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Busting Through the Ceiling This Year

Every business goes through some ups, downs, and growing pains along the way, but even a successful business will come against a mighty force at some point in its history. This powerful force has slowed the progress of ambitious businesses and crushed many under its weight. It’s called the ceiling.

It’s the end of another calendar year. You’re reviewing your year-end revenue and profit margin and for the third straight year, you haven’t generated anymore sales or additional profit. You’ve hit the dreaded ceiling.

Many business owners, especially contractors who are already stretched thin, stagnate at this point. They lose their momentum, and slowly their company begins to backslide. However, with the right mixture of determination and planning, you can break through the ceiling and attain a higher level of success.

How do you bust through this ceiling and take the business to the next level? It’s time to take the 10 necessary steps to do so:

1. Change your thinking.
Go into your bedroom or bathroom and look at yourself in a mirror. Look into your eyes and do some soul-searching. Ask yourself: Are you willing to change the way you conduct business—even though you may be comfortable in your ways—for the good of your business and your family? If so, be resolute in taking the necessary steps to improve.

2. Outline your goals for the next year.
Decide what is most important for your company to improve in the next year. Do you want to increase revenues by 15 percent? Do you want to improve your profit margin by 5 percent? Would you like to increase your club memberships by 1,000? Write down three or four large goals that you would like to accomplish next year and what your next step(s) will be to obtain them.

3. Present your goals to your team.
It’s time that you call a meeting and share your concerns. Your company has hit a ceiling, and you know that everyone—including yourself—is capable of busting through it with the right effort. Using an erasable board or an easel with paper, write down your goals. Then ask your team to help you decide how these goals can be reached.

The remainder of your meeting will be a brainstorming session. Write down every single suggestion—there are no bad ideas. Ask your team to think about how they could be more efficient in the field, on the phone, or in the office. Encourage them to be vocal about any idea(s) they might have. By participating in this process, whether your employees know it or not, they are gaining ownership of these goals—and the company.

4. Create motivation.
At the end of your brainstorming session, sit down with any managers or key employees and evaluate every recommendation. Write down four or five realistic actions that can be done to accomplish each goal. (Please note: you will want action items for all segments of your team—call-takers, dispatchers, technicians, salespeople, etc.)

Next, you will need to generate a compensation plan that will be awarded for attaining every goal. It could be a new profit-sharing plan, bonuses, or additional time off. Maybe you’ll promise to take your entire team on a trip. Once you have a set compensation in mind, present it to your team. Listen to their feedback. Be willing to make some tweaks. Remember, the goal is to get them excited about change!

5. Monitor progress.
If you don’t have them already, position Scoreboards in visible areas of your office. Update them regularly with everyone’s individual progress. Have a companywide Scoreboard showing the team working toward larger yearlong goals. Your team must know how they’re fairing to continue to stay motivated.

6. Help them succeed.
Evaluate invoices to determine why certain techs may struggle or listen to CCRs with low-booking percentages. Then train on those issues. Have regular video-recorded role-play sessions, and have your team review themselves. Make it a point to do weekly ride-alongs, too. Get in the field and see how you can help your team improve. Seek new motivational videos and play them during trainings. Be willing to reimburse team members that invest money in motivational CDs or DVDs for themselves.

7. Congratulate along the way.
Send congratulatory texts out across the company when someone has a big-ticket invoice or sale. Have monthly team meetings—bring in food and present companywide progress. Congratulate individuals hitting their specific goals. For those who surpass their goals, award them with something unexpected. You want to keep people focused and motivated throughout the year. Be positive in everything you do!

8. Always be assessing your team.
If you stay true to the steps, after several months you will begin to see who is onboard with your goals and who isn’t. Ask yourself: is this person creating negativity in your company and holding others back? Can you provide additional training or one-on-one support to motivate this person? If your instincts tell you that this person is a bad influence, it’s time to start seeking a replacement—once one is found, make the change.

