Building Your Business: One Step at a Time

How do you eat an elephant?

Big challenges can often be broken down into a world of smaller pieces: The journey of a thousand steps begins with the first step. Rome wasn’t built in a day. In the case of eating an elephant, it’s all about taking it bite by bite until you’re done. The trick with the elephant is consistency: you have to keep at it, piece by piece. Improving your home improvement business isn’t so different.

Let’s sketch a typical business in action: market your business, get the lead, make the appointment, sell the job, install the work, collect the money, pay your people, and come back for regular service (as applicable). Each one of those steps can be done well or poorly, they can be done by you, the owner, or somebody that works for you – but they have to be done.

Now let’s simplify those steps into a list of business functions:

Marketing

Appointment Center

Sales

Production

Service

Accounting

Office

Each of these functions is an area that you can work on to make your business grow. Some of them might be limping along, others might be very healthy, but there’s always room for improvement.

What do you want out of each of those functions? Here are some aspirations to strive after:

Marketing: Ride Your Great Brand/Excel at Marketing

Appointment Center: 95% Lead to Appointment Ratio

Sales: Push Your ADL Up (ADL = Average Dollar per Lead)

Production: Install More and Better

Service: Make Service A Profit Center

Accounting: Financial Mastery

Office: Build (and Retain) a Great Team

Is it possible to achieve these aspirations? That depends on two things: 1) Reality and 2) You.

Reality says, “Yes, these things can be done and others have done them.”

What do you say?

If your answer is, “Yes. That’s what I want.” Then the next question is “How?” The first step is an honest assessment of each of the functions. Take it one piece at a time: Who’s in charge of marketing, etc? How well is each function being done? What’s the metric for success for each piece? What could be achieved with the right changes? What’s a reasonable/achievable year-end goal for each function? In doing this evaluation you’ll be able to start zeroing-in on where your business could improve.

We’re getting clarity on problems and starting to come up with solutions. For example: are you not getting enough leads? What might be some strategies to boost brand recognition and get your name out there? Or are you struggling to turn those leads into appointments? What could be done to bring that number up?

Next week we’re going to take closer look at that first function: Marketing.

See you then.