Contractors often ask us, “How do I expand my plumbing business?” They want to know how to get more leads, improve SEO, and maximize paid advertising. If you run your own business, you fully understand how difficult it can be to achieve growth and find success in a given industry.
After you have gotten your business off the ground, finding a way to maintain growth is essential. If your company remains stagnant early on, it likely will not last all that much longer. Granted, your company does not have to become a national powerhouse, but it needs to grow its local presence to find continued success.
Expanding and growing your business can mean something different for each business owner. Maybe you are merely looking to expand by eventually adding employees. Perhaps you want to increase profitability and revenue. Or maybe you want to find a balance in your life that isn’t there.
Whatever the goal, it is essential to know what you are looking to achieve to grow your business to the level you want it to succeed. Don’t worry about becoming a giant; look for steady, reasonable growth that can lead to positive things for your business.
But how to achieve this? Here are a few helpful tips to get your business on the right path towards growth and expansion heading into 2023.
Identify Growth Opportunity Areas
Stating that you “want to grow” is as vague as it gets. There are so many different areas that a company can grow and expand. You must identify what areas you want to grow in. Having clear, concise goals can make it easier to focus on those goals and put you on the exact path towards achieving those goals.
Don’t be afraid to be as specific as possible with your growth goals. Maybe you want to grow profit; perhaps you want to increase revenue. Or maybe you want to expand the number of trucks you deploy, the number of employees you have on the payroll, or the number of customers you have.
Whatever the goal, make sure that you narrow it down to a few specific areas. The key here is to make reasonable goals for yourself and your business. You don’t want to get too carried away with this – trying to expand in too many areas will leave you unfocused and will defeat the purpose – so make sure that you limit it to just a couple of places at a time.
You can also attack this in a bit of a different way. Consider how each area impacts the other areas of your business. For instance, instead of adding to the number of trucks that you deploy, think about expanding the number of employees on your payroll. This way, when you grow the number of employees you have, you are forced to increase the number of trucks you deploy.
This strategy can help you to determine where you want to see growth. If you feel like expanding in one area could trickle into others, you might put a greater priority on those areas. Ultimately, it is essential to know your goals and where you want to expand the most. And it is just as important to understand why you want to grow.
Setting these goals will help you get some focus involved and make those goals a reality.
Set Specific and Measurable Goals
Break down your goals into a bit more specific category. Instead of saying “I want more employees,” think about what the result will look like by the end of a year, two years, and five years. Much like creating these goals is to eliminate the vagueness of wanting to expand, envisioning what you want will help you determine the best way to get there.
Let’s take the “I want more employees” goal into account. Consider that not all employees are assets. Do you want to grow the number of employees that are on the payroll? Or do you want to find the versatile and valuable employees you can delegate to and ultimately trust?
Knowing what you want out of these goals helps to refine the vision down even further and give you more concrete focus. After all, you are trying to implement consistent growth area by area. Growth requires patience that not every business owner possesses.
Speaking of, focusing on these goals can help you to develop patience as a business owner. Patience is essential to the success of your business. If you don’t have patience, how are you expected to grow your business?
Having the patience to work towards your goals and to see them develop is vastly essential. By working steadily towards these goals, you will develop the patience you need as a business owner and will create an invaluable skill along the way.
You can even take it one step further by writing out the details of each of your goals. Goal-setting will give you something concrete to focus on, and you can even create something of a checklist to follow as you continue to work towards those goals.
Develop a Strategy to Execute Your Goals
Envisioning the goals that you want to achieve is undoubtedly a critical step in the process. Without this, you can’t begin to create the kind of progress that your business craves. But how can you expand upon that vision and make your goals attainable? How can you start the work towards achieving those goals of growth?
The best way to do this is to create steps as you go. Change rarely happens all in short order; it occurs over time and often slowly and steadily if you are doing it correctly. Without steps in place, you might lose sight of your goals because of the time that it takes to develop those goals and achieve them.
Creating these steps gives you a growth path to walk down and see the results as you go. Let’s say that you have a goal of adding a dozen new employees over one year; this is, on average, one employee per month. Knowing what your goals are here gives you an idea of what you should be averaging but keeps you on track if you have faster or slower months.
For instance, if you hire two employees in one month and none in another, you know that it averages out and that you are on the way to achieving your goal. Tracking goals is a great way to keep yourself on track and to prevent those highs and lows from throwing you off of your path.
