get frustrated because the technology fights them, they leave. In an industry with roughly 450,000 technicians and about 45,000 open positions, losing even one is painful. Demand for service is growing faster than the trade can hire, driven by aging infrastructure, deferred maintenance, and a wave of regulatory and efficiency requirements. Every departure carries recruiting fees, unbillable orientation time, and training cost, and it lands in a market where you can't backfill fast enough.
What surprised Justin most was David's observation that technicians will sometimes leave for less money. In exit interviews, the reason is rarely a bigger paycheck somewhere else. It's the headaches. People will trade salary for a simpler, lower-stress job, and leaders who assume it's always about compensation miss the real problem.
Build technology for the technician, not just the dashboard
David described a project where the team built beautiful analytics for leadership to look at from above, but left nothing useful for the technician actually doing the work. If you design technology to serve managers and treat the frontline as an afterthought, the people who face your customers every day get a tool that slows them down. Worse, when a rollout is sold as a benefit to technicians but is really a management reporting tool, they see through it almost immediately, and the disingenuous framing breeds the exact resistance you were trying to avoid. If the goal is data collection, David's advice is simple: just say so.
The field council closes the gap before go-live
David's primary prescription is the field council, a group of respected technicians who help shape the technology platform before it ships. These are the opinion leaders, the ones other technicians listen to. Bring them in early, let them test, and treat their critical feedback as design input rather than noise. He compares learning a new tool to putting up a tent: most people skip the instructions and build from the picture because they learn by doing. The sooner technicians can put their hands on a tool and prove they can use it, the better it sticks. Small, early tests beat a big-bang launch every time.
This connects to a point David kept returning to: never assume. Don't assume a technician will adapt easily just because they own a smartphone. Find out where each person is actually starting from, because an unfounded assumption is what turns a capable expert into a frustrated novice in front of a customer.
Confidence is the variable nobody measures
Field technicians build their identity around competence. Putting them in front of a customer with a tool they haven't mastered strips that away and creates real fear and uncertainty. David's answer is to measure and protect confidence through the rollout. Get feedback early and often through the field council, and use the technology itself to check whether technicians are taking the right steps and getting the right output. There's an interpersonal way to gauge confidence and a technical way, and the strongest rollouts use both. The stakes are concrete: a technician fumbling with new software while a customer waits, or sitting on hold with a help desk for 45 minutes, damages the employee experience and the customer relationship at the same time, and the customer is left wondering who's paying for that lost time.
Governance is what makes AI trustworthy in the field
With thousands of equipment types and non-standard software across manufacturers, no technician can be an expert on everything. That makes real-time information at their fingertips essential, and it's where AI, crowdsourcing, and knowledge platforms come in. But David is clear that the information has to be accurate, and that requires governance. Long before AI, every knowledge article had to be approved by someone with higher technical expertise. The same discipline applies now: vet what goes into your AI tools, or you risk handing technicians confident answers that are wrong. He doesn't believe the technical support line will ever fully disappear, and he sees the field as fairly balanced on AI, with many technicians energized by it and some worried it will take their jobs. His view is that the wrenches still need turning, and well-governed AI should make the work more efficient, more productive, and safer rather than replace it.
Find the real problem before you solve anything
David's closing advice is the capstone of his consulting philosophy: make sure your problem statement is sound before you tackle anything. Teams move fast and try hard, but they sometimes solve a problem that was never really there. Go to the field, talk to the technicians, and work through the five whys to the root cause. As David put it, someone in that room will gladly tell you what the real problem is. Then prioritize by impact, because you rarely have the resources to fix every bottleneck at once, so you go after the biggest one first.
About David Bishop
David Bishop is Managing Partner at Twin Bishop Strategies, LLC., a consulting firm he co-founded with his twin brother after both retired from executive roles in the HVAC and building automation industry. Over more than 45 years, David worked across equipment sales, installation, service, operations, and maintenance, including time as a general management executive at an OEM focused on building high-performance teams and improving customer satisfaction. Twin Bishop Strategies takes a problem-first approach: they go in to find the pain point, and if there isn't one, they move on.
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PODCAST
Listen to Episode #140 - Happy Technicians Make Happy Customers: How to Actually Get There
David Bishop joins Justin Lake to explain why poor frontline technology adoption shows up as attrition first, and what it takes to build tools technicians actually trust. A practical conversation on the cost of losing a technician, the field council model, the confidence gap, and the governance that makes AI safe to use in the field.