9. Stay true to your word.
By the end of next year—if you’ve been working with your team along the way and they’ve offered the same effort—you will reach many of your goals, if not all of them, and will have broken through the ceiling. Have a year-end party celebrating individual and companywide successes. Hand out compensation or awards that you promised in your team meeting. It’s important that you thank your team for their hard work and compensate them as you said you would.

10. Don’t settle.
After your first year, don’t allow yourself to slide back into old habits. Keep that ceiling-busting attitude. Create new goals, encourage your team to think of new ways to reach them, and outline a new compensation plan.

Now Hiring… PLEASE!

We all need good people on our team.  Even if we are fully staffed, a successful business is always seeking out top talent.  SGI^TM teaches that managers should spend one-third of their time managing, one-third of their time training, and one-third of their time recruiting.  Larry Bossidy once said, “I am convinced that nothing we do is more important than hiring and developing people. At the end of the day, you bet on people, not on strategies.”

Hiring today is not like it used to be… The tide has turned. Employers can no longer tell employees, “Like it or leave it.”  In today’s marketplace, attracting and retaining good employees is a top priority in both large and small businesses.

With the cost of replacing employees at 70 percent to 200 percent of their annual salaries—not including the effects on the business of lost knowledge, declining morale and productivity, and customer dissatisfaction—it is no surprise that four out of five respondents rated employee retention as a serious or very serious issue in a survey conducted by the American Management Association (1997).

“You need to have a hiring process,” said Steve Jobs in The Apple Experience: Secrets to Building Insanely Great Customer Loyalty.

Let’s examine a five-step process:

Step One: Recruitment Ads

Recruitment is all about finding the right people—but the old rules no longer apply.  Today, recruitment includes a serious referral program in your business, radio ads, job fairs and open houses, Internet-recruiting sites, church newsletters, and community organizations. Of course the Internet includes CareerBuilder® and Monster.com®.  But many local newspapers also have an online edition, which normally includes a job-search function.

Another option may be recruitment from local career centers at schools and colleges in your state.  Go to www.rwm.org for a complete listing, by state, of vocational-school locations, phone numbers, and contact information.

Oh, you can always put an ad in the newspaper, too, I suppose.

Step Two: Initial Call

Have you called your office lately and pretended to be a job-seeker?  What did they say?  Was it something like, “Yes, you can come by the office anytime and complete an application…”

In today’s market, few, if any, potential employees will “drop by the office” to “complete an application.”  Today’s workforce wants instant gratification. If you miss the opportunity to answer their questions now, they will hang up and go to the next call.

Make sure your entire team knows you are recruiting and let them see the ad you place. Have employment applications ready. Make sure you or an on-duty manager is able to speak with every inquirer and is able to clear your/their calendar to meet with the candidate.

Step Three: First Interview

The goal of the first interview is 1) sell the company and the job, 2) let the applicant know what your standards are including drug screens and background checks, 3) be real and don’t sugarcoat things, 4) let the applicant ask questions, and 5) let the applicant know the next steps.

You must first sell the opportunity to the potential employee.  This can be accomplished by either a printed presentation in a three-ring binder or a PowerPoint® presentation.

The presentation should include: Your company story (who you are), product story (what you do), service story (how you do it), guarantee story (what makes you different), market potential (room for growth), and how you develop leads (take your company to market).

Step Four: Checks

It is highly recommended that you contact past employers.  You may only get verification of length of employment, or you may be surprised by what you may hear.  Remember, always ask, “Would you hire _____ again?”

Before proceeding too far in the selection process, be sure to conduct a driving-record check, a drug test, and a national criminal-background check.  Some locations include a personality profile, especially for full-time sales positions.

Step Five: Now What?

Once the decision has been made to bring on a new employee, the work has just begun.  After all, research has shown that most new hires decide if they are staying or leaving the company within the first five days of employment!

