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.