What Roofing Company Owners Should Be Doing NOW to Prepare for a Successful 2015

Hopefully you came out of 2014 with a profitable year, learned some new lessons along the way about how to run your business or deal with your team better, and took some time to enjoy the fruits of your labor. Christmas has passed, the New Year has begun, and even though the frosty mornings and chilly weather may give the illusion that you’ve got plenty of time to kick back and “wait for storm season,” the reality is that these next 8-12 weeks is your opportunity to prime the pump, stack your team, revamp your sales processes, and put newer, better, more effective systems in place to ensure that your 2015 makes your 2014 look like child’s play.

There are two different kinds of individuals when it comes to entrepreneurs:

1) Reactive business owners

and

2) Proactive business owners

The reactive business owner lets the year happen to him. He waits until circumstances arise that require him to react, flying by the seat of his pants and rolling with the punches. While this is a great quality to have in terms of remaining adaptable to surprises and curveballs throughout the year, it is not a method that allows you to have control over your business and results. This is a very “let’s see what happens and we’ll do our ‘best’” approach.

The proactive business owner creates his year. He sets specific objectives and intentions with clear targets in mind for revenue, recruiting, and profits. He takes his goal and breaks it down into an executable action plan, and forges after it with gusto. Everything is done on purpose and with purpose. These are the company owners that own their market.

If you’re a company owner or are in a management position, you should be thinking,

“What should I be doing NOW to prepare for a killer year?”

The fact of the matter is that this “down time” during the winter months or slow season is your biggest opportunity to work on the infrastructure of your business and the quality of your sales team. Without the fast-paced, highly charged, demanding nature of “peak storm season,” you have a unique opportunity to focus on improving key parts of your business and team. You have time to learn, teach, recruit, and grow. Proactive business owners are spending this valuable period of time preparing, so that when storm season hits, they aren’t scrambling to come up to speed all at once in a frenzy.

Here are 4 things you should be focusing on right now to ensure you are prepared and ready to rock and roll when the first hail falls this year.

1. Recruiting.

When a storm hits, having capable bodies ready to go will be one of the biggest advantages you’ve got over your competition. Don’t make the mistake of waiting and waiting and waiting to add members to your sales team until a storm hits and you’re completely unprepared, because either a) your competition will be way ahead of you while you scramble to hire, interview, and train your newbies, losing potential sales all the while, or b) you won’t have time to effectively train your new hires to be closers, and they will burn through countless leads during their rushed, costly learning curve.

2. Training.

This is the perfect time to be training your sales team to develop them into a crew of absolute killers. For your existing team, work on getting your entire company on the same sales system, particularly the same sales presentation so you know that it’s a close that WORKS, and also ensure that your company is being represented well across the board. Practice lead generation approaches, objection-handling, and referral approaches.

For your newly added recruits, master the basic fundamentals of the front-end of the sales process (focus on SALES TRAINING first and foremost; the technical training/product knowledge/estimating/measuring is secondary, because remember: your salesmen don’t need to know how to use Acculynx if they can’t close a deal yet!) Get them ready to hit the ground running before storm season. Don’t be the manager that’s working 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, running on 5 hours of sleep, 4 Monster Energy drinks, (poorly) training 3 guys by dragging them along and ineffectively showing them tips here and there and stretching yourself so thin that a) you fail to be a strong, effective leader and teacher, and b) are unable to provide the quality training your new hires NEED in order to succeed.

This is your chance to ramp up the quality of your sales force. Increase their closing ratio, teach them new and advanced skills so they’re better at the door or on an adjuster meeting; turn them into sharks!

Consider this: say your company did $2,000,000 last year with 200 jobs. If you’ve got a current sales team of 4 individuals who each sold an average of 50 deals last year or $500,000 in revenue and they were closing at a company-wide average of 50%, that means to get those 200 deals, they went through 400 leads. If you provide them better sales training to improve their closing ratio by just 10%, with those same 400 leads this year, they’ll close 240 deals, adding an additional $400,000 in revenue to your company for a new annual total of $2,400,000. Simple, strategic tweaks to key areas of your business will have an incredible impact on your results and revenue across the board.

2. Increasing your personal knowledge.

Your team will only be as good as their best member. If you’re the leader of the pack, shouldn’t you make it your number one priority to constantly be learning as much as you can about every angle of the business? The better, more skilled, and more knowledgeable you are, the more information and guidance you can pass on to your team.

The moment you think you know it all is the moment you start falling behind. Stay ahead of the curve. Be a sponge. Soak up as many different strategies, approaches, lessons, techniques, and methods as you possibly can. The more you know, the better you can be, and in an industry like storm restoration where many companies still operate in a very archaic, simple way, learning just a LITTLE bit more than your competition will give you an incredible edge in your market.

