With the challenges of material shortages, rising costs and lack of trades it would be easy for renovation business owners to feel powerless to manage their business effectively. But there are 5 positive steps you can take today that will help you harness the strength of your business and create a more stable, and profitable, business for the future.
1. Be on top of scheduling
It sounds basic, but this is an essential task of every successful business. Scheduling is a skill set that many business owners don’t have but last-minute scheduling or closing your eyes and hoping for the best is not going to lead to a happy customer or a well-executed renovation project.
When you plan in advance and schedule correctly, the job starts on time, everyone knows where they need to be (and when), materials and supplies are ordered in advance and are available when needed, the customer is kept informed and everyone is happy.
The number one rule with renovations is to start on time and finish on time – and it’s here that effective scheduling is the key.
If you are working with contractors, it’s recommended to use a scheduling tool that allows you complete visibility across calendars, projects and tasks, and across the whole team. A CRM such as Ayrmont ARMS gives you the control you need to ensure the renovation runs smoothly. Nothing, in your customer’s eyes, says “confidence” more than a schedule they can understand, trades who turn up on time and know what they are doing, and a stress-free renovation.
2. Get accurate with your quoting
Too many busy designers or business managers do not take the time to create accurate quotes that truly reflect the costs of the renovation project. And customers, naturally, are not impressed when you have to go back to them for more money throughout the project.
Yes, accurate quoting takes time but the benefits are plenty – earn your customer’s trust, provide the correct pricing, and accurately measure your true profitability.
Many business owners are still using tools such as Excel to generate quotes and, while this can sometimes be effective, it’s not a system that “talks” to your other business systems so there is still a manual process involved. With a CRM system, you have tools to generate accurate quotations, better visibility of costs and outgoings, better relationships with suppliers, more effective management of sales staff (and commissions) and the ability to generate reports that allow you to see across the whole business, rather than just at one job.
Ayrmont ARMS keeps all this documentation in one location, helping business owners stay in control of material prices and ensure updated costings that produce accurate quotations.
3. Take control of variations
Once a renovation project starts, life can get very busy and you likely have a number of tasks all being juggled at once. It’s rare these days for a renovation project to go through without at least one variation but, when you are busy, it’s easy to think that you’ll get to it later or you rely on a verbal conversation with the client about what needs to change, or be added.
This is a sure-fire way to create misunderstandings and arguments at the end when it comes to final payments. All requests for variations should be fully documented with a quote and an acceptance (signed) and a solid variation workflow created. This is a fundamental part of controlling the costs of the project and ensuring you can still make a profit.
Using a CRM allows you to keep all documentation, discussions, agreements and decisions in one location and you can quickly, and accurately, produce figures that show the updated profit/loss of a project. This system also helps prevent costly mistakes or misunderstandings with staff who are managing schedules or ordering materials as the updates are automatically made on a system that everyone has access to.
4. Keep costings updated
Every day seems to bring an update from suppliers on the costs of their products and materials – and it’s almost always an increase in pricing. To ensure the profitability of your business, you must also ensure that these increases are reflected accurately in your quotations to customers. Too often, costing updates from suppliers are pushed aside and this leads to smaller and smaller margins until they are changed in the system.
Ayrmont ARMS allows you to easily input new price lists and will automatically allocate the updated pricing to any active, but not finalised, quotations. This gives business owners the confidence of profitability in every project and helps alleviate the risk of losing money on a project.
5. Make sure you collect your final payments
For some reason, it’s this final step that seems to trip up so much renovation business owners. That final payment is vital as it means the job is complete, the client is happy and the business can move on. Too many businesses see projects run over time at the end of the process with small (usually avoidable) installation or maintenance issues that you just can’t seem to get resolved. The longer this goes on, the unhappier the customer and the less likely it is that you can secure that final payment without a long, drawn out battle.
As the business owner, the buck stops with you but the good news is that, when well-managed right from the start, renovation projects can move seamlessly through the schedule and be completed on time, meaning your final payment is easy to collect.
Really, what all these steps come down to is being on top of the process from the very beginning through to the very end. As a business owner, you are doing yourself a disservice by not using the technology available to automate many of these processes and allow you to do what you do best – which is running a successful renovations business.
Ayrmont ARMS provides you with powerful tools that support your efforts and actions as a business owner. It gives you control of many business processes that don’t have to be manual and take away the risk of human error. But this system also gives you better relationships with your employees, your contractors, your suppliers and your customers by ensuring everyone knows what everyone else is doing. So, can you really risk running your business without Ayrmont ARMS? Why not get the right tools for the job?
For more information visit https://ayrmont.com.au/
