No matter what position you hold in your company, from administrative assistant to owner, you can’t deny that sometimes you feel like everything is balancing on a wire and one wrong move might knock your company down. You can see that with increased sales, inadequate training, and employees who are just stuck in their old ways, the company is never really going to move out of the slump it’s been in for the last few years.
It’s no longer about what you can do to make ends meet. Keeping your business off the edge of the proverbial “cliff” is about deciding what you need to change in your daily operations to take your business to the next level – even if that level is just feeling like you can breathe a little easier.
Digging out of Design
With a number of sources saying that the housing market is turning up, it’s no surprise that you are seeing an increase in business. But with that increase, designers tend to get weighed down by hours and hours of designing (and they’ve got sales to make). It doesn’t have to be that way – dig yourself out of your design hole and start selling to your customers. You don’t have to be a master of design to sell a kitchen and bring home the money, you just need to truly understand the needs of your customers and sell them kitchens that will solve their problems. It’s easy to get sucked into a design and lose hours upon hours trying to make it right, only to be told that it’s not what your customer had in mind. If you really take the time to listen to your client – understand what they need, what they want to add on, and their budget range – you will spend a fraction of the time in the design phase of the project.
Train Your Talent
Nothing is worse than hiring someone with high hopes, only to find out that they run around like a chicken with their head cut off when under pressure. Taking control of the team means training them to follow certain steps when things get crazy. The best staff in any company knows that when things start to get overwhelming, it’s best to revert back to your training. Work together to keep yourselves from falling into a pattern of rushing around and not doing your best, because if you start to slack on your quality, you’ll become known for your lack of attention to detail.
Organizing Your Ordering
Next to time spent designing a kitchen, the biggest gripe employees have is getting stuck in ordering and quoting. Although it is an integral part of the process (your customers do need to know how much this is going to cost them) it can be a huge time-suck for a salesperson or designer. Keep it simple for the team and create an ordering process that takes a few steps and produces a professional piece that can be sent right to the customer. It will keep the team from slaving away over a calculator and file folder, trying to produce quotes as fast as they can write.
Keeping your business from falling off the cliff doesn’t have to be an everyday issue. By changing some integral parts to how your business and teams operate, you can truly come back from the edge and get your business running smoothly. Trust in yourself and your team to create a business that will really move ahead of the pack and bring in sales.