Episode Transcript
Justin Lake: Welcome to Frontline Innovators podcast. I'm your host Justin Lake and we've got another great episode and a great guest lined up for today. Today's guest is an executive business consultant at Twin Bishop Strategies where he specializes in HVAC and building automation with deep expertise across equipment sales, installation, service, operations and maintenance. With a background as an accomplished general management executive known for building high performance teams and improving customer satisfaction, market share and profitability, he brings a practical frontline focused perspective on leading operations and driving results. Please welcome to the show, David Bishop. Hello, sir.
David Bishop: Hello, Justin, how are you?
Justin Lake: I am super well. Now that I've introduced you by name, the name of your company probably makes a little bit more sense. Will you do a quick introduction and tell us about your company and where the name all comes from and who else you're working with?
David Bishop: Sure, happy to do that. Interestingly, I worked in the industry about 45 years, actually competing with my twin brother. He worked for an OEM, I worked for an OEM, and much of that time we were competitors. When we both retired, we decided we wanted to be teammates instead of competitors. So we joined up and called ourselves Twin Bishop Strategies. That name comes from a couple of things. One is the chess game, where you get bishops, and there's strategy involved in how a bishop moves. And of course, because we're twins, and our name is Bishop.
Justin Lake: Yeah, I love it. I'm not a chess expert, but I think the bishop is very powerful, but limited to only working in one direction, right? Don't they only go diagonally across the board?
David Bishop: That's right. So they have to be very strategic about their moves. Does that make sense?
Justin Lake: Yeah. I feel like in your consulting practice, there ought to be something about frameworks that run diagonally. I'm sure there's some way to pull that in.
David Bishop: You always have to be thinking a couple of moves ahead. That's what chess is about, at least two, maybe three.
Justin Lake: I like that. Well, normally before I ask for the background, I actually like to jump into the first question, which is what's the biggest operational consequence you see of poor frontline technology adoption? What goes wrong in the business when we don't see adoption on the front lines?
David Bishop: Well, the biggest consequence is attrition. It's when technicians get frustrated and they're not enjoying their job because the technology is actually working against them instead of working for them. And they move on. When you've got a high attrition rate in this business, it's tough, because it's hard to hire them and train them. And when they leave, it's incredibly costly to the organization.
Justin Lake: You're already jumping right to the meat of something I wanted to talk about. When you and I did our quick preparation for today, you said something that really surprised me and that some folks may find counterintuitive. This is not a direct quote, but you mentioned that people sometimes leave a job for less money because of the headaches. That caught me by surprise. Tell me more about that and some of the real world observations you've seen.
David Bishop: Well, I think executives often jump to the first thing. When someone leaves, they think they left for money or benefits somewhere else. But if you take the time to do the exit interviews and really peel it back, oftentimes that's not the case. They're moving on because there's a work-life balance issue and they want to simplify their lives. They'll take less money if there's less stress involved in the job. You can't always jump to that. I've seen it numerous times in exit interviews with technicians.
Justin Lake: So let's talk about how we measure that. I know there are ways to measure the cost of attrition, the cost of rehiring and training, but in field service it's particularly complicated because the time to productivity for new hires can be very variable. Talk me through how you thought about that as an executive and how you counsel leaders now to think about the cost of attrition. What are some real world metrics you're seeing, and what should we aspire to?
David Bishop: I'll take it at a high level first. In the HVAC service business in the United States, there's probably 450,000 technicians. There's also about 45,000 openings right now. The business has been growing at about a 6 percent rate, but demand for technicians has been growing at a much higher rate, eight or nine percent. With all the retiring technicians, you can't hire them fast enough. And when you think about attrition in your own organization, if you're losing 10 percent of your technicians annually, then every time you hire another one, you have to spend the recruiting costs, the orientation costs, which is unapplied labor you can't charge for, and then the training. In some cases there are even recruiting fees. So it's very expensive to lose one, and because the industry is growing the way it is, the cost of not having technicians available just grows exponentially.
Justin Lake: Before we go past this, I want to make sure I understand. The industry overall is growing, so there's more cooling being installed than ever before. Did you also say the service side is growing at a greater rate than the industry overall?
