Chaos in Your Office? Four Ways to Get Your Office Under Control in 2017.

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Click here to download your free copy of the Office Checklist

Hey Guys, Tony from Profitable Tradie here.

Does your office feel chaotic?

Invoices piling up?

Do you have Slow paying clients?

A pile of quotes?

Or are you reliant on one or two key people who if they moved on would cause you major headaches?

If this is you then stay tuned, I’ve got 4 super helpful steps that’s going to help you get your office under control.

The first step is to complete a thorough task analysis. Task analysis involves creating a list of all the tasks required to run your office. Get everyone involved so your list covers everything. It doesn’t matter who’s doing the task at present. Include everything from answering the phone, invoicing, GST, payroll, compliance certificates, quoting through to WOF’s for vehicles and getting stationery. The more detailed the list the better. Listing all the tasks that your business currently does is the easy part. It is as important to list all activities that you are not getting to right now. For instance, marketing (website, social media, email marketing or building relationships with local contractors), performance reviews for your guys and other activities that will help your business grow and improve. Using a whiteboard (or an A3 sheet of paper) works well.

Once you have all the tasks on paper divide the tasks up into roles such as Receptionist, Office Administrator, and Estimator etc. By clearly outlining what tasks each role is responsible for you prevent confusion around who is responsible for what. Clear roles are important in any business but especially so in a family business when a husband and wife work together!

Including Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) in your Job Descriptions ensures your team have a clear understanding of what good performance is. Take an Office Administrator for example. KPI’s could include all quotes followed up one day after sending, all jobs invoiced within 2 days of completion, Profit and Loss Statement completed by the 10th of the following month and all tax obligations (GST, PAYE, Income Tax) filed and paid on time. An incentive program where your team is rewarded based on achieving their KPI’s can also improve productivity.

Once you’ve completed the Task Analysis, Job Descriptions and set up KPI’s for each role in the office, a daily and weekly checklist helps ensure all tasks get completed. Your Checklist will include all the tasks for the day and at what time of the day the task should be completed. Weekly tasks are also assigned to specific days and times. For example, “follow up overdue accounts” could be included on Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. Monthly and annual tasks such as GST or annual accounts can be included too. The act of physically “ticking off” the tasks encourages more ownership and accountability from your team (and yourself). You reduce your stress levels as all the tasks are written down and no longer stuck in your, or someone else’s head.

If you’d like a free example of an office checklist that we use with members of the Million Dollar Tradie program, click on the download button on this page and we’ll shoot a copy straight out to you.

I hope you found this helpful guys, happy systemising.

Talk next time.

Click here to download your free copy of the Office Checklist

Is Your Website Mobile Responsive?

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Click here to download your free resourse on How to Build a Kick-Arse Website that Sells

Hey guys Tony from Profitable Tradie. If you are wondering about your website, you have heard and all this talk about making sure that it is mobile responsive, then this quick blog is going to be super helpful, so stay tuned.

So, the world of internet marketing and websites and marketing in general is a brave new world, it is really changing quickly and that is mainly because of the mobile platform.

Now 50% or more of traffic is viewed on mobile sites these days and it is increasing all the time. So, it is absolutely critical that your website is mobile responsive.

Now at Profitable Tradie we build websites specifically for Plumbers and Electricians and we spend a lot of time making sure that these websites are mobile responsive. And it is not necessarily an easy thing to do, you have actually got to put a fair bit of work in it to make sure that the website looks right on a large screen, on tablet and on your smart phone. On your iPhone if you have got class, or your inferior android if you don’t; we won’t hold that against you.

So, I am here at Matt’s desk. I have kicked him out and I am going to show you what we do to make sure that the websites are actually mobile responsive, because it is probably one of the number one or number two things that is important get right with your website.

So, on the screen you can see that we have got a website, this is one we have just recently released, albapumbing.co.nz, you can check it out if you want, it is a good authority website, it has got a really good content on it.

So, at the moment you can see that it is displaying at its full size and we’ve got this cool little program which we can use to check out how it looks on other sizes. So, if we click on this button here, that shows us how the website will look on a small tablet. And you can see that it still works, it has got the “Call” button up the top there, it has got the right headline so it all really still makes sense, if you like.

And then we can check it out on an iPhone for the mobile phones. Again, it resizes nicely and we can see that it actually works. It has got the “Click to call” button right at the top so if you just click on that button on your phone it will allow you to call straight away.

And it has got a good head line and right down the bottom on the left hand side you see the green button, that’s another “Click to call” button.

So, it is really important that it all works and you have got to make sure that your web designers are across that. That the website doesn’t have any sort of ugly blemishes when it goes to mobile, because that can certainly happen and that is going to damage your conversion rates.

