On my first day working for a new employer, my manager was outlining what he expected from me in my new position.  I was starting my career as a District Service Manager for a major copier manufacturer.

 The mangers goal was for me to spend two days when visiting each dealer.  I was okay with that until it was explained that my bonus was based on the cost of a dealer visit and the number of dealer visits.  Now I am reasonably quick with math, and this was pretty simple; more dealer visits and less cost per dealer visit was how I maximized my bonus.

I told him he was paying me for one-day visits, and he said he wanted two-day visits.  I suggested that he change the bonus structure, and he said no.  For the entire time I worked for him, I did one-day visits and sometimes two in a single day.  I did what he paid me to, not what he wanted.

I challenge you to think about your business. Do you pay people to do something different from what...

Many dealers still do not automatically protect the power of the devices they sell and of all the poor decisions that dealers make, this may be the worst. There seems to be a variety of excuses. The client does not want it. The salesperson does not want it included in the deal. It is too expensive. You do not really need it the power is ok.

But all of those are lame excuses. Build it into the deal just as you would build in the cost of setup and delivery. And don’t show it as a separate item on the invoice: that way neither the salesperson nor the customer can try to negotiate it out of the deal.

My Experiences

When I owned my dealership, I had the opportunity to witness firsthand the ways that power protection saves equipment and therefore money. One of my clients had an electrical event that caused catastrophic failure to devices in one area of the building. Devices that were not even powered on were destroyed, including calculators, monitors, and PCs.

In that same area, I...

If we're meeting for the first time, my name is Ken Edmonds. And on this blog, I share information to help managers get better at managing people, growing their profit, and achieving success in every area in their department.

In my experience working in the copier business, something I saw happens way too often was an owner would walk up to his best technician and tell him, “Congratulations! You're our new manager!” Then they turn around and walk away. And that was the end of their training.

Here is one experience where that happened. A technician who was probably one of the better technicians I met in my career was very good at fixing equipment. So the company wanted him to step up and be a supervisor and promoted him to the position of supervisor, but they didn't give him any training.

It was interesting because I got to see him struggle and try to succeed in leading his team. But he failed at that. The result was he quit working for the dealer and went to work...