Coyote Blog

Over the past year, I have spent a staggering amount of my time trying to get service providers who are supposed to be the leaders of their business to do their damn job.  I literally keep a list at my desk with a list of reminders I need to send out to service providers to do what they promised.  This list is never less than 30 names long.

More than the COVID life disruptions, more than the fear-mongering, more even than our merger, the most exhausting thing for me over the last year has been the utter inability to reliably delegate anything to a third party without constantly having to coach them through their job.

I see many reasons this is occurring.  These include:

• Lack of employees due to either sickness or else difficulty in competing against high unemployment payments.
• Closure and elimination of services that companies always wanted to eliminate but they can now blame on COVID.  For example
  • Hotels stopping maid services and room service
  • Banks closing tellers and branches
  • Airlines not serving meals or drinks
• Unwillingness to adjust to the current reality.  Banks are high on this list, demanding things they have always demanded but that are impossible to do in the last year

But these do not encompass the whole problem.  There are a lot of companies in their core functionality that seem to have simply forgotten how to do what they do.  Even after 6 phone calls, Amerigas can't take and fulfill a simple order for bulk propane delivery;  Iron Mountain, who I like and invest in, can't reliably provide any of their core services accurately and on the first try; I don't think Intuit even picks up the phone anymore.

My hypothesis is that people are getting too far ahead of themselves in saying that COVID proves that the centralized workplace is dead.   I think we are going to find that this is not true at all, that there are networks in the office that spread both knowledge and accountability that are lost with all this home work.

I have run a company for 20 years where every employee works out of their home, or more accurately, where every employee moves their home (RV) to the workplace.  My employees work in over 400 spots.  And one thing I have learned vs. years of working in Fortune 50 offices is that you have to build a special process for this situation.   In particular, my constant focus is how how to centralize complexity.  I keep trying to take complexity out of field locations and managers and centralize it in a few office people where it is easier to train and build tools and create backups, etc.

My hypothesis is that companies did OK for the first month or two with work at home as well-trained employees carried the momentum of office work styles to their house.  But as time passes, and the staff turns over, the lack of traditional knowledge-sharing, support networks, and accountability systems are causing service functionality to degrade.