If you’re like most contractors you probably spend the majority of your day putting out the fires that your company set yesterday and the first you put out today are bound to pop up again tomorrow. And here’s the bad news…this pattern is going to continue until you change the way you spend your week.
You need to be spending a part of each week working on your Top Five #1 priorities. A project makes your Top Five #1 list if it either solves your biggest challenge or problem or it provides you the greatest opportunity to grow and be profitable.
Do you know what should be vying for your Top Five #1 list? I bet these 10 will be vying for honorable mention on your list:
- There’s no documented procedure and policy on what takes place 80% of the time at your company in the office and in the field
- There aren’t enough calls, from the right people and when you need them because there is no document Marketing Program in place
- You don’t know how to maximize the opportunities you get from the way you answer your phones to how your field people do their calls
- There are way too many callbacks which anger customers and cost you money
- You don’t have an organization chart so things end up either being everybody’s job or nobody’s job. Both are bad! Plus, it’s not clear to those who work for you who their real boss is both when it comes to discipline and when they need help
- You don’t have a salary level template so employees know how they can earn more money based on objective things. Instead, they come knocking on your door at the end of the day to ask for a raise
- You don’t have a way to fix the holes in your existing people, find the holes faster of the new experienced people you hire or how to build your own people the right way from scratch because you don’t have a training system in place including learning how to train staff
- You don’t have a sales system to teach your people so they wing it and skip steps if they sell at all
- You don’t have the reward systems in place that are objective and posted for your field staff so they don’t know what the incentive is to go above and beyond…or even what they must do to keep their jobs.
- You don’t do real budgeting so you operate your company with financial blinders on just hoping that a profit will miraculously materialize
Build a big list of your own with all the projects you and your company need to work on to get your and your staff working on the “Right Things at the Right Time” and then boil it down to your Top Five #1 and work on it each week and watch how fast your company gets better.