Hey there, it's the HVC school podcast podcast that helps you remember some things that you might have forgotten along the way as well as helps you remember some things you forgot to know. In the first place, this episode is gon na, be about intangibles, intangibles that a technician needs and we've done some similar episodes to this, but I want to go through some things that are truly truly intangible, but this episode was not a regular short episode. This episode was actually inspired by my friend, Andy Holt, who left me a voicemail on our new voicemail system for HVAC school through a program called speakpipe. It's pretty cool.

You can just hit a button right on your phone and say what you need to say. There's a five minute limit, but if you have a quick tip you want to give or something that you've noticed in the field, something you want to add to the podcast or if you have a question for me, you can go to HVAC our school comm /vm. For voicemail hvac our school comm /vm for voicemail before we get into the episode, though, and we need to thank our excellent sponsors who make this thing possible carrier and carrier comm, everybody knows carrier Willis carrier invented air conditioning in many ways he invented the word air Conditioning which means that by definition, he invented air conditioning which is the simultaneous control of humidity temperature and air filtration, which is a good combo. We're proud to work with carrier they've, always treated us well, you can find out more by going to carrier comm, also refrigeration, technologies, that refrig tech, comm makers of so many different great chemicals for our industry, chemicals that are much more natural than chemical in many ways And we've been enjoying using the Viper cleaners check them out by going to a French tech comm or by going to true tech tools.

Comm, you can use our discount code, which is get schooled for a great discount at checkout, and i also want to thank nav AK. You can find out more about navikev accupuncture tech tools. They have all their products there at true tech tools, and you can also go to navigable comm and then also air oasis at air oasis.com forward. Slash, go to find out about the Nano and bipolar air purifiers.

Alright, oh actually, something else. Sorry, one more thing before we get in, I am working with solder well now and solder. Weld is not a sponsor this podcast, but they company that I've been working closely with helping them, develop new products and testing and just making sure that they're going to be great for the HVAC industry. The answer is that they are, and so the trick of solder weld is is that they are available at several different supply houses in Florida, Johnstone's bringing them in reference centers, bringing them in in Florida, and I'm very thankful to those wholesalers for doing that.

But other places they're not brought in yet, and so, if you are interested in, if you have any connections to a wholesaler or distributor who might be interested in bringing in solder weld in their great line of products, I'll be talking a lot more about those. In a future, but you can put them in touch with me or you can go to their website at solder web.com. So today we're talking about some intangibles, but first, let's listen to Eddie, hey Brian. This is Andy Holt at Columbus, Georgia just checking out your new widget here, leaving voicemail, that's pretty cool love, the site level.

What you guys are all about as a recommendation, I'd like to see a little bit more of the people side of the business being brought into it, in other words, customer service stories. Things like that. I know your technical site, but, like Ron Smith, taught me years ago that our customers never ever complement our technical skills. They always compliment how we made them feel, and I've never forgot that.

So that's what I'm all about, but anyway I'd love to share your site and tell others you take care and keep on keepin on all right, so that was Andy Holt Andy. He didn't mention it, but he is the founder of outdoor university for HVAC Tech's. You can find out more by going to top rate dot-com as his organization he's a really great coach on the soft skills and the intangibles. He would probably be more qualified to talk about this than me, but since this is a short episode, all you get is me, so, let's go through real, quick first thing that I think it takes first intangible for a good technician is just overall awareness being aware Of self being aware of, what's around you, the equipment? That's around you, the customer, how they're feeling their pets, their children, all those things that could potentially lead to problems, and so you want to be really thoughtful and you want to be really aware.

But another thing that goes along with awareness is the ability to let things go so technicians who are aware. Often good text tend to notice everything, but a lot of older texts, especially guys who have worked with over the years. You've been doing it 10 plus years. Even if they're not older but they've, been doing it a while they tend to let all the bad experiences build up and that kind of grows on them and they become grouchy.

I mean I'm sure, you've experienced this if you've been in the business a long time. You start to get kind of jaded, and so one really good intangible, trait of a good technician. A soft skill that you kind of learn is how to let things go, how to let it go before you hit the porch of the house. So you don't bring that stuff home and how to let each previous day go when you wake up the next morning and go out to do your job.