David Bishop: Well, I would say the HVAC service industry is outpacing other service industries, and one of the main drivers is aging infrastructure. In the US we have a very high rate of deferred maintenance, especially in large complex commercial buildings. That equipment is failing and at the end of life, so you're replacing it and spending more to maintain it. The other reason is regulatory and environmental policy driving toward electrification and higher efficiency equipment. Much of that means retrofitting, replacing, or doing a better job maintaining equipment, so it's driving the growth as well.
Justin Lake: I know it's small in comparison to commercial equipment, but I had to have a unit replaced in my house in the last couple of years. One component had failed, but because of the refrigerant changes you were talking about, it basically necessitated an entire system-wide upgrade.
David Bishop: That's a great example. You used to be able to just replace your outdoor unit. Now you can replace the outdoor unit, the indoor unit, and in some cases even the refrigerant lines. So yeah, it's real expensive.
Justin Lake: I got lucky with the refrigerant lines. But in my humble residential establishment, that became big and costly and the project got much more complicated. Now think about the commercial implications, across far more complex systems than what I have at home. So let's go back to the attrition point. The industry is growing, so even with no attrition we'd still have a hiring dilemma, but we do have attrition. It's burning from both sides. Are people leaving HVAC to go to other technical segments, or are we just aging out? Is it the silver tsunami we hear about?
David Bishop: I think they're really just aging out. The clients I work with tell me that when people leave, they would only go to other HVAC companies. It's a very good trade, very high paying, very stable, with plenty of business. So when they leave, it's usually for some other industry entirely.
Justin Lake: Let's go back to their satisfaction on the job. I've done some ride-alongs with guys in this industry. My brother-in-law is a technician. But I can't say I've really lived a day in their life. Tell me about a day in their life. What would the guys who are happy with their job say, and how is that different from the guys who are frustrated?
David Bishop: That's a great question. The day varies depending on the equipment. A residential or light commercial technician might have five, six, even seven service calls in a day, moving site to site. With complex equipment you have fewer calls, maybe only two or three. But where the job satisfaction comes from is they want to look good in the eyes of their customers. They want to do a good job and have their customers be happy. That's what makes them go. If a customer sees a technician struggling on the job for reasons other than the actual technical work, whether it's a mobile tool that's not working or software they just implemented, the customer has to wait. And if they have to get on a help desk for 30 to 45 minutes, the customer often wonders who's paying for that. The technicians I've worked with tell us they really want to get the job done as quickly and efficiently as possible, so that kind of thing is a real drag.
Justin Lake: It's such an interesting way to hear you talk about the dilemma from the front lines. And yet you and I both talk to leaders of big complex businesses, and there are very legitimate reasons we need to introduce new technology and change to the men and women on the front lines. So both things can be true. They can wish for things to be easier in the field, but we also understand why we want to implement this technology to gain efficiencies. That creates tension, because we're constantly asking the field to change and learn things they feel aren't germane to their core skill set. How do we overcome that? Do we just need to do a better job communicating, and how do we eliminate the obstacles?
David Bishop: There are two things I'd cite. One, if you build your technology to serve your leadership team and your managers only, and you don't build it to serve your technicians who are ultimately the front line in front of your customers, you're going to make a mistake. I was involved in a project once where we put together wonderful analytics we could look at over the top. It was wonderful, but there was nothing available for the technician to do their job. It was more of a management tool than a technician tool. The second part is to engage them early. I always liked the concept of the field council, a group of technicians who are opinion leaders, leaders among leaders, who can sit in with you and help you build out your technology platform, then become early adopters and give you the critical feedback you need to design a system that works for them and their customers.
Justin Lake: That's a great point about deploying the technology primarily as a leadership tool. There are cases where that makes sense, but one of the problems we've talked about with other guests is that if that's the intent, we should just say that. I've seen this go wrong, where we deploy a capability and say it's going to have all these great benefits, but it's not going to benefit the majority of users. They can see through that disingenuous positioning in the first half of the first day. And then we get rebellious behavior, because they're saying this isn't making me more efficient.
David Bishop: That's right. Well said.
Justin Lake: So let's say we get the users involved, and they're looking to make things more efficient, but sometimes you're implementing a new field service management system because the old one is going end of life, or there are reasons we need to upgrade. What's the playbook you'd put in place? You've already touched on pulling together super users who can be change champions. What are the other things we can do to support them?