Have you and your team put together a plan.  Train, train, and then train.  Don’t just get them—keep them!

Is Your Business Plug-and-Play?

There are tons of companies and products that are making a name for themselves by making things easier for consumers. Many of the hottest products today are simply plug-and-play. That means they take all of the guesswork out of the product for consumers. To use an item, the consumer need only plug it in and start playing.

It’s user-friendly. How user-friendly are you? Is your company plug-and-play? Many service companies make it so difficult for homeowners to use them that I wonder if they understand the meaning of service.

So, with the world looking for more convenient and easier to use devices, how do you stack up? How do you make your company plug-and-play?

1. Explain everything.
How much do your technicians really explain when they go to a client’s home for a service call? When your technician enters a client’s home, there is a good chance that the homeowner knows nothing about what is wrong with their home and most likely they’re worried. They’re worried about the frustration and hassle of a major problem.  They’re worried about the cost of a huge repair coming at the wrong time. Your goal as a user-friendly service company should be to remove some of that fear and explain everything that is going on in their home. Don’t just tell your client what happened in technical terms. Explain it to them in layman’s terms so they understand what caused the problem and how you’re going to fix it for them. Explain how much your service costs, what that cost entails, and what guarantees and warranties back up your work. Don’t leave your client confused. Explain everything.

2. Present options.
One of the ways to make a service call more user-friendly is to put the client in control of the outcome. That means offering them options. No one likes to be told what to do, and if you simply do the work and present your client with the bill at the end, you’re doing just that. Plus, you might be missing out on additional opportunities to serve the client. Talk with your client about the options that they have in their home and what they would like to see. That way you’re giving them the power to choose the outcome, and they’ll feel better about your service.

3. Be easy to find.
You might have 10 different phone numbers coming into your business, but when you put a number on your trucks and in your Yellow Page ads, why not just put one? That way, homeowners only have to concentrate on one number. Plus, if your existing clients need to go to the phone book to look up your number, you’re falling down on the
job. Make it easy on them. They should have stickers throughout their home, whether it is on their electrical box, water heater, HVAC system, or gutters! You want your
number everywhere possible. That way, if something does breakdown, your number is the first thing they see. If your clients need to go to the Yellow Pages to find you,
you’re not making it easy enough.

4. Be accessible.
When your client calls, you should be there, or at least someone should. If you’re going to operate a truly user-friendly company, you need to answer your phones live 24 hours a day and seven days a week. Basically, when your clients need you, you should be there. That goes for running service calls, too. Naturally, you don’t need to have someone at your office 24 hours a day, but when you leave, the phone shouldn’t dead-end at voicemail. Your phones should be forwarded to the on-call person that night. Be accessible when your clients need you.

5. Guarantee satisfaction.
If a customer complains about your service, you’re going to give them their money back, right? If you’re going to do that anyway, why not let them know that their satisfaction is guaranteed? That will take some of the fear and worry out of using your company for the homeowner. Guaranteed satisfaction does get results. These five quick items to focus on will make your company more user-friendly. The more plug-and-play you can make your company, the better your service experience will be. Eliminate the fear, the worry, and the confusion most homeowners feel when calling a home-services company and you’ll have a client for life.

Envision Your Business

Envisioning your business is all about understanding why you decided to own your own business and mapping out how you plan to achieve the business you’ve always dreamed of.  A successful business owner understands the key fundamentals of what their business is today as well as understands how to further achieve in the future. Take a look at the direction your business is taking.  Is it what you had planned? Are you on track and budget? Do you know what your next steps are?

Being proactive means always planning your next move and striving to meet the goals and objectives you set. Take a look at your company’s income statement, balance sheet, and most recent year-end report within the last fiscal year.  Are you on target or not?  Are you monitoring the effectiveness of your marketing efforts?

