As a business owner, we have to be upskilling ourselves all the time…. Some of us find the hardest to get our heads around is the social media side of things, We were just not born with that wire!
It can be easy to feel like there are a million things you don’t know and when you are busy being busy and doing the physical work, then working on the business part can feel tough.
So on that note, we just wanted to let you know that if you are reading this, you are ahead of the game.
Some people don’t have a clue about how to do pricing.
No joke, We are talking to tradies all the time, of all different sizes and shapes and I’m honestly telling you, the majority of them have absolutely no clue how much they don’t know about pricing their jobs. Even big places where you would think from the outside perception that they are all over it because they are building lots of houses. Nope. Lots of those guys are ‘winging it’. The term ‘you win some you lose some’ is their company mantra.
3 big parts of running a business
In my book, if you are doing the following things you get a big gold star from me.
Reading these blogs. There will be some I am sure that you are like, ugh I am all over this, but every now and then I know for sure that something will come up that will help. It could be the smallest thing, but it might just be the difference between not losing profit on a job, or having it slip away from you.
Reaching out. It’s a part of the DIY culture in NZ that we should be able to sort ourselves out but sometimes you really just need to spread the load. You might be reaching out in a formal or informal capacity, either way, if you are looking outside of your daily circle regularly to connect then you will grow as a person in the business. We have people we go to just to shoot the breeze, find out what’s new with them, see what cool things they know that I don’t. Its always worthwhile, so if you are doing this too then good on you!
Regularly checking your P&L. Even if this is the only thing you understand from your accounts, then big tick. Profit and Loss is a great indicator as to how you are doing. To be able to clearly see the direct cost of sales versus the cost of running your business it helps us to plan gives us goals to achieve and generally stops too many nasty surprises. If the P&L is looking a bit sticky, it might mean it is time to look at increasing your margin a bit to cover offsite overheads, or it might show that the direct sales costs are higher than expected which means there is someone not pulling their weight or variations that are slipping through… if you are looking at this regularly then you are covering your bases.