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How to grow your plumbing business

http://plumbingmarketingprofits.com/how-to-grow-your-plumbing-business-by-george-hedley

New Use for Worn-Out Work Gloves

NEW USE FOR WORN-OUT WORK GLOVES

I wear out my right-hand leather work gloves before the left-hand ones, leaving me with a lot of old pairs I don’t want to throw away. Also, I need to wear reading glasses for most tasks. I buy them in quantity because I’m pretty rough on them. I cut up the old leather gloves into strips and tubes (the fingers). I mount the strips with two roofing nails in all my work areas and use them as reading-glass holders, keeping them clean and scratch-free. The leather tubes can be used for sheathing chisels or shock-absorbing cushions.

Article Courtesy of:
Dave Congour

Colorado Clean Energy Systems

Montrose, Colo.

To read more industry news and updates visit: http://www.pmmag.com/articles/96711-saving-fasteners-with-teflon-tape-emery-cloth-for-threaded-tailpieces-new-use-for-worn-out-gloves

Planning for the Quiet Times

Here is what I promise you: There will be certain times during the year that your business will be quiet. Your phones will stop ringing and your staff will be looking at you asking what they should be doing with themselves. You may tell some of them to go clean the shop or count inventory. Sometimes you may have work to be done at home or at a friend’s house that you have been putting off. This is what typically happens when we are slow.

But how does this affect our profitability? The average North American contractor’s net profit is less than five percent.  When we pay our staff for non-revenue producing work, it eats into our profits further.

So what should we do when it’s quiet? The answer is to plan for it now! You don’t have to spend a lot of money to market. Today with social media and email you really have so many new ways to communicate to clients.

You need to have a marketing plan based on a budget that you also should be planning now! You create a plan for what happened yesterday. All you can do is learn from yesterday to plan tomorrow. Use this little tip to begin your planning process. You require the following.

• Sales plan month by month, broken down by each department in your company
• Marketing plan
• Training plan
• Recruiting plan
• People plan
• Goals
• Team reviews & bonus plans
• Inventory

This is the beginning of a complete plan but to balance out your year you need to plan it. The time to plan is NOW! If you need help give us a call we would be happy to discuss this with you.

Manage It or It will Manage You!

Today, despite technology that is intended to make our lives easier, we tend to work harder and have less flexible time than ever. About 95 percent of the time, the time management challenges we find fall into a set number of common categories.  I want you to become more productive. This is why I am sharing with you the biggest waste of time traps we experience today.

#1: Interruptions and Distractions
Emails and phone calls impact us constantly and represent almost a third of this category’s complaints. Overcoming this trap requires a firm application of self-discipline. If something distracts you, tighten your focus.  Turn off your email alerts or close your browser; forward your calls to voicemail and respond a few times a day, or go somewhere quieter to work.

# 2: People Problems
Many distractions emanate from others.  They’re the result of either the employee or the manager not being properly trained. Management duties represent the biggest time challenges. Employees who are not properly trained hurt profitability and productivity. Most employee challenges can be solved by holding them accountable to perform. It is your job to lay the path so you can get the performance standards to where they should be.

#3: Overwork/Overwhelm
You can only push yourself so much within a 24-hour day. Eliminate unimportant tasks from your schedule.  To the greatest extent possible, find ways to delegate. If you run out of time for something minor, let it go. Stop seeing your task list as a must-do list; instead view it in order of must-do today, can-wait-until-tomorrow, can-wait-a-few-days, can-be-delegated-and-followed-up-on list.

#4: Prioritization
Whether the failure to set priorities is the manager or the employee’s challenge, focusing on the wrong task at the wrong time can lead to feeling overwhelmed.  The solution: Simply prioritize your projects and focus first on the items that truly bring you the greatest returns.

#5: Meetings
Besides not over scheduling meetings yourself, you can overcome the meeting trap by only participating in meetings that absolutely need your attendance and setting time limits you communicate to everyone before it starts. If you can, leave once you’ve made your contributions.

#6. Lack of Self-Discipline
Fire up your willpower, crack the whip on yourself and your employees, and decide to concentrate on a task until it is complete.  About a quarter of those with self-discipline problems see procrastination as a bigger issue than a lack of focus. Most often, they find themselves daunted by huge, complex projects. So in addition to applying tight focus to the problem, break it into smaller chunks you can handle more easily. Set milestones, buckle down, and get to work.

#7: Disorganization
Learn to use your email to its fullest by establishing a logical, simple organizational system, and process every piece of information you receive. Don’t let it pile up, and never hesitate about what to do with an item whether a piece of paper, an email, or voicemail.  And always make time for planning, including making time to review what you’re doing to ensure it’s working. As necessary, take steps to fix what doesn’t work, and be on the lookout for ways to improve efficiency.

