Shop Owners! October is here; end of year tips for a stronger future

[Joe Marconi]

October starts the year’s fourth and final quarter. A time where shops begin to reflect back on the year and look toward the next year. For many of us, it’s been a wild roller coaster ride, for others not so bad. That’s business, and we all know that there will always be good days and bad days.

 

The key thing to remember as leaders of your business, is to always be looking to the future. Learn from the past, but don’t dwell on it. Become more proactive. Try different things and don’t be afraid to fail. Through failure are valuable lessons.

 

Set your sights high and remember to begin planning now for 2016. Don’t wait until the end of the year, or even worse the start of 2016. The earlier you begin to dissect and analyze the current year, the better position you will be to improve your chances of a more successful future.

 

[Marksas]

It seems like October comes upon us pretty quickly. Next thing we know it will be Jan and we won't have a plan. Once you start creating your projections for the year and you have good tools to do it, it really doesn't take that long to come up with a plan. Review your expenses and your sales history and you should be able to come up with a plan.

Since I live in Texas we just don't really have the major seasonality that others have but we do have about 3-4 months where we perform the major portion of our a/c work derives from, I project a little differently. I really look at where we will finish the year out and what kind of sales growth I expect in the next year. Once we figure what that top lime number is, I just divide it by the number of work days and that becomes the sales target for the day. I then look at what resources are needed to obtain the sales figures as well as the breakout of parts and labor. I figure in what type of efficiency we expect as well as the gross profit required to meet our profit goals. I factor in planned wage increases,for various positions and review the the required amount of techs to achieve our goals to make sure we have the right amount of staff. You also have to factor in vacations and paid holidays. Once the plan is completed the manager and office staff buy off on it and we lock it down.

We then just run a simple spreadsheet where they just enter the days sales and number of RO's and it lets them know where the are for the day, month and year. If the number is below it will be in red and if the number is at or above it will be green.. It's simple and it works. We don't win everyday and don't need to because we hit home runs occasionally. We also don't scramble at the end of the month trying to make a number. We play the game everyday.

We've been using the simple sheet for about 3 years and we beat plan every year. Sometimes I think we aren't as aggressive as we should be but I want the goal attainable.

Really the importance is in having the plan and knowing what we need to do to be successful. It makes it much easier to sleep at night and gives clarity to what we expect and want to achieve. It all sounds complicated but it's really easy if you track your numbers, plus I've spent time developing the required spreadsheets. Just to give an ideal of the detail, we budget what we will spend on toilet paper, hand towels, customer refreshments, and even hand cleaner. Some of it's almost anal but my nature is I the details..

I think another important factor is understanding your people and personalities. We do DISC assessments on all of our people. I am not a dominant type person (D) and am a strong ©. My manager is a high D who wants to be in control and in charge, he also scores high as a C which is not typical. How do I use this? I work with him him in the plan and he executes well. (Better than me)

If you don't do this you should start, the assessments are about $30. I use peoplekeys.com

 

Hope this is helpful...

 

 

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