When Quality is on the Front Lines…

…GREAT things happen. At RFS we have an aspirational metric that 20% of all of our jobs will have a random site visit from one of our field supervisors, project managers, or leadership team members.  During these site visits our leaders utilize a simple, one-page site visit and evaluation form (shown below), to ensure the RFS quality standards are met. During a recent visit to an exterior refresh – a multi-day job where all of the exterior wood and seals are inspected and repaired, calking re-applied, and the building primed and painted – our leader completed his walk around with the site supervisor, as he was about to leave the supervisor asked, “Hey, you gotta second for a suggestion?”  The obvious answer was, “Of course.”  Here’s how the dialog went…

Supervisor: “When we are doing these exterior refreshes, we have to do much of the work during the day due to moisture levels and paint, etc.  When customers of the restaurant pull up for lunch or dinner, often times they get out of their car, take a few steps, and once they see us, they assume the restaurant is closed.  So our guys always yell ‘Hey, the restaurant is open, we are only working on the outside.’”

Leader: “That’s great, thanks for looking out for the client’s business.”

Supervisor: “I was thinking, what if we had a sign or banner we could hang on both sides of the building that reads “OPEN”, so people driving by looking at us don’t assume it's closed?”

At that point, our leader put the wheels in motion to get some canvas signs made up for this crew to take with them from refresh to refresh.  We have two crews doing these refreshes, within a few hours each crew had two sets of “OPEN” signs, which were shared with the manager on duty at the restaurant to gain approval if the local sign ordinance allows, to get the go ahead and hang up.

It appears that during these daytime refreshes, traffic at the concept was taking a dip.  A couple of “OPEN” signs, and a conversation with the manager could save the concept thousands in potential lost revenue.  At RFS, we are Remodeling the Renovation Experience.  Ensuring that operations is as unaffected as possible is one of the many ways we are doing this.