Quality Control

Operations: Deliver and run the business

Every owner I know believes their work is good. Many of them are right, on their best day, when they are the one doing it. The trouble starts when the business grows past what one person can watch. Then quality becomes whatever your least careful person does on their most rushed day. Is that the quality you promised?

Quality control is how you make sure the customer receives what you told them they would receive, every time, and not only when you were standing there.

Define good before you check it

What you intend and what the customer experiences are two different things. You may intend a spotless finish. The customer experiences a smudge on the window, a text that came two days late, and a cheerful crew that left a gum wrapper by the door. To them, all of it is your work.

So begin by writing down what good looks like, in terms a customer would use. Not “high quality” but “the job site is swept, the customer gets a text when we arrive, the finished work matches the photo we showed them.” If you have done the exercise in Standard Operating Procedures People Will Actually Use, this is the “what done looks like” line on each page.

Keep the list short. Five to eight things that matter most to your customers. If you do not know what those are, ask a few of them. The things you obsess about and the things they notice are often not the same list.

Check the work before the customer does

Once good is defined, build a small check into the end of the job, before anyone leaves. A checklist works. So does a rule that the person who did the work is not the person who signs it off, if you have the people to do that. Fresh eyes see what tired eyes miss.

Photos help here too. A quick set of before-and-after pictures, taken as part of the routine, gives you a record, gives your team a standard to meet, and gives you something to look at when a customer says the work was not right. Your crew will see it as fair when they know why you take the photos: everyone has the same picture of what happened.

Match the size of the check to the size of the risk. A cleaning crew might need a two-minute walkthrough of every room. A restaurant might taste and look at plates as they leave the pass. A contractor might do a punch-list walk with the customer before final payment. Where a mistake is cheap, keep the check light. Where a mistake could hurt someone or cost a great deal to redo, check twice.

And check the early stages, not just the finish. It is much cheaper to catch a wrong measurement before the material is cut than after the wall is closed.

Fix the cause, not the symptom

Sooner or later something will slip past your checks. When it does, the tempting response is to fix that one problem and move on, or to blame whoever was closest. Ask a different question: why was it possible for this to happen?

Ask why, and then ask again. The cleaner missed the baseboards because the checklist did not mention them. The checklist did not mention them because nobody updated it after the client asked. The fix is a better page, not a stern talk. Many quality problems trace back to an unclear standard, a missing step, or a crew that was never shown what good looked like. Those are fixable.

Keep a simple log of problems: what happened, what caused it, what changed. Glance at it once a month. If the same thing appears three times, your process is telling you something, and you should listen.

This week

Write down the five things a customer would notice most about your work. Turn them into a checklist of five yes-or-no questions. Use it on your next three jobs, and see which question gets a “no” most often. That one is where you start.

Defining your standard and building a first checklist takes two to three hours, mostly thinking. The check itself should take minutes per job once it becomes routine. It costs nothing but time, plus perhaps a small amount for printing or a free app for photos and checklists.