Good Morning Elephant Hunters,
There’s an old joke that goes: How do you eat an
elephant? Well, one bite at a time of course!
One problem I run into when having a whole weekend (Sunday
off J)
to think about Mondays K&E, is I tend to write too much. It might even feel
like homework just to read my pontifications.
How
to Eat an Elephant
There’s an old joke that goes: How
do you eat an elephant? Well, one bite at a time of course!
There is a common sentiment when we
begin working on our monthly goals, and it goes something like this:
There’s just too much! I need to
make sure my clients are taken care of. I need to make all the sales calls, I
need to make follow up calls, go to Tuesday meeting, self gen, pop into my
installs, send thank you cards, balance my books to make sure I am being paid correctly,
remember to make the change order form for that message I received from my
customer, etc… And somehow—in the midst of all that—We have to perform a small
miracle to get our customers to buy from us. How can we possibly do all
that? We don’t have time to sit down and
develop all these systems, scripts, forms and standards. It would take us a
solid six weeks of work just to get this business organized!
Does that sound familiar? Can you
hear some of yourself in that tirade? You’re not alone. Every business owner
since the beginning of time has struggled with how to do it. How do we develop our
business, when we can barely get it to run in the first place?
I’m sorry, but I have some bad news
for you. We can’t. We will probably never find the time to do it all, if we’re
focused on how to do it. Why? Because our focus is off. It
doesn’t matter how many times we release our arrow of good intentions, we’ll
never hit the target if we’re not aiming at it. Oh sure, we may get lucky every
now and then, and hit the target out of sheer luck. It happens. But we’ll never
achieve consistent, predictable results if we don’t take careful aim each time.
We
Can’t Hit a Target if we’re Aiming at the Sky
At the risk of seriously mixing my
metaphors, that’s why we can’t eat that elephant: our aim is off. It’s not
about how. It’s about what. The problem is not how to eat
the elephant. It’s identifying the elephant in the first place. Once we’ve
identified the elephant, then we can focus on having a system to prioritize
where we’re going to start.
We need a vision of what our
business will look like when the elephant has been eaten. Without the vision,
nothing we do in our business will make much of a difference. We might make
some small changes, and we may even see some good results of those changes.
Everyone gets lucky, once in a while. But without the vision, our business
will never truly become a great business. We have to stop focusing on the
work, and start focusing on the results.
Focus
on the Results, Not on the Work
What is our vision of our business?
What do we want it to look like?
As a business owner, our most important
job is the development of our vision. That’s it. It’s not taking care of
our clients, it’s not making sales calls, it’s not advertising our services,
it’s not paying the bills it’s not even managing our time. Our job, our most important
role, is defining what our business will look like when it’s finished, and making
sure we remember every day.
It can be a real struggle for some
people. But think about it this way: this isn't about how we’re going to
produce a widget. It’s not about how we’re going to deliver our widget to our
customer. It’s not about how Empire is going to help us make your widgets the
best on the market. We need to focus on the what. We need to focus on
the vision. What is the widget going to do for our client? What will it look
like? What is our promise to our customers? What will we feel like, coming to
work every day? What will set our widget apart from every other widget out
there? Focus on the results, not on the work.
Now we might be thinking, “I have a vision for my business, but my support staff (family, mgmt., etc) isn’t helping me achieve it!” Of course not. If our support staff isn’t helping us achieve our vision, it’s because we haven’t effectively communicated that vision to them. They can’t help us hit the target if they don’t know where the target is. They can’t help us hit the target if they don’t know what it looks like.
Now we might be thinking, “I have a vision for my business, but my support staff (family, mgmt., etc) isn’t helping me achieve it!” Of course not. If our support staff isn’t helping us achieve our vision, it’s because we haven’t effectively communicated that vision to them. They can’t help us hit the target if they don’t know where the target is. They can’t help us hit the target if they don’t know what it looks like.
Approach
that Elephant Strategically
To determine what bite we need to
take first, we need a strategy. With a defined strategy, we can choose where to
start. What is our system for prioritizing? Without that system, we’ll get
stuck in reactive mode. We’ll develop whatever system seems most important
right at that moment. We’ll deal only with our biggest frustration that minute.
And while we’re putting together a system to deal with that frustration, five
more problems will show up, each seemingly more important, more vital to the
survival of our business than the one we’ve started working on. We need a
system to prioritize. We have to pick and choose our battles.
Take small bites out of our
elephant. Take the right bites. But most importantly, determine what our elephant
will look like when we’ve eaten the whole thing this will help keep us focused
on the results, not the work.
Normally I just show the 5 figure deals here, but did such
an OUTSTANDING job Saturday that I thought I would show some additional orders
written!!
We sold over $153K worth of Empire Love Saturday – You guys/gals
ROCK!!!!
Question for Ya’ll: What do you think is more important; 1)
selling 100% (sometimes that is only 1 appt)? or 2) selling a 2fer (which may
not be 100%)?
Vision without action is simply a daydream, but trying
to tackle too much at one time is simply unrealistic. - Japanese Proverb
Floors By Tomorrow
Auth Rep of Empire Today
Sales Trainer
720-371-2000
Connect with me online:
PS: I often ask if you know your numbers. Sometimes the
simplest way to add them is to grab your calculator, go to your portal, sign
in, click order status, then add up all your orders set to install this month.
If you would like help learning how to copy/paste into your excel spreadsheet, watch the quick video I made!!
PSS: Are you handing out a ton of business cards to everyone
you meet? Is it time to order more so you don’t run out?
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