Are you a Business Owner or Just Self Employed?

How to Become a Business Owner Instead of Just Being Self-Employed.

Lets face it, as small business owners, we would like to be able to take a vacation here or there without having the wheels fall off back at the shop.   I know plenty of you who haven’t taken more than 5 days off in a row, EVER.  Some of you are too afraid to leave early on a Friday in fear of what may happen while you are gone.  Why do some owners seem to live a care-free life, full of making money while others seem tied to their shop, unable to leave early on a Friday for fear of some disaster happening? The differences are direction, structure, and empowerment.

3 Differences between a “Business Owner” and being “Self-Employed”

1.  A Business Owner Sets Clear Expectations and Procedures for Employees-  While running a granite shop is a demanding job, it can be made much easier when employees understand what they are supposed to do, when they should do it, and the goals of their job.   The majority of employees are looking for direction on what you want, but they don’t really want you micro-managing them every step of the way.  In order to take a step away, you need to set some basic operating procedures, and you need to let everyone in your company know what your business goals are.  A great way to start is to make a position description of every job in your company. The fastest way to get this done is to make each employee write down his own understanding of the job duties.  You will find out very quickly where the holes are.  Then you can fill out the missing items.  

2.  A Business Owner Makes Use of “Captains” –  After identifying all the job duties, you need to make sure each person knows who they report to.  The way to visualize this is by using an organization chart.  Make sure each person in the company reports to someone.  Identify 1 or 2 responsible leaders that you can depend on and elevate them so they have people reporting to them.   It is important to do this at least 6 months prior to your vacation so there isn’t crazy infighting while you are gone.  Sometimes after doing this, you will find that some employees are not on board with the program.   You have to let them go.  Once you have this structure in place and your Captains trained, you can go on vacation.  You will only have to make daily follow-up calls with 1 or 2 people to make sure everything is ok and then get on with enjoying yourself.

3. A Business Owner Empowers His Employees – In order to empower your employees, you need to instill in your employees the idea that everyone is here to make money, but if the company doesn’t succeed, everyone is out on the street.  Everyone in your company needs to make sure whatever they are doing, they are doing it to benefit the company, not anyone else.  They need to know that they need to use their best efforts to solve their own problems and not come to you unless the problem is worth x dollars.  You need to create an environment where if an employee is making a genuine effort to help the company, but makes a mistake, they aren’t punished.  Only corrected and taught the best way to handle the situation.

Some employees are so scared to think for themselves, they will only do exactly what you ask.  

I know a guy who told one of his employees to go out and get some “Duncan Donuts” for their employee meeting one morning.  In my friend’s mind, Duncan Donuts meant any generic donut.  “Should be a 15 minute errand”, he thought.  After 3 hours, when his employee returned with the Duncan Donuts, my friend yelled at him trying to figure out what took so long.   The employee replied, ” well I drove past Krispy Kreme, Fresh Donuts, Bill’s Donuts….., until I found Duncan Donuts”  My friend was irate that the employee didn’t make the executive decision to just get whatever donuts.  I reminded my friend that he had conditioned his employees to only do exactly what was asked, because when they tried to solve a problem in a different way, he would yell at them.

These tricks are super easy, and can be implemented in under two weeks for a shop of less than 10 people.  The benefits are countless, but one of the biggest ones may be returning you to sanity.

Make Your Website Work Harder for You!

Make Your Website Work Harder for You!

I remember about 10 years ago I was talking to my sales rep for the yellow pages.  He kept trying to get me to spend more money on phone book ads.  I told him that by 2016 no one would be using the phone book anymore ( I didn’t fully believe it, but I thought it would be a possibility.  Fast forward to today and it is really amazing how true that prediction was.  I have spoken to many granite shop owners who don’t realize how important it is to have a good web page.  However, the large shops have been investing money in this area for years.    If you don’t have a website, then you need to get one.  But just putting up a basic site just doesn’t work anymore.  You have to make sure it is a tool that converts visitors into customers.  There are several ways to improve your website’s conversion rate, and while many are simple in theory, you may be well served to use the services of a pro.  I use a company called digitalharvester.com to help me.  When talking to they guys over there I found a couple of things everyone should implement.

Use Call Tracking.

If you are using multiple lead sources to generate traffic to you granite shop’s web page, then you want to make sure you can trace your leads to the different channels.  This used to be an expensive proposition, $50-$60/ month per line could add up fast.   Now, with VOIP technologies, you can get different phone numbers for less than $10.00/ month and some are even free! (Sort Of).  I know some guys that were spending a ton of money on mailers that they thought were bringing in business, but when they added tracking, they found that 80% of their leads were coming from their website.  They took that wasted money and put it into a better converting channel.

Analyze your Google Analytics data.

Once you have your site up, you need to be able to see what people are doing on it.  Google has powerful tools that can help you to see if your pages make sense, by showing where your customers go in the site, where they came from, what were they searching for to find you, etc..  All this Data is important so you can improve the customer’s’ experience on your site and hopefully call you to do the job for them.  This can be a difficult thing to learn, so I have chosen to get professional help.  I like to stick with what I am best at, selling the best stone tools around, (ahem), and let the people who know what they are doing take care of these things.

These are just a couple ideas that should help you in your search for more of the higher quality customers you all want.  In the past, advertising was this black hole that you threw money into and hoped that you would get some back.  So many people were wasting so much money on mailers, phone book ads, newspaper ads, etc., and not getting anything out of it.   I hope you will all make the jump to the digital age and get a site if you don’t have one, and improve the sites you already have to turn them into cash generating machines.