Do you know the 3 biggest barriers that block you from increasing your net profits, productivity and employee morale?
If not, then read this immediately.
Barrier #1: Finding and Keeping Good Help
Finding and keeping good help these days can block you from growing your company and increasing your profits.
If you don’t get this handled, you will be staffing up with employees you don’t really want, put up with less than desirable performance and suffer the financial consequences of doing so.
I don’t want this for you.
A Personal Story:
One time I was working in a company and we desperately needed a marketing person. We ran ads, collected resumes and no one was hired. When I asked what was going on, I was told no one good was applying.
So, we waited and waited.
Two weeks went by and still it seemed no good candidates.
So, I asked for the stack of resumes and called every single one. The result was, we found an excellent person who was able to hit the ground running.
What I learned was sometimes, there are really good people hiding behind an okay looking resume and you would never know that until you get them on the phone and meet them.
If you’re willing to do a little extra work, you can find and hire great people who will help explode the growth of your company.
Here’s the Real Problem
Many business owners believe you cannot find the right people because of their area, geography or economics and as a result, they don’t even look, or they look, but, they already know how its going to turn out…..sure enough, they’re right every time.
Maybe you can relate to this?
By buying into this type of thinking, you’re defeated before even starting.
I hear owners and managers all over the U.S. complaining about how they can’t find good help these days.
What I’ve learned is there isn’t any more area more difficult than any other part of the U.S.
The truth is finding good help can be challenging but it’s not impossible.
Here’s How You Get Around This:
The key to is having an effective hiring process.
An effective hiring process starts with really good ad copy, follows with solid screening and interviewing practices and ends with hiring procedures that will simultaneously begin to build your management culture of highly accountable people.
This way you have a team of people who will do the job and care about the project and your customers as much as you do.
Barrier #2: Not Keeping a Steady Flow of Work Coming In
Sales is the life blood of your business.
It’s extremely important for your business to have marketing outreach practices to consistently provide a steady flow of leads for sales.
What typically happens for most businesses, is they become dependent on the weather or TPA’s and they wait for the phone to ring. They don’t have an effective outreach program in place or if they do, it’s not managed very well.
Maybe you’ve made this mistake before?
Maybe you don’t understand how to set up an effective outreach program and/or you don’t know what to expect from your marketing efforts?
A Personal Story:
One time I was asking a group of estimators to start marketing in a very successful business that historically had never done any marketing, at least not in their ten years of operations anyway. At first, they were good with this, then came the day they went 180 degrees the other way.
All of a sudden, they experienced tons of resistance from their team and reality started to sink in. Two hours later, we discovered what we intended for marketing and what the employees thought marketing meant were two completely different things.
Once I helped the business owner and their employees get on the same page, not only was everyone happy, but the discussion solidified the team around marketing practices and initiatives that no one had ever thought of before. As a result, their productivity and sales went up dramatically.
Here’s the Real Problem:
One of the biggest problems I see contractors make is having too many employees thinking its someone else’s job to go find work.
This misunderstanding occurs because when you first hire someone, it was not made clear that they would be accountable for marketing and sales. It probably wasn’t even mentioned at all from the beginning.
So now this leaves you asking for them to market for you and you may be experiencing lots of resistance to this. Maybe your employee is saying, “You didn’t hire me for that!”
Here’s How to Get Around This:
You must learn to inspire an attitude in your company of “Everyone Sells, and everyone Markets Here, Everyone.”
The truth is your customers just want to speak with someone who has expertise on getting the jobs done.
Once you learn to find and keep good help, you’ll have the kind of expertise your customers really want. So then, all your employees need to do to effectively market is to be their shinning self and ask your customer or prospect if there is anything they need help with.
Your employees need to be positive and mentally expect the prospect or customer to give you work immediately. It also helps if all your employees have some training in a sales process, but it’s not completely necessary.
Barrier #3: Maintaining a High Profit Margin on Each Job
There can be so many variables going into the making of your gross profit performance when it comes to managing all of them.
The reality is you have some estimators who write and sell, others who only produce, and then some who write and run.
Without getting into a big argument here about which is the best of these, let’s ask this question…How can you support an estimator or project manager to keep all of their plates spinning?
The real answer is, however you choose to design it. I know it can be challenging and comes with a lot of risk of exposure and money at stake.
A Personal Story:
I just got off the phone with a company who had been using personality profile tests for the last few years and were not seeing great success from it. Their project managers were under performing for the normally high standards of the company. So they tried something different.
They hired a project manager who scored high on the test as a strong sales personality. Instantly, his gross profits starting coming in 20 points higher than anyone else’s on his team.
Here’s the Real Problem
When it comes to maintaining a high profit margin, getting two contractors to agree about what works or how it’s done is hard, if not impossible.
The reality is what works for one contractor maybe not work for you because of the differences in volume, type of work or other possible factors.
Here’s How to Get Around This:
Of course, there are things you can learn from the study of how other companies tackle problems like this. But ultimately, in order for you to maintain consistent high gross profit margins, you must know what your costs are and you must be rigorously aware of your financials.
It’s also important for you to be watching your overall gross profit margins and the person running your work needs to be completely aware of the costs on every single job and how it impacts their gross profits every single day.
The best examples I see of this are project managers who keep a running sheet of the total value of the job, the costs, materials and running gross profits on a daily basis. This kind of awareness allows them to drive their scores where they want them to go. What you measure and track, grows.
This is a way of being responsible before and during the job, rather than waiting to see how it all turns out at the end.
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
