CEO’s Blog – Save us all from the “comfort zoners”

Around this time last year, I posted about “blockers”. These are the people in an organisation who resist change and stand in the way of progress https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dont-let-blockers-hold-you-back-martin-port/.

Blockers are a nightmare. They can be hard to spot and may drag the whole team down with them. But they are not the only threat to your business. I’m talking about: the “comfort zoner”.

This is someone who wants to change but refuses to take action to make it happen. They just keep doing things the way they have always been done. I have met a few of these in my time and it drives me mad.

We recently released a new feature called the BigChange Scheduling Assistant. It’s amazing – I know, I would say that. It looks at all your jobs over the next seven days and arranges the job to be scheduled in the best way to maximise the efficiency of all your resources. It’s a bit like Uber, finding the nearest driver to take you on your journey, except more sophisticated. The platform takes into account things like the skill level of each member of the team, vehicle type, even the Service Level Agreement that has been promised to the client. It will find the lowest cost engineer to do the job.

Around 85% of the people using BigChange’s software are engineers. These people can be driving over 100 hours a month. Every hour they aren’t stuck behind the wheel – and are on the tools – means more revenue for their company. Building more efficiency into the way jobs are scheduled can save businesses an absolute fortune. For example, companies think they need to hire another engineer to complete the workload when all they need is to schedule the jobs more efficiently. Not to mention that cutting time on the road does lots of good for the environment and reduces carbon footprint.

And yet, over the past few weeks I have been encountering a lot of comfort zoners that won’t even give it a go. They will find any reason under the sun not to press that button.

I don’t get it. Surely you can enable the functionality, see if it works, and then make your mind up if you want it? Even if you let the computer make the decision, and you check it, it would only take you a few minutes, compared to the money it will cost the company if engineers are spending unnecessary time driving. But comfort zoners always say the same thing: ‘What if X?’ Or ‘I’m worried about Y.’

How do you get a comfort zoner to see that they are a comfort zoner? The only way to prove our system works is to sit beside them and say: “You do it your way and I’ll use BigChange at the same time. Let’s see who improves efficiency?” I would do it, too.

Just think what it would do for your business if you could improve output by even 10%. Just one extra job a day? That could boost revenues, profit, and let you grow your business that much faster. Don’t be a comfort zoner. Push the button.

Martin Port
Founder & CEO