David Bishop: I think you want them involved in testing the software early. I always use this analogy. If you ask somebody whether they've ever put up a tent, and you get the instructions plus a picture of the tent, how did you put it together? Did you read the instructions, or did you look at the picture and build it from that? A lot of people do it from the picture, because they learn by doing. So the sooner you can get them to put their hands on whatever you're implementing, run it through a test, and give feedback, the more valuable it is. It's a lot of small early tests, and checking to confirm they actually know what to do and can prove they did it. That's like the tent. I can prove I built it, because you can come to my backyard and see it. I may not have done it through step-by-step instructions, but I learned it by doing. You've got to let them put their hands on it early, otherwise they're going to get bored or lose interest.
Justin Lake: You're speaking to something I've often talked about but don't have enough firsthand knowledge of, which is that field technicians, and this isn't just specific to HVAC, tend to be drawn to problem solving and being seen as an expert in their field. When we put them in a position to be a novice again, it creates fear and uncertainty. I know we're not here for a psychology conversation, but the profile of this worker is such that their competence is part of their personality as a professional. We put them in a position where they don't have that proficiency, and it puts them off balance. Talk me through that. Maybe you don't even agree.
David Bishop: No, I agree. Over my 45-plus year career, we've transformed the industry like every industry. We went from needing to know how to turn a wrench and work on systems, to running a huge building with an iPhone, because all the technology is now remote and we have to be fluid with these tools. The key is you can't assume anything. The first time you assume the technician will get it because they understand computers or an iPhone, you can't. You've got to make sure you know what the starting point is. That's often the mistake that's made. You assume, and then they get frustrated because they're working with something they haven't worked with before. So don't assume, and test early to find out where they're starting from.
Justin Lake: Another area that's been coming up is giving them early access, which builds confidence. What creates the gap is something new they don't yet have confidence in, and closing that gap to get them back to that confident, capable self is the difference. It's come up a few times on the podcast. Do you have any thoughts on how we can measure the confidence of folks throughout change, and do you agree it's a critical component of their success and well-being in their role?
David Bishop: I think you've got to get feedback early and often on how well it's working. I go back to the field council, getting them on the phone regularly during a deployment to talk about what's working and what's not, because in many cases they're mentors coaching others and even have teams reporting to them. Take that feedback seriously. The other way is you can test confidence through technology. They use the tool, and you can grade or test whether they're taking the right steps, pushing the right buttons, getting the right output. So there's a technology way and an interpersonal way, and touchpoints with field council members would be valuable.
Justin Lake: My day job focuses a lot on being able to do that. It's not enough to document your processes and establish best practices and SOPs. We have to give people the ability to build competence and confidence in those capabilities, and we have to measure that. Whether you use our platform at Skyllful or some other mechanism, you really need to be looking at that before you go live. The horror stories we hear are when those measurement mechanisms weren't put in place in advance, and it becomes disruptive. Going back to the beginning of our conversation, you said it puts the guys in the field face to face with the customer in their most vulnerable position, because they're not ready. They're fumbling with new software for 15, 30, 45 minutes on the phone with the help desk. So you've covered technology adoption at its core, the employee experience, and the customer experience being affected, and in the back of their mind the customer is wondering whether they're being billed for that time.
David Bishop: One of the things that's just a fact in our business is that happy technicians can create happy customers. If you've ever had a technician come to your home and be critical of their own company because of some process or technology change, how does that make you feel? You appreciate the transparency, but you start to wonder how long this person is going to stay if they're complaining so much. So you don't want that. Happy technicians who are able to do their job, and we enable them to do their job, are going to take care of your company, because they're out looking after its best interest instead of fighting the system that was put in place.
Justin Lake: I met a global service leader last year who I quickly developed great respect for. She said the three most important things she thinks about are associate experience, customer experience, and profitability, in that order, because one leads to the next. Exactly what you said, just in bullet form. If we take care of the people taking care of our customers, we'll have a better employee experience, better customer experience, and that will yield the profitability that's the most obvious form of measurement. But if we flip it around and focus first on profitability, things are upside down.
David Bishop: I'll tell you a story about one of my clients who's been highly successful with that formula, where they put the technicians and employees first. Safety always comes first, that's number one across all employees. But just taking care of the employees and making sure they know you have their back. This client did that so well, and he grew the business tremendously because those technicians were taking care of his customers, and the financial results just came. There were no fancy metrics. It just worked. However, you get to the point we call hitting the wall, when you get large enough that you become a manager of managers. That's a whole different world. You can't be in front of all your customers or all your technicians. That's when process and technology implementation becomes critical, because you want to keep that same culture as you scale. That's where all this comes into play, making sure you've got highly trained and motivated technicians as you grow.
