Here is a post by Janine Popick on the Inc.com website that I loved and thought I would reproduce it here. I hope she doesn’t mind. I like to watch Gordon Ramsey pull businesses apart, improve them and put them back together again. Through the magic of TV it can be done in 30 minutes,…
DetailsChances are you use, pretty much, the same materials as all your competitors and follow similar construction techniques to complete projects. How then can you stand out from your competitors, that doesn’t take a million dollars to achieve? One idea is to develop an MVA for your business and make it part of your daily…
DetailsWhen you think about it, renovating a house is much like what I do in helping you improve your trades business. And when you look at it this way, using an outside advisor makes sense. How so? Scoping. When you look at a reno project you visit the site (I hope) and check it out. …
DetailsYour business can be viewed as a bucket. In the top your pour revenue, which comes from your sales process, then deduct the direct costs of producing that revenue. Unfortunately everyone’s bucket leaks and so the amount left over (as net profit) is often a lot less than it could be and what is required…
DetailsWednesday night I ran a workshop for 30 Auckland Certified Builders entitled, “Make 2013 your Best Year Ever – Build Your Marketing & Sales Machine”. Received good feedback and some interested in having me help them improve their marketing and sales results, so was well worth the effort put in to put all the content.…
DetailsAccording to a study by the Centre for Small Enterprises at Massey University, during the next 10 years 64% of business owners intend to exit their businesses. For the North Shore, where I live, that means about 16,000 businesses may come up for sale (or other exit option) during the next 10 years. That’s 130…
DetailsI want to talk to you about one of the least understood, yet vital aspects of marketing. It is the principal that when creating an ad, a brochure, a sales letter, a web page or any other marketing piece you should COMMUNICATE WITH ONE PERSON AT A TIME. The natural thing to do when preparing…
DetailsMost small businesses stay small because the owner does everything. Simple maths means 24 hours x 1 = not very big. 24 x 10 = much bigger. So if you do all the estimates and present the quotes; sign all the contracts, subcontracts, and change orders; make the big site decisions; purchase all materials and…
DetailsYou may be doing lots of quotes and only converting a low percentage of them into paying jobs. If this is the case you may think that your sales technique needs some work and you need to learn some high pressure closing scripts. You know. The ones the car sales guys seem so good at.…
DetailsMany business owners I talk to, knowing what I do, ask me how do they go about systemising their business. Often they are stressed out from covering for staff who aren’t doing the job properly, have forgotten to order materials needed for the day’s work, have been let down by subbies not turning up on time, or a combination of all these….and more! (Sound familiar?) They hear and read about how systems are essential in business to help free up their time, but they are not sure where to start.
I have put together a few thoughts about beginning to systemise a business if you are in a similar position to those business owners I mentioned above.
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