And also, what’s going to happen if it is not really mobile responsive, Google is going to punish you, they are not going to put your website near the top of the list because they like it to be mobile responsive and give your clients a really good result.

 

So, as I said, we are building websites for Plumbers and Electricians, it’s an absolutely critical part of your marketing strategy, it sits right at the middle. So, I have got a guide that I am going to make available to you today, it is “The 23 points to build a kick ass website that sells.”

And you can get a copy of that just by putting your details on the page and we will blast it straight out to you, which I think you would find super helpful and it talks about the mobile responsiveness being important, but a bunch of other elements that are super important to get your website performing well.

So, I hope you find that helpful guys, happy website-ing and we will talk to you again next time.

Click here to download your free resourse on How to Build a Kick-Arse Website that Sells

Profitable Tradie

Sick Of Bad Cash Flow Over The Christmas Period?

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Hi guys, Tony from Profitable Tradie here. Hey look, do you find you are flat out busy now in December heading up towards Christmas but you are actually worried that your cash flow and how it is going to pan out over the January and February period. Stay tuned, I have got something that is going to be super helpful with that.

Look guys I know that everyone is flat out during December trying to cram in all the jobs you can before Christmas, clients screaming at you to get things done.

So often you are not thinking about how things are going to pan out in January and February in terms of your cash flow. But if you think back to last year or maybe the year before you will remember that January and February can actually get a bit tight with the cash flow.

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Are You Paying Enough To Get Good Tradesmen?

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Hey guys, Tony from Profitable Tradie. I want to talk about hiring today and one of the key reasons why you might actually be struggling to hire.

So are you like a lot of Plumbers and Electricians out there who are desperate to hire some good tradespeople but you are just finding it hard to get the right people?

Well I am going to start with a story actually, it’s about the property market and an experience that my wife Bronwyn and I have had over the last, sort of, 12-18 months.

Now we have been looking for a new house, we have got three young boys, we need some more space and we have tried to buy three or four times and each time we just haven’t been paying enough, we’ve missed out and the prices that have been paid, have been quite a lot more than we thought we needed to pay.

Now, the same thing’s happening in the market for tradespeople, for qualified Plumbers and Electricians. What you used to pay just doesn’t cut it anymore and if you are thinking about hiring and you’re not getting any bites, well you probably need to look at what you’re offering; because the market is competitive and you really need to be paying top dollar to get the right people.

And here is the other thing to think about, I know it is scary to pay more, but if you get a tradesperson how much extra money are they actually going to make you? Now the potential is, if your margins are where they should be, you could get $80-100K worth of gross profit out of each tradesperson.

Now if you need to pay $4-5k more to get to them does it make sense? Well of course it does, you’re still going to be up, you’re still going to be ahead of the game, even though you’re paying a bit more.

And the other side of the coin is, because there’s a lot of demand out there for services, it’s time for us to actually increase our rates, get our margins up as well so we can take our cut and pass it on to our team members as well.

So guys lesson for today and my thought is this, look, the industry is booming in most parts, there is a lot of demand for tradespeople and what you need to pay has really moved on; so if you are not getting the results you want, look at what you’re offering and super-size it! And then we’re going to make sure we pass it on through our clients.

Hope this is helpful guys, happy hiring and I look forward to talking to you again next time.

 

 

Are You Pricing To Make Profit, Or Just To Win The Work?

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Hi guys, Tony from Profitable Tradie here.  I’ve got a question for you; are you pricing to win work, or you are pricing to make money?  Stay tuned.

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You Don’t Know, What You Don’t Know

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Click here to watch Brad Martins Case Study

Hi guys. Have you ever heard the phrase “You don’t know what you don’t know”?

 

Tony from Profitable Tradie here and I want to tell you a little bit about one of the key lessons I have learned in business, both with our own businesses and coaching plumbers, electricians, drainers and guest fitters for the last eight years. And it is all about not knowing what you don’t know. So stay tuned.

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How To Create A High Performing Team?

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Click here to Get your Rules of the Game Template

Hey guys, Tony from Plumbers Coach here.

Are you finding that your team are not behaving the way you want, are not performing?  Maybe the attitude is not quite what you want it to be. I’m going to share something with you today that will really help.

Now creating a high-performing team is all about getting the right culture.  And here’s something people don’t understand about Read more

Are You Frustrated With Rework & Call Backs?

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Hey guys, this is Tony from Plumbers Coach here. Look, do you have lots of reworks and call backs on site, you find that your guys make the same mistakes over and over again and it’s really frustrating and doing your head in?

