Greetings Floor Dealers!

JIM: What is your goal for your business?
FLOOR DEALER:  To make more money.
JIM: What’s important to you about making more money?

December is a great time for floor retailers to begin setting goals for the upcoming twelve months.  However, for most entrepreneurs ‘setting goals’ means figuring out how to make more money.  Making more money is great, but I want to take a step back and look at the bigger picture by posing an important question: what is the true purpose of your business? Here are some common answers you’ll get from business owners:

  • To make money
  • To provide employment
  • To provide products and services for your customers
  • To make a better community

Every one of those is a good thing, but I don’t think any of them are the main purpose of your business. “But Jim!” I can almost hear some readers yelling right now.  “How can you say making money is not the main purpose of business?  Are you nuts??”

Don’t get me wrong.  Your business should be doing those things, but I still contend these are not its primary purpose. These are not the things that motivate most people to invest the immense amount of time, energy and money into building a floor dealership in the first place. Yes, when I ask a dealer his or her goal for their business they usually reply that they want to make more money. But when I dig deeper, when I ask why making more money is important, then I hear things like:

  • Because I love to travel and I want to be able to do it more
  • So I can improve my golf game
  • So I can live in a good neighborhood
  • I want to get my pilot’s license and buy an airplane
  • I want to spend more time fishing
  • So I can help my kids with college

Dealers see that owning a flooring store gives them a better opportunity to facilitate these things than getting a traditional job. It’s for this reason that I believe the main purpose of your business is this: to fund and facilitate your ideal lifestyle.

This point of view radically alters your approach to business. Instead of simply asking, how can I make more money, you begin to ask, how can I make more money, and do it in such a way that I have the freedom to do all the things in life that are important to me outside of business? In other words, how can I tailor my business so that it funds and facilitates my ideal lifestyle? Yes, your business should make money, provide employment, and all those other good things, but not at the expense of your life.

I coached a dealer who had a large, successful business and was paying himself a salary in the mid-six-figures. However, he worked 70+ hours per week, rarely got to see his two young daughters, and didn’t have much of a life at all outside of work.  (I’ve worked with a lot of dealers like this, and I have a name for them: successful slaves.)

After a few coaching sessions he was able to free up an entire day each week, and later that year he took his girls to Disney World. You see, making a lot of money isn’t the big trick. The big trick is to make a lot of money but do so in such a way that you’re happy, fulfilled, un-stressed, and have the freedom to pursue your ideal lifestyle.

Here’s the amazing thing: the more you tailor your business to fund and facilitate your ideal lifestyle, the more money you will tend to make. And that’s what Marketing Mastery is all about!

Over the next installments, I’ll give you practical steps to take to make this a reality in your flooring business. Go on to Part 2.

 

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!