Greetings Floor Dealers!
About two-thirds of my coaching for flooring retailers focuses on marketing and making more money. The other third focuses on helping dealers engineer their businesses so they can have the time and freedom to enjoy the fruits of their labors. After all, what’s the point of investing the enormous amount of time, energy and money required to build a flooring dealership if you remain enslaved to your business, never able to really enjoy life outside of work hours?
Last time I gave you the assignment to take a calendar to a coffee shop where you could sit undisturbed, and build out your ideal week. In this installment, I’m going to give you some tips on engineering your business so that it funds and facilitates this ideal week.
Let’s look at a work week for a fictional dealer named Floyd. Floyd works ten hours per day, Monday through Saturday. He wants to take Wednesday afternoons and all day Saturday off so he can improve his golf game. In order for this to happen, his business will need to become system-dependant (rather than owner-dependant), at least initially during Wednesday afternoons and Saturdays. By system-dependant I mean that the business continues to operate correctly even when Floyd isn’t there to personally oversee things. Here are the basic steps he would take to make that happen:
First, what are the tasks Floyd is doing Wednesday afternoons and Saturday? Let’s say it’s working the sales floor.
Second, he needs to delegate. What personnel does he need to add to his team to so he doesn’t have to sell on Wednesday afternoons and Saturdays? Obviously, a sales person.
Third, does Floyd’s budget allow for the extra expense of hiring a sales person? If so, he’s golden. If not, then he needs to implement a marketing plan to grow his revenue to a point where he can afford the additional expense. It’s critical that Floyd create a written financial benchmark for when the new hire will take place. For example, if he needs to generate an extra $20,000 in monthly revenue to pay for the new hire, then he should write this down, along with marketing strategies that will get him there, and a deadline to make it happen.
Fourth, he needs to put a written system in place for the tasks he is delegating, and train his replacement to follow this system.
In essence, Floyd must make his business system-dependant rather than owner-dependant, for those hours when he is away. He can then expand this systemization to other areas of his business until it’s 100% system-dependant.
Floyd is now able to take Wednesday afternoons and Saturdays off to improve his golf game. (Or go hang-gliding, or take up origami, or join a speed-dating group.)
Obviously, this is a very simple example, and there’s more you’ll need to learn about systemizing, but in the limited space here I wanted to give you a picture of the thinking. I’ve seen this process work many times, and the results are truly life-changing. Dealers who once were slaves to their stores and working 60+ hours per week, now working less than 40, taking weeks at a time off for travel, leisure, or whatever is important to them. They enjoy life again, the stress is largely gone, and they get to spend more time with their families. Their dealerships continue to run like well-oiled machines while they are away.
And that’s what Ideal Business, Ideal Lifestyle is all about.
(For further reading on the subject of systemizing your business, I highly recommend The E-Myth by Michael Gerber.)
To Tons Of Customers!
Jim Augustus Armstrong is The “Coach”
Jim Augustus Armstrong is the President of Flooring Success Systems, a program that equips dealers to double their profits, cut their work hours in half and beat the boxes! Many dealers have totally transformed their businesses and their lives for the better after joining Flooring Success Systems.
See what real, live dealers are saying!