RayDoc Carpets, Doors, and Windows is a fairly average small business. It has slightly rundown commercial premises, with office space in the front, and workshops and carpet cleaning bays in the back. It has annual sales of about 3 Million Canadian dollars each year, and its staff is comprised of Doc, his wife Maureen who does the book-keeping and manages Kay the receptionist, a junior partner Andrew, and a staff of about 22 employees.
The name RayDoc once celebrated the teaming of Ray and Doc to create this business, but Ray is long gone, and Doc now runs things by himself. Well, by himself is not quite true. Maureen actually runs the office, except when Doc is in one of his moods, and between them Maureen and Kay take care of nearly all the paperwork and administration in the company.
Some of the services provided by RayDoc include carpet and upholstery cleaning at customers offices or homes, the provision of rotating supplies of clean carpet runners and boot trays for businesses during the Canadian winter, deep cleaning of large Indian and Persian rugs in the bays behind the offices, the sale and installation of replacement doors and windows, and general contracting and building services. RayDoc owns several vans and mini-vans, which are used by staff to get themselves and their equipment to jobs and to bring large carpets back to the office.
While some of RayDoc’s customers have had only one transaction with RayDoc, much of their business is with existing customers: businesses that have their carpets cleaned on a regular basis, property management firms that always get their doors and windows repaired or replaced by RayDoc, and home owners who have come to count on RayDoc for a broad range of services over the sixteen years it has been in business.
Doc likes to focus on finding new business opportunities, and schmoozing new and existing customers. He also spends much of his time finding new suppliers of interesting new products, and making sure that the bigger jobs they get are always done to the customer’s satisfaction.
A street-smart individual, Doc is somewhat bored by the rather mundane nature of much of his business after all the years he has been doing it, and he consciously ducks a lot of the everyday administrative work, searching for more interesting business opportunities, or just customers to talk to. Doc comes from a fairly rough blue-collar background, and just as well, as a lot of the young men doing the carpet cleaning are pretty rough themselves.
Doc prides himself on his business sense and to some degree on his marketing abilities. His main advertising expense is running an advert on the local cable TV Guide channel. As a boy, Doc didn’t much care for academics, as he was too impatient to get on with living his life. Skilled with his hands, he has mastered many trades. But at 45, he knows he is doing a lot of things the hard way at RayDoc, and wants to get the company working smarter. Not in the least because he has hopes of taking more and more of a back seat in the business before too long, and he needs to put more business systems and processes in place before that can happen.
Doc has been hearing about CRM systems from some of his friends and customers for a few years now. Recently he had a long chat in a local bar with an old friend who owns another small business, who was extolling the virtues of being able to get at all his business information from home, while out of town, and even from his fancy Treo cell phone, all because of the new CRM he had purchased. That was it. Doc wasn’t going to have his old friend be able to say he knew more about running a business than Doc did. He needed to find out about this CRM stuff, and quickly!
RayDoc has been holding its own for several years now, neither growing nor shrinking. Making reasonable, but not exciting incomes for Doc and Maureen, and showing just enough promise for Andrew to stick around, hoping for Doc’s retirement. Part of a younger generation of well‑educated tradesmen, Andrew has often tried to encourage Doc and Maureen to adopt newer business management tools, but it has been difficult, as Doc resisted change, and Andrew’s responsibilities kept him out of the office, supervising on-site employees nearly all the time. But he will be a willing and supportive ally for Doc in his CRM initiative.
An automated system that documents all of RayDoc’s customers and their history with RayDoc is just as essential for Andrew’s succession plan as it is for Doc’s early retirement.