How to organize your field service organization to become a profit center

Our focus, with our most recent blog posts, is on helping you move your field service organization from a cost center (where you essentially spend money but don’t necessarily make it back) to a profit center (where you do both and can understand your organization as a self-contained business). There’s an eBook on all the core steps of thinking about this process; you can download it here.

This post is about how you organize your team toward a goal of profitability. There are thousands of different approaches to team organization toward a goal -- entire sections of bookstores are dedicated to this idea -- and ultimately, what works for every team will be different. One field service organization may achieve their goals one way, and another field service organization in the same city might follow a totally different path to their sales targets. Organizations are unique.

There is, however, a helpful framework for thinking about moving toward your goals. It’s called 4A. Here’s the visual representation:3

This is based on research from University of Virginia business school professors who worked with dozens of top companies, including Coca-Cola, Marriott, and LinkedIn. You can learn more about their findings here.

As you can see above, the 4A model revolves around:

• Alignment
• Activation
• Ability
• Architecture

Broken down even further, here’s what you have:

• Focusing energy on breakthrough performance (alignment)
• Channeling value-add effort (activation)
• Building human potential (ability)
• Designing organizational capability (architecture)

This is a helpful framework for thinking about any goals in your field service organization, whether they revolve around profitability or not. However, there’s a key takeaway to focus on in terms of field service profitability.

Start with this basis: your profitability ultimately comes from your people. How your techs deal with customers and how your back-office staff deals with customers and partners, as well as other relationships you interact with every day, will ultimately determine how successful your business can become.

If you believe that profitability comes from people, then your focus to achieve profitability should be ways to maximize your people and their potential; that’s what all four of the As above point to.

In that vein, consider this section of the professors’ research:

Ironically, we often refer to people and organizations as “resources,” but less as sources of energy. In his work with senior executive teams, Jim Clawson (2012) emphasizes that “leadership is about managing energy, first in yourself and then in those around you.” The same logic applies to strategy execution. Executives need to build the “ability” and “architecture” factors as sources of potential energy — the human potential and organizational potential that determine the firm’s capacity to execute. At the same time, they need to foster “alignment” and “activation” as sources of kinetic energy — vitality that propels the firm into action. Alignment energizes performance by focusing and concentrating human resources. Activation energizes execution by channeling and accelerating it toward value-adding activities. Ask any leader with responsibility for strategy execution and he or she will tell you, “Resources are important; managing energy is essential.”

There’s your ‘secret sauce’ to becoming a field service profit center, then: start by thinking of people as sources of energy, as opposed to simply resources. This will drive the ability, alignment, activation, and architecture you ultimately need to succeed.

For more ideas and information on becoming a profit center, download 10 ways to make your field service organization a profit center.

Written by Shloma Baum