When you have a serviced based business the biggest issue in it is staff. Finding them, hiring them, training them, firing some of them … rinse and repeat. It’s a never ending headache.
When you were working on your own and you were doing everything, you knew that you couldn’t keep doing it all so you thought that hiring a team was the way to go.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s definitely a smart move in many ways.
It’s how you can get time back and increase your business turnover for sure, but it also creates another set of issues and work that you need to do.
You have to have KPI’s in place for you to manage them to, you need to be running meetings and dealing with the day to day dramas that happen. The time that it takes to actually manage the staff you employee starts to increase and increase.
Then because the business is growing you are needing to do more work on the business with marketing and finances because you realise that you can’t take your eye off the business now that you have even more responsibility because these people and their families are relying on you.
All while you are trying to have a life and get your own financial situation in order.
It’s a lot.
And that’s before we even start looking at the fact that because your business is service based you have to have PEOPLE to provide the service before you can get paid.
So if someone is sick or on holidays or worst case leaves, your income suddenly drops but your expenses stay the same… goodbye profit.
It’s a never ending story that just keeps happening over and over again.
Once upon a time in my service based business I was tired, I was frustrated, I was sick of dealing with customers and trying to run my business. I thought that if I just had more staff then there would be more money and that would mean that I could work less.
If only it was that simple.
What happened instead was that I grew a team of 10 people in a serviced based business, which I quickly realised was a recipe for disaster. Things were hectic, I was dealing with drama most weeks, I was constantly marketing to get more people coming in and then constantly monitoring trying to keep customers in my business returning on a regular basis. I knew that it was more expensive to keep finding new people than it was to look after the ones we already had.
I had a staff member leave and I lost a huge chuck of customers which affected my turnover and my profit. When this happened I decided that I would do everything in my power to make sure that was never the situation again. I changed the way the business ran and how we dealt with our customers to prevent that from ever happening again.
When I did this it meant that our customer retention increased even if a staff member left, it meant that my profitability increased, it also meant that I could take time off and not worry about the turnover being impacted by my lack of presence in the business.
It also meant I looked at other ways to produce income using my knowledge and experience instead of the qualification that I had.
This meant I had more money and time in my personal life to enjoy the free time that I had, to be able to travel and experience life instead of being stuck in the day to day running of the business.
The biggest lesson I have learned over the last 12 years of employing more than 100 people in my own businesses, is that LESS staff is actually better. More is NOT the answer.
The other part of the answer to still being able to increase your turnover and profitability without more staff, is looking at HOW can you create revenue that’s NOT based on providing a service to someone and getting paid once the service is completed.
It takes some serious thinking outside of the box for that to happen, to come up with a strategy for your business as to what that looks like.
If you’d like to learn more about how you could do exactly what I’ve done, fill out the form below and we can have a chat!
