How Great Companies Turn Mistakes Into Customer Loyalty, Jonathan Harvey, HarLand Windows & Doors

About This Episode.

Building industry companies don’t lose customers because their people stopped caring. They lose them because growth added more approvals between the person taking the order and the one installing it, and their people don’t feel empowered to fix the problem if a job goes sideways.

In this episode of the Grit Blueprint Podcast, I sit down with Jonathan Harvey, co-owner of HarLand Windows & Doors in Atlanta, who I first met back in 2012 when he was one of my first accounts and I was the one writing up his door POs. He grew up in a three-generation family moving business, came up through inside sales at a one-step distributor, and now runs a turnkey company built so that the product side and the install side sit under one name. We get into the jobs that went sideways, what it costs a business when nobody owns the outcome, and how you keep a growing team close to the customer.

What’s inside

• Why nearly every expensive mistake Jonathan saw in his career traced back to bad communication, not bad product
• What good communication actually means to a contractor
• Where the phrase "opening possibilities" came from, and how Jonathan uses it to push decisions down to whoever is talking to the customer
• Why layers of checks and approvals are the bane of a large corporation, and what decentralized command looks like inside a growing company
• What homeowners are asking for when a window and door package runs two to three hundred thousand dollars, and why HarLand built a design studio for that conversation
• Where AI is already helping building industry businesses with product knowledge, design, proposals, and presentations
• A surprise vocal performance!