Move forward
Selling the company’s union shops essentially marked a new
beginning for Comfort Systems USA. The company was now free
from the debt that had plagued it for years, but a new set of challenges soon became evident.
Comfort Systems had been pieced together by acquiring smaller
companies, many of which were start-ups still fronted by the entrepreneurs who founded them. Murdy says there had been a lot of
talk but little done, with regard to pulling the remaining business
units — which now number 42 — together into a single, aligned
business plan.
“A lot of words were being thrown around, but the hard work of
pulling it together and moving it in the same direction had not been
done,” he says. “So the biggest challenge we’ve had is pulling those companies together into a cohesive whole, at least in terms of their direction, focus and processes.”
The overarching problem was figuring out a way to get the entrepreneurs within the Comfort Systems network to speak the company language and embrace the company values, without turning
them into corporate robots.
“You’re dealing with individual entrepreneurs, many of whom
have built these businesses, some of whom have taken over from
the prior owner as companies were taken into Comfort Systems.
You want to maintain all of that entrepreneurial drive, that local
spirit and focus,” Murdy says. “But the business was very fragmented around the country, and even within markets it was very
fragmented.”
Murdy hit the road, traveling to Comfort Systems’ business units
around the country. He had to show the leaders of each of the business units the value of aligning, and the most effective way to do
that is direct communication.
Murdy focused on selling unit leaders on the idea that corporate
headquarters is a resource for growth, not a power-usurping entity looking to manipulate puppet strings from above.
“It’s a process of showing (the business unit) the value of working together and having common resources for purchasing and
financing, human resources, benefits, safety, legal, all those
things that corporate can provide,” he says. “It’s important that
you provide that, but that you sell it, you don’t force it. You show
the operating entity that it has value in and of itself.
Where the situation is marginal, maybe they have to compromise
from the way they did it before, maybe it’s suboptimum, but they
recognize the overall benefit, that it’s not that much of a burden for
them to utilize a central system or a common way of doing things.”
Once some of the business units were on board with the new
alignment plan, Murdy used numbers as his most convincing argument to win over other business units. If you show others that the
company is making more money and achieving greater levels of
performance as it operates according to your plan, chances are
business unit leaders will find it much harder to continue in another direction.
“We are very cash flow positive, we operate in the upper percentiles of the industry,” Murdy says. “We think we’ve brought a lot
to the operations in terms of bringing greater productivity, education, training, so there have been a lot of things brought to people.
All this stuff relates to leadership and having a common purpose,
moving toward what is important.”