Business owners want their companies to deliver the results they want. Do you know what you want? I’ll bet at the top of your ‘want’ list is more money, more freedom, more time off, more wealth, and more fun! You want to build the best company in your marketplace that makes more net profit than your competitors, has excellent managers who run your company, loyal customers who give you most of their work at your price, allows you to build equity, generates passive income, and gives you several months off every year to enjoy your life.
But do your everyday actions, activities, and priorities deliver what you want? Probably not. Most continue to do the same destructive things which keep you from ever achieving your dreams and reaching your goals. You continue to hire the wrong people for the wrong reasons and don’t have a training program to allow them to perform at their best levels. You try to save as much money as possible by controlling every purchase, delivery, and installation instead of focusing and investing in marketing, sales, and building customer relationships. You continue to win business by offering the lowest prices instead of providing more value or services than the minimum required to keep your customers somewhat satisfied. You get projects and tasks completed with your constant supervision, micro-managing, and telling managers and employees what to do instead of utilizing written systems and guidelines for your people to follow. You are the business and won’t let go, delegate, or empower people to make decisions without your input or approval.
Is your company mediocre?
Are you really willing to do what it takes to get your business to work the way you want it to? Or are you stuck, afraid to make a move, unsure what to do, unwilling to try new things, not able to trust your people, and comfortable with mediocrity. Mediocrity is owning a company that makes little or no net profit, competes on price, doesn’t have a unique differentiating factor from their competition, and doesn’t deliver what the business owner wants. Are you satisfied with being mediocre, average, achieving less than your potential, and continuing to struggle to keep it aflloat?
OR, do you want to:
– Be the industry leader in your marketplace?
– Sell more than low price to win customers?
– Make lots more money than your competition?
– Have the best people run and manage your business?
– Be the owner instead of the overworked boss?
– Generate lots of passive income from your investments?
– Have plenty of free time to enjoy your family, friends, and fun?
Where are you headed?
Are you really ready to hit your goals, earn more, work less, and live the life you want? It would be crazy to board an airplane without a flight plan or destination. Or try to swim upstream in a rapid rushing river. Or drive a car blindfolded. But this is how most business owners run their companies. They don’t have a specific destination or road map to get where they want to go. They work as hard and as fast as they can trying to make headway against all odds. And they don’t know where they’re going. This causes frustration for the owner, managers, and employees who try to fly faster, make a lot of waves, and go around in circles.
You know what you need? You need something to shoot for. You need a goal. Here’s a goal you have been striving to reach for years: Keep doing more! When you keep doing more, you stay busy and never run out of things to do. That’s like being capsized in the middle of the ocean aboard a small rescue dinghy and the captain keeps yelling: ‘Paddle faster!’ Never mind where you’re going. Never mind if you’ll ever reach land. Just paddle faster until you run out of food, water, or energy. And then you’ll die worn out, tired, and broke.
Why do you need specific direction? In order to achieve the results you want, you must know where you are going and why.
“If you don’t have specific written targets and goals,
you’ll never have to admit you’re a failure!”
You can continue living the lie, staying busy, and offering excuses about your progress. You’ve heard all the excuses: ‘It’s the economy, bad employees, lousy customers, cheap competition, or some other problem out of your control.’ Or you can decide to stop making excuses and do something about your condition and future priorities and plans. In order to get your business to work, earn more, work less, and live the life you want, what will you have to do to improve your:
– Sales volume
– Profit margin
– Market Share
– Cash-flow
– Wealth
– Effectiveness
To achieve your targets and goals, you will have to make major changes how you do business and strive to be the best in your market. At FedEx, flawless service is the NORM, not the goal or the exception. Walmart expects NO mistakes from its suppliers! If their suppliers don’t make it easier for Walmart, they go elsewhere! To be the best, you’ll have to improve your company operations, systems, management, administration, employees, estimating, pricing, marketing, sales, and service. Take a hard look at how your company is doing at your sales, profit margin, market share, cash-flow, wealthe, and effectiveness. Do you, your managers, or employees specifically know? What numbers are they aiming at? Numbers tell you how well you’re doing. You will need a new set of measurable standards to see if you are improving, on track, and headed towards being the best in your class.
