Business Success in a Competitive Market
Grow in a competitive market with efficient systems and lean teams
When you envisage growing your business, what comes to mind?
Is it a bigger team? More tradies, a few apprentices, and one or two full-time office staff? Is it a bigger premises, more vehicles, longer-term contracts?
With the dreams of the future comes the realities of the traditional growth path: Big bills from fixed costs each month. Managing payroll, sick leave, and holiday leave. Hiring decisions. Being responsible for multiple livelihoods.
In a booming economic climate, that extra weight that comes with growth can be more of a blessing than a burden. In a competitive one, where things can change quickly, it’s often too heavy for an SME to bear. That’s why many trades business owners throw in the towel, stall their growth, or scale back to a man-in-a-van operation.
Growth is less of a scary prospect when it’s sustainable, easily scalable (in either direction), and comes without heavy overheads. Find out how you can avoid the growth trap with a lean and modernised business model.
Sort out your systems
Small businesses can operate fairly well without formalised, structured systems of administration, communication, and scheduling. If you have two people on your team in addition to yourself and you see each other everyday, locking in systems is very helpful but not always make-or-break.
Systems can make or break a larger business. As you grow, it becomes more and more important to get your operations organised. Without proper processes, you will increasingly suffer from missed messages, double-handling of information, customer misunderstandings, and an administrative mess to deal with at the end of every day.
How? Creating systems that support efficient business operations can include:
Finding a software that matches your workflows as closely as possible, and setting it up to automate a lot of your busywork. Job cards accessible to everyone provide a central source of information, minimising miscommunication, delays, and errors.
Making sure that your paperwork matches your real-life practices, and vice-versa. Written policies and processes are worthless if they’re just collecting digital dust in a Google Drive folder.
Training your people correctly. Knowing what they’re doing on the tools is great, but knowing how to track their time, communicate issues, read a schedule, and pass on the right details to coworkers and clients will save you a lot of time, money, and headaches.
Outsourcing to the experts. Most trades businesses are run by tradespeople, and this means that their talents likely lie somewhere other than invoicing, scheduling, HR, payroll, customer comms, and other administrative tasks. Asking a team like Released for help in choosing a software and creating admin systems is an investment in long-term success.
Lean down your team
For trades businesses, more work means more people. You can’t build more houses, fix more pipes, install more A/C, or hook up more electrics without extra hands on the tools. These are the ones that are working billable hours. As business owners become overwhelmed, they often think that the only option for the ‘other’ work is to hire a full-time office manager to free them up to work on the tools. There are other possibilities!
We’d call the costs of traditional hiring “hidden costs”, but they're only hidden if you're purposely not looking. Everyone is aware that with an employee comes:
Set wages or salary.
ACC levies
Kiwisaver contributions
Sick and holiday pay
Office space and equipment
In addition to these financial obligations, there is added stress to having another person relying on your business entirely, and another person to ‘manage.’
A lean business uses only as many hours as they need, and nothing more. Rather than being locked into a set number of hours per week, they choose a scalable administration resource that comes with none of the abovementioned overheads. Not even an increased coffee budget.
The competitive solution
Our team is a valuable business support resource for many kiwi trades and service businesses. We’ve seen the process of scaling up and scaling back in action firsthand! Some clients have used our team for their admin until they became big and stable enough to hire a full-time administrator, then relied on us for any overflow. Many have increased hours during busy times, and cut them back during slow ones.
That’s how our service is designed to work, and it helps to create those lean, scalable teams.
We can also contribute to putting together those solid, efficient systems we discussed in the first section. With extensive experience in how business backends function best and an unparalleled pool of job management software expertise, Released is a true resource. Our goal is not to work as many hours as possible for any given client; it’s to give multiple clients the boost they need and nothing more.
Clients get one dedicated VA who becomes a part of their team, but have access to the pooled knowledge and experience of the whole team, as well as backup when they are sick or on holiday. Our marketing team can take care of digital marketing when you need it, a simple add-on without the fuss of finding a separate agency. It’s easy, lean, and efficient.
A while back we spoke to Max, who bought a housewash business and dove into the deep end of business ownership. He found that outsourcing admin to the efficient Released team helped him to manage the workload and shift focus to income-earning activities, and grow the team.
"I think when you’re small, there’s a real thought of ‘I have to do everything myself’... you’ll stay self-employed forever but never have a business.”
Interested in building that kind of business? Book in a quick chat with Released and find out how we could help you get ahead.
