The best intentions of a successful year in business can come undone for a number of different reasons.
Now that you have settled back into the swing of things after the holiday break, you should be focusing on what you intend to achieve for 2018. This year, ensure you are aware of the five key things that get in the way of business owners achieving their goals.
Clarity is the pre-requisite to mastery. Vague goals and outcomes produce vague results. For example, you may have a goal to increase your turnover, number of jobs, gross profit, net profit, type of work that you wish to do, etc. The fault is in the word ‘more’. What exactly does ‘more’ mean? Is it one dollar more? Is it one percent more? Is it one more job? When you apply specifics it becomes real. An example of a clear, specific goal is “I would like to ensure a consistent gross profit per job of 65% throughout the year”. You then have a measurement to which you can relate, rather than just the intention of increased or more gross profit.
The word NO is one of the hardest words for many tradespeople to say. It appears too hard to say NO to the wrong work, NO to the wrong employees, NO to doing work with little margins. Yet if you continue to say YES you become all things to everyone and nothing to no one. This year, toughen your NO muscle and say NO to more and YES to less; YES to less, but with better quality.
In business, people don’t fail, systems do. One of the requirements of a successful business that produces consistent and sustainable results for the owner, is the quality of the back-end procedures that are written. Ensure that your top 10 to 20 key processes are documented from start to finish, and that you refine them and train your team in them, so that the same outcome is delivered consistently, regardless of the small changes that takes place on site.
Procedures and processes are important, but mean nothing without the right people. Hiring smart and having the right people doing the right things in the right way, is essential to your success this year. If you hire the wrong people who do the wrong thing in the wrong way, then you are headed for a disaster. Hire slowly, be clear on the attributes you want in your team players (more importantly value attitude and ethics over skills) and ensure that you get the wrong people off the team as quickly as you can.
We live today, in a sea of distractions. From the moment that you wake in the morning, until the time you go to bed, on any given business day your conscious and subconscious mind will have been bombarded with up to 10,000 messages. Beeps, alerts, rings, pings, emails, SMS, notifications and the list goes on. Many could be important; however I am going to suggest that at least 80% of them are irrelevant to you accomplishing your key goals for the year. Once you are distracted and your focus is lost, it takes energy and time to reapply yourself. As a suggestion, unsubscribe from all notifications, social media, unnecessary email, in fact anything that’s going to take your focus away from what matters the most this year.
Achieving success in business is actually quite boring. It’s the repetition of simple structures over and over. Minimise distractions, be clear on the outcome and you will be in a much better position at the end of this year than the majority of the business owners around you.
Written by Jon Mailer
Founder and CEO – PROTRADE United
For more information on how to achieve your business goals, contact the team at PROTRADE United on 1300 767 774.
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