“I used to work dark-to-dark, six and seven days a week,” Craig Bendele told me. “I was completely stressed out and feeling pretty miserable.” A lot of dealers can relate to Craig’s situation.
In this first installment, you’re going to learn Craig’s story, and how he eventually made changes in his business that enabled him to experience 50% annual growth two years in a row, while at the same time drastically cutting his work hours.
Craig is a dealer from Florida who, like many dealers, grew up in the family flooring business. He worked in every aspect of the business, from sweeping floors to warehouse work, to selling and estimating. A few years ago he took over the store. “I was the owner now,” Craig told me. “It was something I really wanted, but I found myself working more and more hours, nights and weekends. My wife and I hardly saw each other.”
As Craig explained to me, “I was still doing all the jobs of an employee like selling and bookkeeping, but I had all the additional responsibilities that go with owning a business.” Working in his office late in the evening after everyone else had gone home, Craig found himself missing the days when he was an employee with regular hours and a steady paycheck. That is the situation many dealers find themselves in: the dream of owning their own business becomes a nightmare of stress, frustration, and seemingly endless hours of work with no letup in sight. Some question their decision to go into business for themselves. Maybe you can relate.
Ideal Lifestyle
In my opinion, the purpose of your business is this: to fund and facilitate your ideal lifestyle. Its fundamental purpose is to provide you with the money, time and freedom to have a great, fulfilling life outside of business hours. You work far too hard and take on too much personal risk, to spend your life missing out on the rewards that should come with business ownership. However, if the idea of making lots of money while at the same time having plenty of time off makes you feel guilty or ‘selfish,’ then you’ll likely never make a start in that direction.
I can give you the most effective methods in existence for achieving those things, but if you are queasy about having these for yourself, then any methods I present will be useless to you. So your first step — before we get to the actual methods — is to get very comfortable with this concept: the purpose of my business is to fund and facilitate my ideal lifestyle.
“Because I Want To”
Craig was very comfortable with this idea, which is why in the first 12 months of implementing new marketing methods and systems into his business his revenue increased by 50%, he no longer worked weekends, and he now showed up for work at 10:00 and left by 5:00 every day.
“They don’t need me there anymore,” Craig told me, laughing. “I’m there because I want to be there, not because I have to be.”
In the second 12 months, his revenue grew by another 50%, but his new work schedule stayed the same. He has put himself in the position where he can experience steady business growth, even open multiple locations, while at the same time never increasing his personal workload.
Stay Tuned!
In Part 2 I’m going to outline the sales and marketing strategies Craig used. In part 3 I’m going to describe the steps he took to cut his work hours.
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!