Measure what you want!
Without numbers to track, it’s like playing baseball in thick fog. You continue to play ball and try your best. But in the fog, you can’t see past first base, where the hits go, or read the scoreboard. This lack of information makes the game rather challenging, perplexing, and dull because nobody knows how they’re doing or who is winning or losing. Without knowing the score, what’s the point?
Measure what’s important to you. Paying your bills, invoicing customers, and keeping your checkbook balanced isn’t enough to get ahead or be the best at what you do. In everyday life, you measure your weight, blood pressure, miles per gallon, the Dow Jones average, who won the football game last Sunday, or the dollar amount on your paycheck. What measurement indicators will tell you if your business is on track, serving your customers, achieving your goals, building wealth, or enjoying your life? Here are some numbers to track and indicators which will tell you if you are building an excellent company:
– Annual taxable business income & profit
– Company Net worth & equity
– Personal net worth annual growth
– Annual income from investments
– Annual company profit margin growth
– Sales from new, loyal & repeat customers
– Profit from new, loyal & repeat customers
– Customer complaints & referrals
– Employee turn-over & training
– Personal time off & vacation days
Aim at what you want!
Start with what you want to accomplish. The number one stress business owners experience is from not knowing where they’re headed. What do you want and where are you headed? Next, how will you achieve your goals? If you depend on hard work to deliver what you want, you’re going to be disappointed every time. Then set up a measuring system to keep track of your progress towards your targets.
For example, if you want to increase your net profit margin, there are many things you can do. You can lower your overall cost of doing business, increase your sales, or charge a higher price for the services you offer. At first glance, most business owners focus on cutting costs. This is futile and won’t work over the long haul. With lower expenses as your solution, you won’t be able to hire better people, add more services for your customers, do the little things that make customers want to give you more work, or help you reach you ultimate goal of more time off or freedom.
The second choice is usually to increase your sales volume by proposing on and winning more business opportunities. Winning more work should increase your total gross profit, but will keep you working at an even faster pace to accomplish the additional projects you have to manage. This is like running on a treadmill faster and faster going nowhere. This won’t move you towards your goal of earning more, working less and living the life you want. But it will keep you busier – is busy what you want?
Charge higher prices!
The long term solution to achieving your ultimate goal to earn more and work less is to charge a higher price for your services and products. When you charge higher prices, you will also make higher gross profit margins. This will create more money to spend on an excellent empowered management team and full charge trained employees. It will allow you extra cash to invest on improving your operations, finances, accounting, marketing, sales, and customer service. In order to charge more, you must strive to become the leader in your market. Back to FedEx as an example. They are the market leader and get more for the same service as their competitors.
Your customers must be willing to pay your company more for products or services than your competitors. Therefore you must offer something different than your competition like more value for the same price, a unique different delivery method, or additional value-added services. Take a moment and describe 5 things you can offer customers which will allow your company to charge a higher price than your competitors:
- ____________________________
- ____________________________
- ____________________________
- ____________________________
- ____________________________
As an example, a commercial general building contractor can continue to bid projects to developers per plans and specifications and get awarded the contract if they are the lowest responsible bidder. Or they can negotiate the project at higher prices than their competitors if they offer additional valued or unique services. What can this general contractor offer or provide to encourage potential customers to award them contracts at a higher price?
