Fall is learning season in this business. There are state association meetings, webinars, trade magazines stacked on the dispatch counter and a podcast on the drive to the plant. Somebody comes home from a convention with three pages of ideas on hotel stationery.
By the first hard freeze, most of those pages are in a glovebox.
Here is the unpopular opinion. Most propane companies already know more than they use. Another session on retention or route density won’t move the business an inch until somebody acts on the last one.
Management researchers figured this out a while ago. Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton built a whole book around it in 2000, The Knowing-Doing Gap. The book’s summary describes companies that “know too much and do too little.” It warns against what the authors call the “smart talk trap,” where plans, meetings and presentations stand in for doing anything.
Why listening feels like work
Sitting through a session on cutting miles per route feels productive, and nothing is at risk. Changing your routes is a different animal. A driver grumbles. A customer gets a new delivery day and calls to ask why. If it goes sideways, it’s your name on it.
So the idea goes into a folder marked “later.”
Our business adds a twist most don’t have. We run on a season. From October through March nobody has time to change anything. From April through September nobody feels the pressure to. The fix you heard about in September gets filed until the January morning you need it most.
The Ticket Test
Every gallon we put in a tank leaves a delivery ticket behind. No ticket, no invoice. Hold what you learn to the same standard.
Take the last five things you read, watched or sat through about running the company. A convention session counts. So does a webinar, a trade magazine piece, a podcast, and this newsletter too.
For each one, write the ticket: the one specific thing you changed because of it. A fee you finally started charging. A driver you cross-trained on the transport. A will-call customer you moved to automatic delivery. A safety meeting you actually held.
“Good session on customer retention” gets no ticket. “Called our 20 longest-standing accounts last Tuesday” gets one.
Now count.
Zero or one. You’re a spectator. The company is running on last year’s playbook.
Two or three. You move in spurts. The ideas that stick are the ones that happened to land in a slow week.
Four or five. You’re already doing the job this column is about. Go put a sixth ticket on the board.
One change, one name, one date
Here’s the rule we’d suggest. Walk out of every session, webinar or staff meeting with exactly one change, the name of the person who owns it and the date it gets done. Write it on the whiteboard in dispatch, where the drivers can see it. Ten finished tickets a year will do more for you than forty pages of notes.
Say the idea that keeps nagging you is online ordering. You don’t need a fourth panel on it. Pick a date, put ordering in front of your customers with Tank Spotter or a Custom Fuel App, and count the calls you didn’t have to take that winter.
The sessions will keep coming, and some of them will be good. Count your tickets before the first cold snap. After that, you won’t have time.
h/t Codie Sanchez, Contrarian Thinking