For home service business owners, planning and building processes around everything they manage is the key to their success.
Without planning and processes, they waste time, don’t properly allocate resources, have the wrong mindset, and don’t surround themselves with the people who can help them eliminate roadblocks.
And for the business owners who attended CEO Warrior’s Business Growth Intensive in May, their education began with a simple step: to learn the importance of following a process. It’s through this activity that they kickstart the development they need to scale and grow their business.
The Nine Pillars
One of the first things business owners learn as they begin their coaching relationship with CEO Warrior is how to transform their business and lives to further their success.
This starts with an examination of the nine pillars that allow them to change what needs to be changed, know when that change is complete and discover how to measure progress. These pillars are:
- Mindset. Leaders are coached to understand how the right mindset will lead to the greatest success, and how this mindset can be developed and fostered.
- Skill set. Owners learn what skills are needed for each position in their organization, and how they can ensure they have the right people in place.
- Action set. Leadership is trained to recognize whether the people they have in key positions are consistently taking the actions needed to be effective, and how to provide these people with the tools they need to accomplish this.
- Clarity. Leaders need to clearly convey their vision for the business, its mission, and its purpose so that employees understand why these business owners take the direction and make the goals they do. This is integral to the big picture.
- Alignment. Leadership can compel action and use punishment to drive behavior, but this is only a short-term answer if the employee hasn’t bought into the vision. Make sure employees’ personal goals align with the business’s interest and the company will be successful.
- Accountability. Business owners should create an accountability system so employees will know when they’re on the right track. This helps with their internal motivation but doesn’t result in their feeling that their efforts are being micromanaged.
- Training. Employees should receive the right training at the right time. Training not only teaches employees the skills they need, but it also assures them that the leadership values them enough to provide this training.
- Coaching. In addition to training, providing motivation and focus helps employees get into the best mental space necessary for achievements. This drives company success.
- Managing. Management isn’t always about directing employees. It should also encompass how a business owner stays on top of the numbers, provides communication, and helps others access resources.
It’s through the development of these pillars that home service business owners begin to cultivate the specific 90-day blueprint that will allow them to achieve the success they want.
Building Marketing Strategies
It takes more than a simple spreadsheet to build the strategies owners need to be successful in their home service businesses. Leaders need to look at how they can build a marketing strategy that will help their companies grow.
To create a successful plan, owners need to understand the environmental factors that either stop or spur sales. This can include external issues, like the economy or the buying cycle. These issues should be included in any marketing plan.
Leaders also need to figure out what sets their businesses apart from their competition: Does your organization have specialty certifications that can drive sales during the shoulder months? What is your company’s culture? Do you understand who your perfect customers are?
And, while you need to understand digital and direct marketing and branding concepts, you should also understand how to build an experience for your customers that they will enjoy.
That also means that you have to take your marketing plan one step further and develop an avatar customer. It may be an anathema in business to “fire” clients, but if you are wasting your marketing resources on the wrong customers, you won’t prosper.
If sales are flat, chances are you haven’t built a process that allows your team to talk to the right people, present yourself as the authority in the market, and provide the community with what it needs.
Process Breaks Down Roadblocks
There are so many roadblocks business owners face, it’s honestly a wonder that any business succeeds. But there are also processes business owners must implement to ensure they can bust down these roadblocks once they encounter them.
A business owner must consider:
- Time: What you’re ultimately selling in the home service business is your time, so you need to think about how you allocate your time.
- Self: You have to be willing to take a look at yourself and your mindset and be willing to change.
- Resources: You have to look at the resources you need to be successful. This could be money, software, the market, trucks, or training.
- Relationships: This is the “heavy lift.” You should look at your family, community, and employees and process how they can help you achieve success.
These are all massive investments an owner makes in their lives and their businesses. And in order to make sure these are all working together to move you in the right direction, you have to develop a process to make sure you control your time, hire the right people to offset your deficits, allocate the right resources and build the right relationships.
Plan, Plan, and Plan Some More
Even if you have the right processes in place, you have to set daily goals for yourself as a business owner so that you’are allowed to follow these processes diligently.
Keep a journal by your bed and, every night before you drift off to sleep, write down the three to five things you need to do the next day to make sure you can stay the course and follow your processes.
How many times do you forget to write down your goals on Sunday night and then, by mid-morning on Monday, you’ve been pulled in several directions to quell employees’ issues, answer a customer complaint, or calm down a vendor issue? By learning how to delegate responsibilities, you can avoid these distractions so that you are allowed, as a business owner, to follow your plans to complete your processes.
If you have an HVAC company and plan to open a plumbing division, you wouldn’t wait until the day you want to open to buy the equipment, hire certified talent, and launch an ad campaign. You’d plan the processes you’d need to follow in order to start that plumbing division off right.
The same is true in planning your processes to win your daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly goals.
By implementing a plan to keep your company on task with defined processes, you find opportunity, reduce cost, reward talent, and have all these processes working toward completing your long-term goals.