A new year is right around the corner—now is a good time to ask yourself what your company’s focus is.  Is it to provide fast, friendly, reliable service and become the number-one source for service and repair in your community?  Do you wish to surpass the competition in sales and service and become an industry leader?  Knowing what you want is great—but how are you going to do it?

Remember that as the owner you are in control of your company’s success! Goals and objectives are important, but be sure not to create too many, which makes them difficult to meet, and will leave you feeling discouraged and overwhelmed. Begin defining what success is within your company. Develop an overall picture of your projected progress and growth by asking yourself this question: What is most important to me, the owner?

1. Setting targets for increased sales?
2. Increasing your customer base?
3. Providing more services to your customers?
4. Becoming a household name within one, three, or five years?
5. Establishing a set amount of hours you want to dedicate to your business daily?

Remember that it is never too late to put goals and objectives into place—you should define both short- and long-term goals. Business goals should be measurable so try using numbers, dates, and percentages so that you can establish timelines for your achievements. Think of this exercise as an important part of your “road map” to success and remember that our goal at SGI^TM is to help you achieve greatness along the way!

Hit Your Target Through Perfecting Your Aim

When it comes to managing a company and growing its success, setting sights on improvement and taking aim on things that detract from your company’s success is critical.  Equally critical is nurturing the successful things happening in your business.  But first you need to find the cracks in the floor and retrieve the gold dust hidden underneath. Below are action steps to get you started:

Laser-in on your daily business routines.              

In order to improve a business process, you should first look at the daily tasks your company performs.  Things like answering the phone, running repair calls, and paying vendors may seem routine, but are they being done properly and efficiently?  Are your employees giving your customers the greatest level of service?  Do they know how? Is your accounts-payable person behind on paying invoices causing your company unnecessary late fees?

You will need to assess each job function in your company to figure out which one to focus on improving first.  Example: Technicians have numerous price objections because they are not providing above-and-beyond customer service.  What do you need to do to get customer-satisfaction levels up so that you receive fewer complaints and create more repeat and referral business?

Create the change.

Once you have identified your business processes for improvement, it is time to provide yourself and your employees with the change solution.  If you are a member of Success Group International®, you have an excellent advantage over thousands of contractors.  You have client success managers to help with your high-level business-improvement needs.  You have Success Academy® at your fingertips to assist you with frontline-employee and management training.  All you have to do is reach out to the resources you have, explain your need, and you will be pointed in the right direction to get started on changing your business for the better.  The key to creating the change is to give your employees the training they need—and for you to reach out to your SGI™ client success manager to get their help.

Implement the change.

Be sure to communicate the reason for change with your employees. It is okay to let your employees know what has been most challenging for the business. Ask them for their input.  Inform them how you plan to correct the challenge.  Make sure you give a good description of why it is important to them, the customer, and the company. Let them know how they will play a key role in creating the success of the business.

Be sure to measure the accuracy and consistency of the established change processes. Attending initial training with your employees shows them that you are equally committed to the change necessary to grow the business.

Create a process.

Written processes on how to perform a job within your company leaves little room for error.  Providing training and developing process-driven operating systems will free up more of your time. Make written processes easy to follow and understand—then tasks may be completed with little to no mistakes. Always give new employees a written copy of processes; this way they know how they are expected to perform from day one.

Test the change.

So many times things are implemented and never perfected.  You should sit with call-takers, accounting team members, ride-along with technicians, and examine the most challenging and/or time-consuming parts of doing their job.  After you have spent time with the employees performing the task, involve them by brainstorming ways to improve the process.  Automating manual processes and investing in contractor-specific technology to give greater customer service and decrease nonproductive time can benefit the company.

Never stop improving the change.

As time passes, encourage your employees to improve the company’s existing systems and procedures. When your employees operate with laser focus, customer service improves, overhead expenses decrease, customer satisfaction increases, your revenue and profits grow, and your business will become a beacon in the communities you service.

Start perfecting your aim now and hit your targets for the year!