To Get Great Results in Your Contracting Business, Use This GPS Success Formula as Your Management Model

June 22, 2015
Category: Achieve Consistent Business Success,Be a Highly Effective Owner,Build an Accountable, Self-Sufficient Team,Business Tips

I love my GPS. It always gets me where I want to go. With my GPS, all I do is set the destination for my trip and it maps out turn-by-turn directions to get me there, it monitors and updates my progress and adjusts my path when I miss a turn or hit an unexpected traffic jam. And it’s absolutely relentless about getting me to my destination.

You’re probably wondering what my GPS fetish has to do with getting stellar results in your business. The fact is that the same formula that makes my GPS so great at getting me to my destination can help you get great results in your business too.

A Clear Goal + A Step-by-Step Action Plan + Relentless Follow Through = Stellar Results

It doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to achieve a higher level of growth and profit, working on an important project to improve your business, solving a persistent problem or successfully completing your next big job, following this simple formula will help you and your team get better results throughout your business.

Unfortunately, what I find in working with my clients and talking with hundreds of other owners and their teams, is that this simple success formula rarely is followed completely. And you can trace back many of your disappointing results to dropping the ball on one or more of the three variables in this stellar results formula.

So, to help you get better results in the future, I’m going to drill down on each of the three variables in the stellar results formula a bit more. As I do, I want you to think about how well you and your team follow this formula. I guarantee that if you follow this simple formula completely, you will significantly improve your sales and profit and create a smoother running business that doesn’t require your constant attention. So let’s take a closer look!

Set Clear Goals

Yogi Berra once said: “If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.” And it’s true. If you don’t have clear goals for your business, for a project, for something that you delegate to someone on your team, you’ll end up somewhere, but you’ll probably be unhappy with the results. So just like GPS needs a destination, if you want to get stellar results, you need clear goals.

The best model that I know of for creating clear goals is to make your goals S.M.A.R.T goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant to you, and Time-framed. Rather than having a vague goal like “I hope to grow my business”, try “I want to Increase my sales this year by 25% over last year.” Or instead of “I’d love to make my business more efficient,” try “I want to increase the gross profit of the work we do from 40% to 45% by July 1st.”

Research shows that simply by making S.M.A.R.T. goals you will increase your chances of reaching your destination dramatically.

Step-by-Step Action Plan

Once my GPS has a clear destination, it doesn’t just “wing it.” It doesn’t say, “Just start driving, Bill, and we’ll figure this trip out as we go along.” If it did, I wouldn’t trust it to get me to where I want to go! Instead, it creates a set of turn-by-turn directions to get me to my destination. It lays out a clear set of actions I need to take to get the result that I want.

When I talk to owners or folks on their team about a goal, I always ask, “What are you going to do to make that happen?” And usually what I hear in reply is, “Well, I hope that if I work really hard, that I’ll make that goal.” But hope alone rarely works.

To get stellar results, you too need to create a step-by-step plan which links the actions you’re going to take to the results that you want. Your action plan answers the question “What are you going to do to make that happen?”

Here’s a step-by-step plan for how you can link your actions to the results for any goal:

STEP 1: Define the tasks that you will need to complete to reach your goal.
For example, let’s say that you want to introduce a new service for your business like power washing. To do this, some of the major tasks that you will need to complete are: create processes and procedures for doing the work, create a system to estimate the work, create a new job, hire and train a new person, buy the necessary equipment, update your website to highlight your new service, develop and launch your marketing.

STEP 2: Break large tasks into a set of smaller steps.
Some of the tasks that I listed above may actually take several steps to complete. In those cases, it makes sense to break the tasks down into smaller, more manageable steps to ensure that they get done. For example, some of the steps that you will need to take to update your website are: hire a web guy, rearrange the website to give more focus to power washing, get photos, and write web copy.

STEP 3: If you need other people’s input to accomplish your project, get their agreement.

This ensures that you have the resources when you need them.

STEP 4: Schedule your project.
Define due dates for each task and sub-step. Without specific time frames and deadlines, the project may take significantly longer than you want, and some tasks may never get completed. Have people involved, including you, schedule time to complete their part of the action plan.

Be Relentless in Following Through

The job isn’t done until you achieve the results you want.

Imagine if my GPS mapped out my directions and then said, “Here are your directions, Bill. You can take it from here.” I can tell you, I wouldn’t be happy. That’s not why I bought the blessed thing! I want it to get me to my destination!

Or imagine this: you schedule a residential customer for an interior paint job. You schedule the job, deliver the paint, brushes and other materials and equipment. You paint a few rooms and then you tell the customer that they can finish the job. Crazy, right?

Yet time and again, I see owners and their teams declare, “Mission accomplished” because they implemented a new program or procedure instead of ensuring that they got the desired results.

For example, let’s say that you want to reduce accidents on the job by 25% and you assign this responsibility to one of your management team members. Your manager creates a safety training program and delivers it to all of your employees. After he completes the training, he comes to you and tells you he’s finished. “Mission accomplished!” Is he finished? Absolutely not! The goal of this project is to reduce accidents by 25%, not to do a training program.

Remember, the job isn’t done until you achieve the results you want. Here are a few things that you can do to improve follow-through and ensure that you get the results you want:

• Assign an owner – Any goal or priority project that’s important to the success of your business needs to have an owner who’s responsible for leading the charge and for ensuring that you achieve the goal. In my experience, if there is no driving force that is on the line to complete a project or achieve a goal, it usually doesn’t get accomplished. P.S. You can’t assign yourself the owner for every goal!
• Evaluate progress – There’s a saying in management that “What gets measured, gets done.” Having S.M.A.R.T goals and a step-by step plan creates clear agreement about what needs to be done and accomplished. But, to get stellar results, you must be able to measure and track progress toward your goals. Regularly tracking progress enables you to hold the project owner accountable for getting the results that you want.
• Adjust when you’re off track – Occasionally, circumstances or unforeseen events arise that throw a monkey wrench in your ability to meet deadlines, complete tasks and achieve your goal. If this happens, don’t get discouraged. Instead, revise your plan, change the dates and continue working to meet targets and move forward. It’s relentless follow-through that makes GPS so valuable, and that same relentlessness will ensure that you achieve the results you want.

Get Stellar Results!

So when you think about getting stellar results in your business, think GPS! GPS is a great management model to hold yourself and your team to: Set clear goals, create a step-by-step plan to link the actions you take to the results you want, and follow through relentlessly until you reach your goals. If you and your team follow this simple formula consistently, you’ll be amazed at the great results and progress that you’ll make in your business. Try it!

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