If that’s the case, then something in this issue today will be super helpful.

Now are you checking your jobs more than you have time for and you just think your guys should be able to remember what you tell them, even Read more

Are You Relying On Just One Marketing Strategy?

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Hey guys, this is Tony from Profitable Tradie here.

I’m going to share with you today why the number one is the worst number when it comes to marketing your business.

So guys, here’s what I have learnt from experience while coaching hundreds of trade businesses over the last seven and a half years.  What I found is that if you don’t have a proactive plan for marketing your business, you’re at the mercy of waiting for the phone to ring or just hoping that the phone rings through referrals and word of mouth.

And frankly, that’s not a great strategy when you want to grow your business, you want to have predictable and profitable deal flows.

So I’m going to tell you a quick story. I just had lunch with a maintenance and insurance agent, he’s really successful, but he told me, “Look Tony I have got a mortgage broker in my office, I sit next to him and 70% of my deals actually come through the mortgage broker. And look, if he leaves I am in the cark and my deal flow just dries up.

So have you got a similar challenge in your business? Do you rely on word of mouth or perhaps you’ve got an old Yellow Pages ad, or you’ve got a few builders that you work for, who just continually give you leads?  If that is the case then you’ve potentially got a problem. If you are relying on one marketing strategy that can go lame, which leaves you without a good deal flow.

So what you want to do is this, you want to create what we call a marketing ten by ten. Now what that means is, I don’t know one way to get you a hundred leads, but we can build ten marketing strategies, ten marketing strategies to give you ten leads each a month.

The way it works is we work on each strategy, build the system for that strategy so that we know that it works, we test and measure it and then we add another strategy and then another and then another. So what we’re doing is building a multilayered approach to getting leads.

Now, when you’ve got a number of the strategies, up to ten, then you can be really confident that you’ve got predictable, profitable deal flow that you can rely on to grow your business. And we all know that if you have got predictable and reliable deal flow, then you feel confident about investing in your business, hiring new staff, getting new equipment, taking some time off to relax and enjoy things because your business has got to that vital life blood of new clients coming in.

So what are some of the strategies you should have in place? Well, you should definitely have a website, you need your online marketing, you AdWords and your search engine optimization. You definitely need a customer database, you need to be doing some e-mail marketing, you need to be looking at your social media, your print media, your direct mail, your customer farming strategy, your up selling on your plumbing inspection strategy and using your servicing work to target the clients that you already done work for that need servicing work like gas fitting or water treatment, etc.

So key lesson today guys is, have you got a marketing ten by ten? Or are you just relying on one or two strategies to get you by? If you are let’s work out on putting a ten by ten in place so you’ve got consistent , predictable deal flow, you can relax and know that the work’s going to keep coming in and you can keep tweaking each one of those strategies to get more and better results.

So, tip for today, guys, get the marketing team by team sorted and then start working through each one of those strategies to build that deal flow.

Hope you found this helpful guys and I look for to talking to you again soon.

Are You Struggling To Make Time To Work On Your Business?

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Hey guys, Tony from Plumbers Coach.

Look, a couple of days ago we finished a one day training for our million-dollar plumber clients and there was a massive lesson there that was really helpful for you to grow your business, so stay tuned.

Now if you’re like a lot of the plumbers and tradies that we work with, you’ll be flat-out busy and from time to time you are going to struggle to actually make the changes you want to in your business because you just don’t have enough time.

Now Tracy and Mike from Plumbworx  in Auckland, they’re on there million-dollar tradie program and I was talking to them at the training day and Tracy shared something which was absolutely golden. Now she has been working hard to try and systemise her business and get it all running properly, so that then she could employ someone to help her run the business.

She had this massive realization that was this blinding flash of the obvious, and it was this.  Hey, I have been trying to systemize this business for three or four years but I haven’t gotten around to it yet because I don’t have the time. She’s realized that I have to get some help in the office, I have to get some more help in the office so I can systemize it and then the business will run properly.

So business is a bit back to front sometimes, you always have to invest first before you get the results. So, what have you been struggling to do in your business? Have you been struggling to get your marketing up to scratch? Or get on top of your numbers or build some pricing templates?  Perhaps get your team meetings running well or do your performance appraisals.

Whatever it is that you are struggling to do, have you got enough help? Have you got the right resources in your office and in your business to make it happen? If you haven’t, well that’s where you need to look first so you can actually create the business that you want, build a lifestyle that you want and just have more fun.

So I hope you found this helpful guys. If you have, just chuck some comments in the chatbox or any questions you have I would love to answer them and I look forward to seeing you guys again next time.