So I would say that's a first thing because otherwise, if you don't learn to let things go, then all these other traits are gon na get worse. As you go on, they're gon na get grouchy a grouch here, so first actual intangible skill. Their technicians tend to be calm, so they're able to deal with tough situations under pressure grab a few customers, all those sorts of things, with a level of calm, they're able to focus, and so that focus goes along with being calm. They tend to be from an intangible standpoint.

Being a happy person goes a long way if you're a person who lets the troubles of your life get you down and you let that impact, how you communicate with customers. Then your customers are not going to have a good experience, and so one of the first things that I talk about with our technicians is that when you show up on that doorstep, obviously you got ta, look professional all that, but more than anything else is you Got to act like you're happy to be there in a calm way, because again, remember calmest, first, not in an overly enthusiastic way, but in a way that makes the customer know that you're having a good day and that you're ready to take care of their problem. Nobody wants to work with somebody who's, not happy to be there. Another intangible that either you learned or you didn't - was the ability to give eye contact eye contact signals to the other person that you're listening to them.

Now eye contact can be overdone. We've probably all met the person who kind of stares you down, so you want to be careful with that, especially if you have maybe an intimidating village. I don't know. If that's the right word visit.

I just felt like saying that if your face is maybe an intense face, you don't want to stare them straight in the eyes, but eye contact is an important way nodding to let the customer know that you're paying attention to what they're saying, rather than just saying What you want to say another thing that customers assess - and this may not be seen as an intangible, but I think it is, is action, and so sometimes when you get to be a really good technician, you just know kind of what's going on intuitively, but customers Want to see a measure of action to what you do. You've heard the thing of well. Why don't have to pay you this much? All you did was just look at the thermostat and tell me I needed a new thermostat or whatever the case may be. One good thing that a technician can do in order to give the customer value is to go through a list of things that you check before you start giving a diagnosis, and that's something that we teach is just because you find the problem in the first two Seconds doesn't mean that you need to tell the customer that you found the problem in the first two seconds.

They want to see you taking some action that you're really inspecting everything, and then you come back to them with your diagnosis. That also means, when you're taking action, you want to do it in such a way that has the customer feeling, like you, actually care about doing your job in a quality and efficient way. So if you're kind of dragging, obviously you don't need to overwork yourself for no reason, you don't need me running all over the place, but you need to be moving with a purpose customers catch on to that and it kind of goes along with that kind of Happy demeanor as well when a technician is being active and they're actively inspecting the equipment and being thorough. The customer will perceive that the next thing is overall cleanliness, so wearing shoe covers when you go into the home, making sure that you're, not tracking making sure that if you have a work area on the inside of the home, if you're gon na pull out a Blow or you're gon na work inside at the air handler on a furnace, that's inside the occupied space that you're putting down drop cloths and that you are paying attention to cleanliness.

There are some things where sometimes a mistake happens where you do drop something on the carpet or you make a little bit of a mess. That's where you want to have a vacuum and clean it up quickly. It's not so much a matter of you being perfect. As it is you having an attention to cleanliness that you care about keeping the site clean - and this is true of commercial and residential - and you see so many motor rooms that end up just being trashed over time.

And if your company is the company, that's been maintaining that space, eventually the maintenance staff and the facilities management and whatever of that facility. It's gon na catch on to the fact that you don't care as much about cleanliness as you should. So. A huge piece of those intangibles for a technician is cleanliness.

The next thing is professionalism. Now professionalism is one of the trickiest ones, because you can't just put a single finger on it. I've said recently in an article a traditional idea of what a professional looks like changes over time in the past. Nobody ever wanted to see any tattoos or no piercings, or all that.

