It’s one thing to drive your business to profitable levels of success. It’s quite another thing to keep it going year after year.
After working with Contractors for over 20 years, I’ve learned there are three challenges that cause most business owners to lose power in their day-to-day operations.
When you lose power in your operations, it costs you money.
The fact of the matter is every business is operated by people and these people have attitudes, emotions and sometimes conflicting points of view.
Often times, this can seriously get in the way of your employees productivity.
It doesn’t have to though.
So, here are the three challenges to overcome so you can sustain your profits for years to come.
Challenge #1: Gossip
Gossip is the number one killer of productivity in your work place.
People waste more time and energy on who said what to who or who did or didn’t do the right thing at the right time. This kind of gossip kills your employees’ productivity and your business’s ability to make money. Unneeded, unnecessary drama is an enormous waste of time and money!
I really don’t want your company to experience this so here’s how to eliminate gossip.
Straight talk.
Straight talk means to take whatever issue someone is experiencing to the person they have an issue with. It is a commitment to no drama and instead a focus on pure productivity.
This requires professionals to act like the adult professionals they are.
It’s about being honest, and nothing gets people back to work faster than saying the truth.
Chances are whatever was a “problem” was all just a misunderstanding and a breakdown in communication somewhere along the line.
Or you may find out one person appreciates the honest feedback because they had no idea or any intention towards hurting another person or you may uncover an undisclosed problem that can now be addressed directly.
When one of your employees has a problem with someone make sure they take it right to the person they have an issue with.
They do not need to get other parties involved because this usually creates gossip and wastes a lot of time and mental bandwidth.
Here’s what Straight Talk accomplishes:
- Expedites communication
- Save enormous amounts of time
- Increases productivity
- Teaches people who may be afraid of being confrontational how to resolve problems without your help
- Gives the listener valuable feedback
- Help your employees to maintain successful working partnerships
One of the significant indicators of health I see in successful companies is people being at work, focused, on task.
Challenge #2: Sales
Another challenge that is critically important to your business’s profits is sales.
A problem I see many businesses make is not having all employees take ownership for the sales process.
This may look like your team waiting around for the phone to ring or depending on Third Party Programs to generate more sales opportunities, or the weather.
The real problem here starts by allowing your employees to believe selling belongs to someone else.
This is a dangerous thing for any company.
When you hear your employees say any version of something like, “You’re responsible for selling and I’m not,” this is a really big problem because it’s indicative of a laziness and lack of accountability in your business’s culture.
You need to help your employees understand everyone sells.
Every employee you should take on the attitude and practice of selling. When this happens the financial health of your company increases significantly.
Here’s how to shift your employees to understand everyone sells:
Help them understand how they can exceed expectations of your customers with exceptional service.
Help them understand the importance of returning phone calls as fast as possible.
Put procedures in place so you can push work through your production pipelines as fast as possible and of course, do a great job in selling.
The bottom line of this shift is getting all your employees on board to do whatever they can each day to reach out and invite new customers into a working relationship with you and take care of existing customers by working hard to exceed their expectations.
If you don’t have a sales process in place, I highly recommend Sandler.
Have all your staff fully trained on it so they can demonstrate each step of the sales process anywhere, anytime and to anyone.
This one practice alone can be enough to enormously impact the success and profits of your business.
Challenge #3: Personal Ownership
The last place where you may be losing power in your day-to-day operations is your employees lacking personal ownership.
If your staff is just showing up to do their part, do what they are told, or just want to put in their time and have an attitude and unwillingness to look at anything outside of their job description, your likely experiencing a drag and loss in productivity.
This type of culture will cost you lots of money over the years.
If you’re the type of business owner who feels this type of business culture isn’t that big of a deal and thinks this is how all employees think, I’m willing to bet you don’t realize how good you can actually have it.
I want you to have the best. You deserve it, so let’s go to work on this…
The reality of business today is you not only need people who are highly productive, who think on their feet, but you need leaders.
You need leaders who inspire others to lead, and you need these type of leaders at all levels in your business.
I have seen Mitigation service technicians making marketing calls to insurance agents or out selling fire jobs and board ups.
I have seen customer service coordinators driving sales and closed work for the whole production team through their efforts of tracking and cheering the team!
I have even seen Estimators and Project Managers drive educational and cross training efforts with all their sub-contractors and for the whole team.
This is the kind of ownership and leadership I want for you!
Your employees should be willing to stick their necks out and take some risks, they should be willing to do whatever it takes to support a co-worker or whatever they need to do to go the extra mile.
Like Art Williams says in one of his best online videos, “Just do it!”
This is the attitude you need in your entire business culture, from top to bottom. Whatever it takes to be successful and a little bit more.
Your Next Steps
My mission is to demonstrate that a business embracing practices of kindness, respect and empowerment will be very, very successful and profitable.
Ready for a new level of success in your business?
Working with hundreds of companies in over 8,000 meetings for 25 years has shown me if you take the right actions, you will get the best results. The GNA program helps you break free from the exhausting effort to run your business. We offer a step-by-step program helping you to thrive and build the business you always wanted.
Explore how you can achieve a new level of success in your company, schedule time with me today: https://calendly.com/greg-479/free-30-min-discovery