Justin Lake: When we talk about collecting feedback from the field, this always comes to mind. I joke that I have a relatively small company, and by lunchtime tomorrow I could have a conversation with everyone on my team. For organizations like the ones we're talking about, you can do a small sample, but part of the challenge is scale. We can talk to 10, 15, 20, maybe 100 folks, but in an organization with many thousands of people, that's not practical. You've worked in these organizations and now have a consultative role. How do you take that from sample size in the laboratory out to scale?
David Bishop: It starts with a strategic plan. You've got to decide what you want to be long term and build a plan to get there. Years ago I was running a business that was the highest priced service company in our market. I put a vision together that we wanted to be a service company customers were willing to pay a premium for consistently. The fact was we weren't at the time. A vision isn't a vision unless it's out in front of you. It's not what you are today, it's what you want to be. We wanted to be worth the money, and the only way to do that was to execute better. So when we looked at how to increase technician engagement and customer satisfaction, it all came back to having a plan, implementing processes we didn't have, and adding technology to enable that. That's what we spent our time on, and it helped streamline and improve the business overall. We measured internal and external customer satisfaction along the way. You can't do all of it big bang at once, but you can build a long-range plan, make the investments when you need them, and figure out the return you're going to get.
Justin Lake: You just raised another important topic, polling for employee satisfaction. I'd be curious about insights on how to do that. I don't feel like I have the skills to poll people at scale and pick up employee sentiment. I'm always amazed when somebody has put together a good process for gathering that. Are there nuances you learned over time about how to ask questions, what to ask, and what kind of feedback you were getting?
David Bishop: The old way was the employee satisfaction survey, once a year, and people still do it. You try not to make it so long they opt out, you want high participation, and then you build an action plan for improvement. That's the standard way. But a newer way is to do it much more ad hoc. If you're using a technology tool, you can put buttons in there, a simple like it or don't like it, a click to say this worked or it didn't. When we implemented a knowledge platform, we wanted to know which knowledge articles they were actually using, and which were best, and to be able to rate them. It's like looking at restaurant ratings. We rate the information the technician is pulling, good or bad, and that's an indicator. There are other sides of the business to measure too, like what kind of help they're getting. Is tech support helpful or not? Be able to rate that, because that's a lot of what they're doing, talking to or trying to get technical support. With good support they do their job better, they're more efficient, and their customers are happier. Those are some ideas I'd give you.
Justin Lake: Those are great ideas. We've grown accustomed to a five-star rating society. Every decision we make or content we consume, I don't buy something on Amazon below a certain rating. There was an app today with a 2.5 rating on the App Store and I didn't even bother downloading it. So it makes sense to pull that into the enterprise context. You talked about a knowledge platform, and that's a good segue into something else I've been dying to ask. We've talked a lot about technology adoption, but I'm becoming increasingly aware of learning gaps on the front lines beyond just digital tools. An example I'm hearing from a lot of people in service is that we have more variation of equipment types deployed than ever, and it's virtually impossible for technicians to be omnipotent about every piece of machinery. Tell me your take on that gap. Is it pervasive in HVAC?
David Bishop: No, it's very real. There are four or five of the largest manufacturers of the equipment we service, but then there are a lot of smaller manufacturers of equipment and building automation systems, thousands of pieces of equipment with different brands. Unfortunately it's not standard. You work on one, it's not going to be exactly like the other, and even the software varies from manufacturer to manufacturer. To be an expert on all of them is impossible. The only way you can survive is to have the information at your fingertips to solve the problem. So crowdsourcing is a big one, being part of a community that gives you information, or having a knowledge platform that gets you right to what you need. That's where AI comes in. Videos play a big part too. But the other part is the proprietary nature of some manufacturers. They hold information close for a couple of reasons. One, they want to make sure somebody doesn't work on something they're not trained for and tear the equipment up. The other is safety. The need for training and real-time answers is greater than it's ever been, and AI and YouTube videos have helped a lot. But you've got to be careful, because the information coming out of those systems has to be accurate. You can't always trust everything you read.
