When Your Service Manager Gets Poached on Vacation

Here's how it goes sometimes:

• Be a business owner
• Run a successful business
• Reward yourself with a vacation
• Spend months preparing. Right butts in the right seats, a stable service and management team
• Get on a plane, fly to a new country
• Land, look at your phone
• Your service manager got poached by the competition
• Two technicians went with him
• Back to work

You Did the Prep Work

The frustrating part is that nothing got skipped here. The months of preparation happened. The right people were in the right seats. The service team and the management team were stable when you left.

And the competition still pulled your service manager away. It wasn't one person gone either. Two technicians went out the door with him, and the vacation is over before it started.

The Opposite End of the Spectrum

I wrote about an owner who took a full no internet, no cell service vacation. He came back and literally everything was fine. Stepping away showed him he'd been micromanaging things he didn't need to be involved in.

This is the other outcome. Stepping away also shows you where the holes are in your business, and sometimes the hole is how much of your operation sits with one person. That's the same key man risk I've written about in acquisitions.

Same vacation, very different phone call when you land.