Evaluating the Overall Health & Well-Being of Your Home Service Business

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Assessing the overall health of your home service business is crucial to company success. Creating a plan to do so will help you stay on track and aware of what is normal and what is cause for concern within your business. Here are some tips for creating a plan to stay informed of what is going on with your business's health and should be performed at set times throughout the year.

Back to Basics

How your company is perceived in the community is very important to the overall success of your business. You can monitor your brand reputation in a few different ways.

• Google yourself! You should be doing this periodically to check on what comes up when you search your company name and any reviews that are out there.
• Respond quickly to negative reviews to deescalate the situation and offer the displeased customer a resolution that will make them happy. This is also a great learning experience for your employees in handling specific problems or issues that may come up.
• Don't be afraid to ask customers for positive reviews once a job is complete. If you have a very pleased customer, ask them to write you a review or get a testimonial from them. You can use these reviews and testimonials in your marketing campaigns to show off your hard work.
• The Federal Trade Commission recommends checking with friends, neighbors, or co-workers on who they used when looking for a contractor or looking at trusted sites to see reviews and ratings for potential contractors. This word-of-mouth advertising is very important in gaining new customers.

Conduct a SWOT Analysis for Key Business Decisions

When you are planning a significant business decision that will affect how you do business or cost a substantial amount of money, make sure you perform a SWOT analysis. This will help you determine what projects or initiatives you should tackle first and which you should spend more time fine-tuning.

You might be wondering what exactly a SWOT Analysis entails. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats and will get you thinking of the pros and cons of the decision at hand.

• S – What does your business do well? Why would this be beneficial for your company?
• W – What are some areas for improvement? How could this negatively impact your business?
• O – Are there new markets, services, or technologies you can enter?
• T – Who are your biggest competitors, and what do they do well? How would these competitors affect your current idea?

Money, Money, Money

You should be tracking and examining your finances often and should not be spending more than you are bringing in. Having a checks and balance system for reviewing your finances is essential. You should also have a system in place for approving large financial purchases, such as two people need to sign off and agree on a purchase before it is made. A few other ways to monitor and improve your finances are:

• Revenue Goals: It is important to set monthly, quarterly, and yearly revenue goals. When forecasting for the next year, you should budget for a realistic increase in sales based on what you did the previous year, the market, and any other important variables to your company. You should always strive to increase your revenue year over year.
• Average Ticket Size and Conversion Rate: It is crucial to track how often your employees are converting sales calls or jobs into revenue-generating business and what may be stopping that from happening. Successware can track just that for you, taking the hassle out of figuring it out yourself! Determining average ticket size is also important, and you can determine ways to increase this number as you start to track.
• Cash Flow: You will want to make sure you always have adequate cash to pay expenses, or as a cushion in emergency situations. Use a spreadsheet, accounting software, or Successware's accounting module to track all expenses and income. This will help you budget for the year.

Implement a Selling Strategy

There is a massive shortage of skilled tradespeople in the country. To avoid turnover in your business, and to keep your employees around, you should work on the following:

• Formalized Sales Process: Implementing a sales process is extremely beneficial to your sales team and company. It can help with your conversion rates and can increase your ticket size per job.
• Eliminate Duplicative and Unnecessary Paperwork: Making certain processes in your business automated or digital will cut down on duplicative work. Successware has customized forms in its Mobile app that eliminates the need for paper forms and sends information immediately back to the home office.
• Ongoing Sales Training: Businesses and messaging are constantly evolving, and you need your sales team to grow with you. This is why offering consistent and ongoing training is imperative. When you have a new process, procedure, or launch of some sort, you should be conducting training with your sales team, so they are up to date on all the latest information.

We hope this is a good starting point for you to put a plan together to assess your business's overall health. Consistency is key, so make sure you follow through with the plans you have in place, and you should start to see a return on your investment in no time! Remember that you will have to adjust your plan as you begin to track your business’s health and are able to see what works and what does not.

To learn more about strategies and way you can assess the overall health of your home improvement business, check out this blog by GreenSky: How to Assess the Overall Health of Your Home Improvement Business.

Disclaimer: This content was provided in partnership with GreenSky. It does not necessarily represent products or services accessible through Successware.