Justin Lake: Tell me more about that, because you and I just reconnected at a conference with a lot of AI talk. Where are you feeling skeptical about what you're seeing? If a technician is standing in front of the customer, he needs to know the resource he's depending on is trustworthy, otherwise there's no sense asking for help. He doesn't call the new guy when he phones a friend, he calls one of the most tenured guys, because he knows he'll get the best answer. How do we need to think about that from a modern AI and technology standpoint?
David Bishop: I think there needs to be governance. Even before AI, when we published a knowledge article, it always had to be approved by someone with a higher level of technical expertise, because the fear is you'll publish something that isn't quite accurate. That can be done internally too. So governance is a big part of it. A lot of the companies successful in using AI tools to create knowledge platforms are working on the governance model to make sure what goes in has been vetted. That's where you can get in trouble. And that's why I don't think the technical support line is ever going to go away. As much as I love self-service tools, there's a time when I push zero and say I need to talk to a live agent, because the AI tools aren't quite getting it done. You can only go so far. So in a word, governance is real important.
Justin Lake: How would you characterize the field, and I know I'm asking for a generalization, but how are the guys in the field reacting to some of the new technology being made available, or potentially feeling threatened by it?
David Bishop: That's a great question. I think it's balanced. From my practice and the customers we talk to, a lot of them are super energized because they're using ChatGPT or Copilot right now to get information, and they're loving it. The other side is the thought that it's going to take my job. So there's a balance, but in my experience most people are enthusiastic that AI can help them do their job. On the part about it taking my job, we're in a business with heavy machinery. Those wrenches still need to be turned, and there's a ton of work that still has to be done in the field. My hope is that, properly vetted with good governance, the AI used in the field makes us more efficient, more productive, and safer, and gets a better outcome for the customer. But that's not going to happen without somebody in the company getting involved to make good decisions on the tools you choose.
Justin Lake: I did a short talk at a conference recently with a lot of discussion around robotics and AI, and they asked me to talk about the future of work with a bit of an HR focus. I really had to think about this. People there were talking about drones used in defense and manufacturing. It was a super high-tech conference. But when I thought about the field-based operations and the people I spend time around, my headline was that the future of technology is actually going to be the same as the past. It's going to be about people, process, and technology working together, and it's going to cause change. The thing I'm feeling most is that the pace of change is greater than it's ever been. But to your point, the guys in my attic who replaced my system aren't going to be replaced by a robot for the foreseeable future. Will it ever happen? Maybe. Will we start mounting equipment that's more serviceable by robots? Probably, in the decades ahead. But we've got a while, and those technologies will be deployed largely in more controlled environments. The people we're talking about today still have many years ahead. We can't get lazy, though. They do have to work with technology, and we're going to keep pushing the envelope, so folks like you and us have to keep finding ways to streamline the people, process, and technology thing.
David Bishop: That's exactly right.
Justin Lake: I'm kind of ready to wrap up. I'm curious if there's one piece of advice you would offer. Many people listening are on the implementation side, in change management roles. As somebody who has spent as much time as you have in the service business, what's one piece of advice you'd give to help us serve the men and women on the front lines better and get better performance out of the organization?
David Bishop: I'd say it like this. When I was leading service in a large OEM, we worked hard to improve the business, and we had a lot of dedicated people. But occasionally we tried to solve a problem that really wasn't a problem. The most important thing you can do is make sure your problem statement is sound. What I love about the work I do now is that it's all problem focused. We don't really have a product. We go in and find the problem. If there's not a problem, we move on to the next customer. So make sure you have a great problem statement before you tackle anything. Don't assume. Go through the five whys, get to the bottom of it. We're all trying hard and moving fast, but if you don't truly understand the problem, sometimes you tackle the wrong one. And then the field is sitting there shaking their head going, why are we doing this? That's not a problem. I'll tell you what is a problem. So go to the field, talk to the technicians, take them through the five-why process, get to the root cause, then go solve the problem. It's tempting to jump at the first thing you think is a problem. I always start a proposal with a problem statement, because if there's not a problem, then I probably don't have a solution.
Justin Lake: I love the way you said that, that when you bring it to the field, somebody in the room is going to tell you what the problem is. I think that's great advice. I tend to view the world as a series of problems, like a puzzle. It sounds pessimistic out loud, but I'm looking for that challenge that likely has a creative solution. It's one of the reasons I love the podcast, hearing these examples and figuring out how to put the pieces together to make outcomes better.
