Prioritising is one of those things that seems to continuously go wrong – when you think you’re finally on top of everything your prioritisation crumbles, things are in shambles and chaos reigns again. 

I know the feeling, we all do. 

It’s overwhelming to have so much that needs doing and feel that you never have enough time, capacity or finance to complete everything yet you need all three of those things to grow your business. 

So you’re stuck in this perpetual cycle of endless frustration. 

When put like that, it makes you rethink why you’re doing this in the first place… 

Wait, stop right there. That’s a negative thought process to get into. There are plenty of ways to prioritise that are effective. 

The reason you’re prioritising is well, because that’s how you get things done and you want to get things done so you can grow your business, so it can become more successful with you happier and less stressed, right?

Yes Jon you’re right – stop it, you’ll get me too excited… 

To prioritise effectively the first thing we have to do is divide up your priorities. I like to think of them as divided into three things – your money, your capacity and your time:

Your Money 

To grow your business you need more money. This means you need to prioritise your sales and marketing to bring in more jobs. 

Normally in our coaching program, we’d focus on 1 of 3 things depending on what your individual business needs. 

1. Get Busier 

Bring in more money and generate more income. We’d focus on getting busier aka your marketing. Thinking about what aspects of your marketing process needs work – how to further build the process so you are consistently bringing in leads. Then we’d focus on turning these leads into sales. We also do the things that will bring the quickest result with the least effort first. 

2. Look into profit leaks 

One of the first things I do with new clients so go over their numbers, make sure their P&L lines up, that they don’t have any leaks and if they do we fix them, we don’t plug them – we fix them. 

3. Better Margins 

We look at the margin you’re making on jobs currently and see if we can pump it up a bit so you are making a healthy profit on every single job. 

Your Capacity

Another part of prioritising revolves around your capacity, as a business owner you know that your capacity to do work is limited by the number of employees you have. 

So you maybe have work flooding in – your marketing machine is working like a well oiled automated machine – however, you don’t have the capacity. A problem that trades business owners often run into or see as a potentiality on the horizon and instead choose to let those jobs go, pulling themselves into a spiral of limited growth and upward profitability. 

Capacity is a seemingly simple fix – hire more staff. 

The first place your mind goes is to more tradespeople and this isn’t the wrong area to look but you’re not limited to it. 

I do realise it is difficult in the current climate to find good, trusted tradespeople. 

Lots of my clients have been struggling, however, a solution there is persistence and great marketing and follow-up – quick follow-up is often key… 

Anyway, I digress, the point I’m getting at is you can’t just look at expanded capacity in terms of your hands-on team – you need to be thinking about the other aspects of your business where you can grow your capacity. This could be admin assistants, virtual assistants and outsourcing to people like job estimators or marketing experts. 

You can also think of capacity in terms of technology and tools and by this, I am referring to job management platforms, quoting software or safety management systems. Each one of these tools frees up you and your team’s time. 

Any of these solutions gives you more capacity to take on more work – prioritising your profitability and growth. 

Your Time 

Your time is finite. You are only a single person. You might believe you are more but the harsh reality is that you are not and if you take on too much you will burn out, limiting the entire output of your business. 

What do you do? 

In the Tradies Toolbox Coaching Program, we call it clearing the decks – you need to make time i.e. prioritise the big actions that only you can do to progress your business. 

How might you do that? 

Delegate – this is one option. I know sometimes you find it hard to pass on jobs to your team. You’re concerned they might not do the job to a standard as high. This thought process will be detrimental to the future growth and success of your business. 

You need to delegate to expand. 

The way to do this is to build cohesive systems for your team to follow. 

Another way to free up your time is to hire or expand the business’s capacity which is intrinsically tied to what I’ve talked about above. 

So, I’ve given you a number of ways to work on how you go about prioritising the different aspects of your business to accomplish either more money. More time or more capacity. 

Want help actioning these ideas? 

Give us a call… we’ll help you strategise all of this. 

Or, if you’re not ready to do that comment ‘Prioritising’ and we’ll send over the guide.