John Joyce is a contractor with a heart of gold. He and his team have passion, integrity and a dream of dramatically growing their business. They work in a midsize market, and the potential to dominate is huge.
They have been enjoying consistent growth, but it came with no real plan, no true buy-in and too much stress. I helped John and his team put a success strategy in place. We focused on empowering the leadership team with clear responsibilities and accountabilities. We devised methods for greatly improving and growing profits, and we set the company on a path of diversification to balance out its revenue profile.
Having a success strategy is the start; the next step is having an easy-to-follow action plan. So we broke down the annual strategy into quarterly chunks, making it easy to follow.
That was a breakthrough, but it was not enough. The question arose: How do you ensure this plan gets followed every day out in the field, where the real money is made and lost? We needed a daily plan. To set that up, we took the annual budget and broke it down into weekly and then daily targets.
This is the silver bullet in business—breaking down your goals for every employee, so they know what they need to do each day to consider that day a win. Figuring that out is half the battle; the other half is staying accountable each day to these metrics.
What hinders accountability in your company?
When I met with Joyce and his team, we discussed what obstacles the division leaders would face in setting daily goals, measuring daily results and getting their crews to operate with daily systems and goals.
John’s team never thought this way before. In the past, they focused on job costing and hitting budgeted hours. They never focused on truly maximizing production each day or on developing the right daily habits with their crews.
To achieve daily success, you have to be willing to follow the adage “one day at a time.” This mantra pertains not only to one’s personal life but also to one’s professional and business goals.
For fast business growth, you first need professional growth. To underpin your business growth as we have described above, it greatly helps if you are also pursuing a professional growth strategy.
Professional growth happens when all team members take personal responsibility for how they show up at work each day and what they personally accomplish. This takes daily planning and reflection. Some professionals do their planning and reflection in the evening, some do it in the morning and some do both. All successful people routinely reflect on what they’re trying to achieve, what they are doing well and what they want to change and improve about themselves and their results.
For example, I have a morning routine that includes reviewing my successes of the previous day. This has two profound benefits: I start the day on a positive note with a strong sense of satisfaction, which trickles down to everyone I work with. Secondly, I document what I did the day before that worked well, so I can systemize and repeat it. By doing this review every morning, I am improving myself faster than the average person who is merely going through the motions.
What if you could get your entire leadership team to commit to a professional growth plan? Could you envision how it would help your entire company and all your staff to grow?
Making this switch to operating one day at a time will make all the difference to your business success. The “Fast Growth Happens” figure shows that you grow fastest when you are improving in all three corners of the top triangle and you are answering all three questions in the bottom triangle each day.
The successful journey of a thousand miles requires a sure and steady foot each day.
Jeffrey’s breakthrough idea: Take time each day to be proactive in your planning and reflecting.