David Bishop: I'd use another word too. A good problem statement comes because you found some pain somewhere. People always want to move away from pain or toward gain. I used to love the customers who were on the front end, leading with technology, always wanting to try something first. They were moving toward gain. They didn't necessarily have as much pain, but they wanted to get ahead of something. But if you find the pain, you can come up with a really good problem statement. You've just got to find it.
Justin Lake: It goes back to what you said earlier about having a well thought out strategy and the objectives you're trying to accomplish. I once listened to a book about the manufacturing process in innovative companies, and one thing they talked about was looking for the bottlenecks on the line. That's the next problem you have to solve for. In manufacturing it's simple, you're trying to get more output, reduce labor, reduce cost, reduce raw material in inventory. The problem statement is there's a buildup happening here, so zoom in on that one area to find what's causing the bottleneck. I know we're not really talking about manufacturing, but it's the same in any business process. What's the goal, what's the output we're trying to measure, and what's impeding us from getting there? That's the next piece of the puzzle.
David Bishop: That's a great example. I really like looking at both manufacturing and service, because you can learn a lot from both. In manufacturing, when you find that bottleneck, you may not have the resources to tackle every problem in the process, so you have to measure the impact and go after the big problems first. I've learned that too. Sometimes you find multiple problems, and you've got to go after the ones with the greatest impact first.
Justin Lake: That's very well said, and I actually skimmed over that detail, but they talked about it in this book, the framework for prioritizing those challenges. To me it's very visual. If you have a stockpile here but a bigger one over there, and you solve the smaller bottleneck first, you actually haven't improved your output. So you go solve a problem that hasn't materially impacted the thing you're trying to measure. It's fascinating. I feel like I could talk about this with you all day. I want to comment on something I probably should have started with. When you and I reconnected at lunch, we had met about a year ago at that same conference in a different location, and I was honored that you remembered. You did a great job telling the story of what we'd done, and I appreciated your attention to detail and what a good listener you were that a year later you recited the conversation. It meant a lot to me personally, and it told me a lot about you as an active communicator.
David Bishop: You're welcome. I did it because I'm always in search of something different and unique, and I think what you offer is something different and unique that I hadn't seen before. So I always remember those things. It's the redundant things you tend not to remember. Very unique and different approach, which I really appreciated.
Justin Lake: A lot of the things you talked about today were good for me to hear, because I've never been a leader in the service business, though I support people who are in the role you had and in the role you're in now. It's super validating to hear some of the things you talked about, the importance of confidence and practice and the ability to measure. Those are all key components of what we do. As I always say, whether you use our platform or find some other way, we all have to aspire to get these processes in place so we can get the performance gains we need and still implement the change we need in these large companies. Thanks again. It was really great to visit with you today, and I hope we get to stay in touch.
David Bishop: Yep, great visit. Thank you. Take care, Justin.
Justin Lake: Thank you.
Frequently Asked Questions with David Bishop
What's the real cost of poor frontline technology adoption?
The first cost is attrition. When technology makes a technician's job harder, frustration builds and people leave. In an HVAC market with around 45,000 open technician positions and demand growing faster than hiring, every departure means recruiting fees, unbillable orientation time, and training cost in a market where you can't backfill quickly.
Why would a technician leave for less money?
David Bishop says exit interviews often reveal that technicians leave to reduce stress and headaches, not to chase a bigger paycheck. Many will accept lower pay for a simpler job with better work-life balance, so leaders who assume turnover is always about compensation tend to miss the real cause.
What's a field council and why does it matter?
A field council is a group of respected technicians who help shape a technology platform before it launches. They test early, give critical feedback, and become trusted early adopters. Involving them up front produces tools that work for the people doing the job and prevents the resistance that comes from a top-down rollout.
How should service companies handle AI tools in the field?
With governance. Field information has to be accurate, so anything feeding an AI or knowledge platform should be vetted and approved by someone with higher technical expertise, just as knowledge articles were approved before AI. Well-governed AI makes technicians more efficient and safer, but a live technical support option should remain available.
What's the single most important step before solving a field service problem?
Write a sound problem statement. Teams often rush to solve a problem that was never really there. Talk to the technicians, use the five whys to reach the root cause, and prioritize problems by impact so you tackle the biggest one first.