– Total development management from concept through completion
– Design-build architecture & engineering
– Guarantee no plan omissions, conflicts or mistakes
– Assist in securing project financing
– Find equity investors for the developer
– Prepare overall project budget & investment pro-forma
– Obtain all City approvals and permits required
– Obtain all utility company approvals
– Complete interior design services for tenants
– Guarantee no change orders
– No mark-up on change orders
– Guarantee faster move-in & occupancy date
– Guarantee no punch-list or defects
– Full time superintendent with college engineering degree
– Project manager certified in construction management from the Construction Management Association
– Project accountant certified from the Construction Financial Management Association
– Monthly service for one year on all building components
– Site and landscape maintenance for one year
I know what you’re thinking. ‘We don’t get paid for all of those extra services so how can we offer them?’ Continue to do buiness the same way, offer exactly the same as your competitors, and continue to struggle to make any real net profit margin. Is the Ritz Carlton cutting back on services or doing whatever it takes to give the customer more than they expect?
What can you do to charge more?
To offer additional value-added or different services than your competitors takes more intensive customer or project involvement, strong company management, and a better trained staff. But it will set your company apart from your competitors. What do you have to do to be different?
– What five things are most important to our clients?
– How are we doing on each?
– What is the evidence of our performance?
– Do any competitors do it better than us?
– What can we learn from them?
– How can we do things better?
– How can we set our company apart?
Are willing to do what it takes to offer more in-depth value-added services which will get your customers to pay more for you’re your company than your competitors?
Develop loyal customers who will pay more!
Another way to differentiate your company is to have incredible loyal customers who deeply trust you and your company. And because of this trust, they know you’ll do a better job than any other competitor in the marketplace. Quality customer relationships will cause customers to be loyal and only want to do business with your company. This type of relationship takes time to cultivate and a commitment to spend lots of time with valuable customers. Providing good work will not set your company apart from your competitors as they also try to do a good job. Developing and building trust takes a concentrated systemized effort and program. It requires a written plan and includes dedicating regular time to take customers to lunch, attending sporting events, fishing or golfing, weekend trips, and sending thank-you notes and gifts on a regular basis. To carve out the time to build loyal customer relationships requires you to free up 33% of your time. To do this you’ll have to improve your company, management team, systems, operations, and service. Are you willing to do what it takes to build customer realationships in order to increase your profit margin and get what you want?
When your company works and delivers what you want, you feel great. Your company is running on all cylinders. Building your business and making money is easy. Customers want what you offer. Your company doesn’t rely on your constant input and direction to deliver a big net profit margin and sales. Your bank account is growing. Your investments are spitting out lots of monthly cash-flow. Your managers and employees are happy and humming. You walk faster and lighter on your feet. You are excited about going to work because you aren’t bothered with the little details that bog you down. You have pride in what you do and want to accomplish more. Your family is also happy as they get to spend more quality time with you. And your are living a significant life with extra time to enjoy and money to give back to others. Stop making excuses and settling for less than you can accomplish. Take this challenge to move beyond mediocrity. Do what you must do to earn more, work less, and live the life you want.
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Best-selling author and professional speaker George Hedley helps entrepreneurs and business owners build companies that work. He is the author of “Get Your Business To Work” and the “The Business Success Blueprint Series” available on his website at www.hardhatpresentations.com. His proven system to earn more, work less, build profits, lead people, and generate customers has helped thousands of companies in multiple industries.. To receive his free e-newsletter and Profit 101 report, attend a 2-day ‘Profit-Builder Circle’ boot camp, or hire George to speak at your next event, email: gh@hardhatpresentations.com or call 800-851-8553.
George Hedley HARDHAT Presentations
3300 Irvine Avenue #135
Newport Beach, CA 92660
Phone (949) 852-2005 Fax (949) 852-3002
Email: gh@hardhatpresentations.com website: www.hardhatpresentations.com
George Hedley owns a $75 million construction and development company and Hardhat Presentations. He speaks to companies on building profitable businesses, leadership, and loyal customers. He holds 3-day in-depth “Profit-Builder Circles” open to construction company owners in an interactive roundtable format every 3 months. His “Profit-Builder System” includes proven tools to always make a profit, build equity, create wealth, win profitable jobs, motivate your people, and enjoy the benefits of owning a profitable company.
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