In 2016 I took the phone number off our website. We stopped taking phone calls and handled customers by email and text instead. For a home-service company that sounds like a strange thing to do, and I’m not going to pretend it was a good idea in the normal sense. I did it because I was managing far too much at one time and the company was in trouble.

How we got there

The short version is that we grew faster than our systems could handle. We were spending a lot of money trying to grow, and we put too much into the build-up. Payroll got too big. The systems we were running weren’t right for what we had become, and we weren’t getting accounts receivable down the way we needed to. When you aren’t watching your money and your growth patterns carefully, you can spend yourself into a cash-flow problem while everything on the surface still looks like growth. That’s what happened to us, and it was my doing. We had grown too fast without controlling our systems, and that is what caused it.

We ended up cutting back to 25 metro markets and rebuilding over an extended period of time.

Liking people doesn’t change what the company can carry

The hardest part wasn’t the phones. It was payroll. I liked the people I was working with. But that didn’t matter for the company to survive, and I had to make a hard choice. I don’t know a way to make that sound better than it is.

When a company is in disarray or losing money, you don’t get to cut what you want to cut. You figure out what is mandatory, the things that absolutely have to keep happening, and those continue. Anything superfluous to that, in any way, shape or form, has to be cut until you’re on a better foundation and can begin to rebuild. It isn’t a matter of wanting to.

That’s where the phone number went. Answering calls was something I couldn’t carry at that stage, so it went, and customers could still reach us by email and text. We lost some business because of it, though not much as far as I could tell, and new business kept coming in. We had already started offering online quotes a few years earlier, and that helped.

A survival measure isn’t a strategy

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to turn this into a story about how a service company doesn’t need phones. That isn’t the lesson. I certainly made more money taking phone calls than we did without them. I personally prefer texting over phone calls, but that doesn’t mean everybody else does, and you have to adapt to the customers you’re actually serving. Taking the number down was what I had to do at that stage of the business just to survive. It was right for that moment and wrong as a permanent way to run a company.

That’s the distinction I’d want any owner to hold onto. Some of what you do in a crisis is necessary and still not good. If you forget that, the emergency measure quietly becomes your operating model, and you keep the cut long after the reason for it is gone.

Shrink to what you can carry, then build

The best advice I have about a situation like 2016 is not to get into it. Don’t grow faster than your systems, and watch your money and your growth patterns closely enough to see trouble before it becomes a crisis. But if you’re already there, look honestly at what is possible with the people and the systems you have right now. Shrink to that level. Then build from that level, and don’t make the same mistakes twice.

It isn’t quick, and it isn’t painless. But a company that is honest about what it can carry has something to build on.