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Contractormag 11961 Rainingmoney
Contractormag 11961 Rainingmoney
Contractormag 11961 Rainingmoney
Contractormag 11961 Rainingmoney
Contractormag 11961 Rainingmoney

Make More Money Immediately

Nov. 19, 2018
Here’s the part that most Contractors know unconsciously but may struggle to implement: the better and more efficient use of your time, the more money you can make.

Who else wants more revenue and profit? When you think of generating more revenue and profit, you may think of the most obvious ways, like raising prices or offering additional products and services. But what if I told you there was a way to make more money as a Contractor without any additional effort? In fact, you can instantly start making more money today by simply making one small adjustment.

As a Contractor, you sell your time and your expertise. Even if you charge a flat fee rather than hourly, you’re still selling your time—the time it takes to meet with the prospect and turn them into a customer; the time it takes to troubleshoot and service existing equipment; the time it takes to remove and install new equipment.

Now here’s the part that most Contractors know unconsciously but may struggle to implement: the better and more efficient use of your time, the more money you can make. Better time means finishing jobs sooner, which means doing more jobs in a day or week, which leads to more revenue (but at generally the same fixed costs), which leads to more profit.

Chances are, you probably know this already but two things are keeping you from making more money right away:

1. You don’t know how to use this information to make an actionable plan

2. You’re not sure how to get your team to buy into the same mindset as you so they run each job more efficiently too

Small Change, Big Dollars

The small change to make is this: figure out how long each job should take and set it as a target for the team members who are working on that job. Get them to “Beat The Clock” and encourage them to do amazing, high-quality work in less time than your stated time.

Of course your team should still continue to do great work and deliver the highest-quality service to your customers. That is a non-negotiable that must be present.

This turns a regular job into a fun challenge for your team members and even if they feel that they are busy and don’t have the ability to do the work faster, many of your team members will step up to the challenge and simply do the work faster because they love the sense of competition.

And for the skeptics out there: of course your team should still continue to do great work and deliver the highest-quality service to your customers. That is a non-negotiable that must be present. But there are little things that your team can do to speed up… probably stuff you’ve been asking them to do for years (like carrying more than one thing at a time from their truck to the job site); now with a challenge in place, they may do all their work just a bit faster.

As an owner, you may have been frustrated in the past by team members who don’t seem to go very fast but consider this: simply asking them to work faster may not make sense to them, especially if they are paid hourly or don’t know how much faster you mean. But by adding a “Beat The Clock” time to every job, you now make it clear how fast they need to go to get the job done.

Step By Step

Here’s how to implement this in your business today:

First, list the jobs you do and how long each job takes. (If that’s too big of a list to get started then list the top 10 most common jobs you’re hired for and just run a Beat The Clock contest on those most common jobs first, then come back to this step later for the rest of your jobs.)

Second, hold an all company meeting and share this Beat The Clock challenge with your team. Ask them if they love the feeling of proving how good they are, especially against the average, and generate some friendly competition between your team members. Introduce this Beat The Clock challenge and tell them, “Starting tomorrow, we want you to do each job at the same level of great service but we want you to try and beat the clock on this job!”

Third, starting immediately, put the average beat-the-clock time at the top of each work order so your team member knows how long they have to beat the clock on the job.

Fourth, when a job is done, have the employee write the total hours and minutes it took them on the work order when they hand it back into the office.

Fifth, hold a contest with a leaderboard and small, fun prizes; award a weekly winner to the person with the most accumulated clock-beating times for that week.

Sixth, revisit the Beat The Clock numbers every 6-12 months and shave a bit of time off the average duration, to reflect your company’s improved efficiency and to keep the challenge exciting (but always keeping in mind not to sacrifice job quality for the customer).

Summary

When your team is challenged and incentivized to Beat The Clock, they’ll find ways to shave minutes off of each job without sacrificing quality. Those minutes will add up and you’ll squeeze in more jobs each week and month, which translates into more revenue and profit.

You’ll start to transform your company culture into one of efficiency and focus as team members engage in the friendly competition of trying to Beat The Clock to outperform the average time, to outperform themselves, and to outperform their team members.

Everyone wins: your team members get more done and win prizes, you make more money, and your company will serve more customers efficiently.

Mike Agugliaro is a Business Warrior on a mission to change the lives and businesses of service business owners. Mike and his business partner started and grew a struggling home service company into a multi-million dollar empire before selling the company in 2017. Today Mike is an author, speaker, and mentor; and he's the co-founder of CEO Warrior, a high level coaching and training organization for home service businesses. Learn more about Mike and CEO Warrior at www.CEOWARRIOR.com.

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