It is also essential to think about the necessary actions to complete those steps. Perhaps you have to implement some plumbing marketing ideas into the mix. Knowing what you need to get to that next step can make it all the more realistic to achieve and help keep a progression towards that goal. There are a ton of little actions and efforts that go into completing a dream; the more you can implement and adhere to, the better the chance you achieve that step or goal.
Create Metrics for Goal Tracking
Some goals are less tangible. For example, maybe you plan to increase the amount of revenue you accrue during a given year. That is a metric that you can calculate as you can track your numbers over a given period of days, weeks, or months and compare it to where you were the previous year.
But some goals don’t have those metrics to make it easy to see how your company is developing. It is for those goals that you need to build a metric for yourself.
Determine how you can measure the progress you are making and know when you might be able to cross that goal off your list. Without these metrics, you might find yourself aimlessly and blindly searching for progress, unsure of when you achieve it.
Find unique ways to track these goals that might not have concrete numbers to them. Maybe you want to improve the quality of your business’ work. You can achieve outreach by campaigning for reviews from customers as you complete each job.
You can then compile the reviews left and determine how you are faring. Review monitoring will give you something tangible to work towards, even if there aren’t concrete numbers to go on.
The key here is to make any of your goals tangible, even if the numbers are not there to back it up. If you can do this, you can give your dreams a level of focus that will only benefit your company and the growth that it hopes to achieve over a given period.
As you can see, the game’s name towards growth for your company is to set clear, concise goals that give you and your company purpose. When you don’t have those things, it can be easy to lose focus and stray away from what you need to do to make your business find continued growth over a given period.
Delegate Growth Tasks to Specialists
One major issue that business owners can run into is the hero syndrome. There are too many business owners who want to do everything themselves and don’t ask for the help they need along the way. The simple fact of the matter is that if you’re going to run a successful business that seems proper growth, you have to know when to delegate and where to ask for help. It is the way of business whether you want to accept it or not.
Where and how you get that help can vary. Maybe you take the time to read something like a magazine article or a book on the topic at hand. Perhaps you end up watching a few educational videos on YouTube to help you along the way. Or maybe it means finding someone to lean on, a person or people you can depend on to help you achieve the goals you have set forth for yourself and your business.
Because most plumbers are hands-on kind of people, it cannot be comfortable to lean on others. But the fact of the matter is that you cannot possibly expect to know everything, learn about everything, and handle all business areas yourself. You need dependable, reliable help, whether in the form of other employees, consultants, or whoever is ultimately up to you.
Businesses that don’t look for help in the right ways are often the ones that fail the quickest. Being successful does not mean doing so by yourself; it means knowing where and when to seek the necessary help to achieve a goal. And if you are achieving goals, your business is making progress and showing growth. And that’s the whole point of this article.
Put that pride aside and reach out for a little bit of help. You will find yourself and your company making the strides you desire because you weren’t afraid to ask for a helping hand. Businesses thrive when people work together, and that shouldn’t be different for your business.
Adjust With Flexibility and Adaptability
One of the most important things about trying to attain a goal is to make sure that you are always trying to improve the chances that you will achieve that goal. Rarely does a plan gets put into place that doesn’t encounter some difficulties or issues; this will likely be true as you implement the program that you deem necessary to achieve the goals towards growth that you have set forth.
Re-assess the goals you have set forth and the progress you may or may not achieve. When you re-assess the steps you outlined, you can adequately identify where you are finding success and where your efforts need work. Not only that, you keep that focused eye towards your goal by looking at it to see where you are having success and where you need work.
Of course, re-assessing is all fine and good, but it won’t do a whole lot of positive things if you aren’t willing to make changes. If you find that one of your steps is not showing the progress you hoped for, don’t just put it out of your mind and hope it will improve. Determine where you can make the changes that will make it a successful step. Again, you aren’t likely to create universally successful actions; one or more of them will need tweaking issues. Be willing to look at that.
Ultimately, the biggest and most important thing that you need to remind yourself along the way is to keep going. Growth and development rarely occur overnight; it is a marathon, not a sprint. It can be easy to lose focus and sight of those goals because you want to see substantial development in short order. But being able to stay focused, keep your eyes on the prize, and continue working is what you will need to do to develop the amount of success and growth you hope to achieve.
It can be challenging to keep these things in mind, but it will also help with your overall patience towards your goal and retain what you want in your mind’s eye. Goals and progress require work; this is a universal truth. Keep your head up, your eyes forward, and focus on what you can do to improve your chances of success. Ultimately, if you put in the work and remain patient, you will see the results.