#8. Scheduling
Do you have problems getting things done in the time you have? Common complaints include an inability to estimate how long tasks will take and deciding where on the calendar to place each task. The second case requires task prioritization, as well as a willingness to say no to new work.  You can’t accomplish anything important if your calendar is filled with unimportant meetings and events.  Target the high-significance tasks first and address them directly, so as not to waste time.

#9: Crises
You can’t do much when others create a crisis except react, which means you must remain flexible. Establish processes in advance to help you handle the unexpected.  Create guidelines for each type of emergency you can imagine. When a crisis arises, practice SLLR: Stop, Look, Listen, and Respond.

#10: Work/Life Balance
People want a personal life, so they can pursue their hobbies, rest and relax, exercise, go to school, or spend more time with their families. Again, the solution involves a strict adherence to self-discipline and prioritization, so you can make a big enough time in your schedule to enjoy life outside of work.

Focus on being efficient and productive at work, so you can achieve maximum results in minimum time.  Proper training and discipline can help you and your employees achieve greater results.

What Are You After?

What Are You After?

Everyone is after something different.  You have a different motivation and drive than competitors in your market.  What is it?

On the day you opened your business, what was your vision? Every successful company needs a vision guiding it, which will keep you and your company on track to achieve the goal you started out with.

Let’s say you have a powerful vision for where you want your success level and your company to go. How do you get there? It’s one thing to know what you’re after and another to know how to achieve it. To give you a framework for achieving whatever it is you’re after in your business, I’ve taken several of the most popular goals that I’ve heard from talking to business owners across the country and applied a few action steps that will help you get there.

Financial Independence

You didn’t start your business hoping that you’d be up all night worrying about payroll and sweating out the last few days of the month wondering how your bills would get paid. You started your company for financial independence. But worry and stress might be your reality. How do you get to the independent

stage? It sounds simple, but to get there you need a profitable business and a strong customer base—a lot of business owners aren’t willing to do what it takes to get there. It might mean laying off some of your employees or getting back in the truck yourself, but at the end of the day, you’re the one worrying about payroll and bills so do what’s right for you and your business.

Tip: A wealthy exit strategy is something you probably haven’t thought about, but it’s your

ticket to  financial security when the time comes to leave your business behind. Plan today

for your security tomorrow.

Freedom of Time

You probably wanted some freedom of time when you started your business, but often owners find themselves working night and day just to keep things afloat. The remedy for this is strong systems and dependable people. With Success Group International™, you have the right systems to put in place in your company; and with the SGI client support staff, you have knowledgeable individuals willing to help you find the right employees who are willing to use those systems. That equation means your business can run like clockwork whether you’re there or not.

Tip: Take stock of your team. If you don’t have the people in your organization that could

keep your company going in your absence, find them and train them before something

happens.

A Company of a Certain Size

Sometimes the goal you’re striving for might be a company that’s a certain size. Often, this is a goal built on pride more than anything, but if it’s your goal, there is one surefire way to achieve it—bring in calls. The worst choice that you can make is to bring on another truck without the calls to keep it running and that technician working. An underutilized truck and technician will simply eat up your profits. So, before you bring another truck into your company, make sure you’re turning away enough calls to keep it busy.

Tip: If this is your goal, you need to start booking more calls. Make sure your marketing is

ringing in the calls you need, but more importantly, make sure your call-takers are turning

those calls into service calls. Listen to your call-takers to gauge their abilities and ensure

they’re doing what’s best for your company every time the phone rings. They, too, should

be training every week, just like your technicians.

A Certain Income Level

Are you after a certain income level for yourself? Your goal for your business might be to provide a certain lifestyle for you and your family. If that’s the case, how do you do it? You need profits. A profitable business will allow you, as the owner, to have the lifestyle that you’re seeking. A profitable business isn’t necessarily the biggest one you can build. Profits are revenues minus expenses. So, you need to maximize revenues while decreasing expenses. Increasing revenues might mean raising your prices or getting in the truck yourself rather than hiring another technician. Decreasing expenses might mean limiting the number of employees you have in the office or improving your purchasing terms. Analyze your company to determine how you can maximize your profits, and you’ll be in good shape to earn whatever level of income you’re seeking.

Tip: Some owners assume that to make more personal income, they need to increase

the size of their company. The opposite may be true. You may have all the revenue you

need to be profitable, but your costs may be sucking it away. Are you making the most

out of your relationship with SGI? You may not be if you haven’t looked at how Buy-Max

can start saving you money immediately—using products that you already are using in

your company today!

Those are just a few of the goals business owners have on the day they go into business for themselves. No matter what drives you to build your business and serve your clients every day, you need a vision for what it will take to achieve it and a plan to get yourself there. So whatever you’re after, it’s time to get after it.