I think that our society has gotten a lot more accepting of those things, but professionalism means that you're not making crude jokes you're, not acting distracted you're, not on your phone, all the time when you're talking to somebody you're giving them your full attention, you're, not using Slang, language, those sorts of things all feed into professionalism and then from an appearance standpoint, you need to look the part of the job that you're gon na do like it's. People have a picture in their head of what a refrigeration or air conditioning technician should look like, and you don't want to deviate too far from what that picture is in their head. Obviously, some companies take that really far and that's where the term white shirt comes in, where they're just always perfectly clean. I don't think that's it at all.

If I have somebody who's gon na be working on my home or on my car, for example, used to work more in my car early on nowadays, I tend to take it to a garage. I don't want to see a mechanic that spotless, but I also don't want them to look like a total slob in most cases, because that tells me the attention to detail that they're gon na place in my car. So again a lot of different opinions about that. But I would say that, generally speaking, you don't want to go too far outside of the norm of what a customer would expect from a professional appearance standpoint and then how you interact.

It needs to always be professional. A lot of technicians end up faulting on the very friendly side. Friendly is fine, but you have to be really careful not to cross any lines, and nowadays you have to be more careful than you ever have, and so professionalism tends to mean that you make it about the customer and their needs. And you don't go to in depth about yourself, you don't start talking about yourself in your own things, your own children, your own circumstances, so much I've seen a lot of guys do that and they tend to overdo it, and that goes back to the self-awareness thing.

If you've been talking about yourself a lot, then you haven't been spending as much time listening to what the customer has to say, obviously having a rapport with the customer where they feel like you, have their best interests at heart, that's important, but you can take that Too far you can get too invasive into their space or you can spend too much time talking about yourself and again. This is about them and their needs not about you and then finally, from an intangible standpoint organization is really huge, so technicians need to be organized with their paperwork. They need to be organized with their processes of as far as how they present to the customer. Those suggested repairs or suggested maintenance or anything are gon na talk to the customer about that needs to come off in an organized way with handwriting that can be is legible if you're doing it on a tablet or whatever it's the same thing, you gon na make Sure that your spelling is in line and that everything's kind of organized in a way that makes sense even the way you knew your call needs to be organized I've, seen technicians who will go talk to the customer.

They find one problem. They go talk to the customer and quote them. Then they go find another problem and they find the customer. In quote, I mean it's a very disorganized helter-skelter process I suggest being very organized and systematic and how you go through the equipment, find everything that's going on with it and then present that to the customer all at one time or is in few steps as you Possibly can present it in the fewest steps, if possible, and then obviously work vehicle organization is also enormous and the biggest thing with work vehicle organization is not to have a work vehicle.

That looks perfect. I see guys if their tools aren't in the perfect spot, then they go crazy. That's not it, but if you're gon na be able to keep all the tools and materials that a HVAC or refrigeration technician needs on their vehicle, you have to have a measure of cleanliness and organization technicians whose vans are a wreck. They have stuff on there that they don't know is on there and they end up damaging tools and of damaging parts.

It's undisputed. I have guys argue with me about this all the time, but I'm telling you a well-organized vehicle is the vehicle where you have what you need when you need it. I can't tell you how many times the really messy technicians end up not having the right tool not having the right part and that's where a lot of hack work happens because they're not prepared with what they need and that isn't intangible. It's something you got to kind of embrace as a technician.

So there's a lot of other intangibles out there, I'm going to talk in few episodes from now. I'm not going to do this sort of podcast too often, but I'm going to talk about some of the storytelling skills, some of the presenting skills, some of the communication and conversational skills. That's another thing and of course those are intangibles as well, but I wanted to give you a quick list so just to go through you have to be self aware. You have to be aware not only a few, but also of everything around you.

You have to be calm, you have to give things up. You have to be willing to give up your expectations, the hard conversation that you had with a friend the fight you got into with somebody in your family. Whatever you got to, let go of all of that in order to be calm happy with the customer act like you want to be at work, you want to give appropriate eye contact. You want to take action when you're at the call, rather than just jumping to conclusions.

You want the customer to see you taking positive actions. You want to do everything with cleanliness, especially for the customer and then also on your person. You want to comport yourself with professionalism. You want to be well organized, so there you go, there's some things for you to think about today.

Hopefully, you found that helpful, we'll talk to you next time on the HVAC school podcast.