What areas of your game could use a little improvement? Could you increase your door-to-door skills? Could your closing percentage be stronger? What would it be like if you learned a new way to handle adjusters’ objections, or learned just 2 new things to supplement to your claims to add an additional $1,000 to your average claim?

Consider the numbers in the previous example. By simply increasing the sales team’s closing skills by 10%, we increased revenue from $2M to $2.4M with 240 jobs. What if you now learned just 1 or 2 new tricks of the trade when it comes to adjuster negotiations and supplementing, and increased your average claim by just $1,000? You would add $240,000 in revenue to your year virtually without ANY additional effort, totaling $2,640,000. Those two simple improvements (and I do mean simple. Really. You don’t even know how simple it can be) added $640,000 in revenue and probably $96,000 in profit to your 2015.

Sound too good to be true? Other contractors are doing it as we speak:

4. Goal setting and plan hatching.

Everyone talks about how important it is to set goals. “If you aim for nothing, you’ll hit it every time.” Defining a goal and putting it out there is great, but even more important is putting together an ACTION plan to EXECUTE that goal. If you say, “I want to double last year’s revenue in 2015!” that’s cool and all, and I’m sure it gives you warm fuzzies to think about doing that, but it’s going to take more than triumphantly standing up at your desk, raising your fists in the air and proclaiming your intention to the world. It’s going to take actual work. Like, you’re going to have to make a plan to achieve that goal, and you’re going to have to follow through with it.

How are you going to do it? How many salespeople do you need to have? How many salespeople will you need to hire to keep that many? How many will you need to interview to hire that many? Where will you find them? How will you improve your advertising? How many leads will you need? How many per week? Your business plan does not work like a GPS. You can’t punch in your annual revenue goal and then not worry about how you’re going to get there. YOU have to create the road map. Everything can be planned out, believe it or not.

Let’s say you know that you want to double your annual revenue from last year to hit $4,000,000, we can break it down all the way to how many doors need to be knocked each week in order to hit that goal. Example:

Last year with 4 salesmen over the course of 48 active selling weeks, you hit $2,000,000 with 200 jobs (average order of $10,000), meaning each guy averaged $500K in sales/50 jobs apiece (approximately 1 job per salesman, per week), and by tracking their activities and results we know they each knock approximately 10 doors to line up 1 inspection, and we also know their company-wide closing ratio is 50%. So they went through 400 leads and 4,000 doors.

Let’s say you interviewed and hired 10 salesmen last year, and 4 stuck. We know you have a 40% retention rate. If you want to double sales, a simple way to plan this would be to double your team, assuming we don’t improve ANY of their skills from last year to this year. To get 8 salesmen, we know we need to hire at least 10 more recruits this year to add 4 to your existing 4.

Those 8, according to the averages within your company, should translate into 8 x $500K = $4,000,000 in revenue and 400 jobs. Since we know they are closing at about 50%, we know we need 800 leads to acquire those 400 deals, and since we know they knock an average of 10 doors to line up 1 appointment, we can make it a big focus to simply achieve 8,000 doors in 48 weeks.

8,000 divided by 48 weeks = 167 doors per week
167 doors/week divided by 8 salesmen = 21 doors per week per salesman

Now you have an action plan, something to hold each salesperson accountable to, and a way to see your year unfold and actively pursue it. Now, this is an abbreviated outline of a much more in depth planning formula, but it gives you a good place to start.

If you want to absolutely launch into 2015 and crush this year with bigger, better results than you’ve gotten in any year previous, you’re going to have to be willing to put in some sweat equity while your competition is kicking back getting fat and lazy. You’re going to have to be willing to do things you’ve never done before. You’re going to need to be willing to think outside the box and pursue new strategies and systems to turn your company into a well-oiled machine. Remember, nothing changes if nothing changes. You can’t continue to do the same things you’ve done up until this point and expect better results.

Do you need help training salesmen? Are you tired of your sales meetings simply being a brow beating session telling everyone to “quit being lazy and go knock more doors?” Are you ready to generate more leads, close more deals, and make your jobs more profitable this year to enjoy more financial freedom without killing yourself doing it? We would be stoked to help you. Roof Sales Mastery provides several online training programs for sales, lead generation, and supplement training, as well as live 1-on-1 online video chat coaching and consulting. If you’d like to learn more or talk directly with me to discuss your goals for 2015, schedule a free 30 minute phone call by clicking here.

Work smarter, not harder,

Becca