Have you ever seen anyone who works out perfectly for one week of the month, and then fall off for a few weeks, get in the best shape of their life? Can you eat great a few days and then gorge yourself and stay feeling great?
Can you build excellence into anything by occasionally killing yourself to do it well?
It seems boring. It doesn’t require a process. It doesn’t require multiple degrees. But, it is probably the most important characteristic to growing a business, or for that matter, doing anything, well.
It is consistency.
Yet it doesn’t happen a lot in small businesses.
Typically a small business will work really hard and diligently to get business. They get the word out, follow-up, and get a few jobs.
Then, they go work the job.
While they are working the job, are they still out trying to get business? No, they are busy doing the work and trying to do it well. But when they finish, will they have more jobs waiting. Not usually.
Unfortunately, to continuously grow your revenues higher each year, you have to be continually building a pipeline of jobs so that you never slow down.
This takes consistent marketing and sales efforts to always be finding new prospects.
How Will I Get All The Work/Jobs Done?
Conceptually, and actually, if you do the work well, you will have the cash flow to hire people to help. As you grow your team, you can do more work and keep your quality.
This grows your referrals. If you get referrals and you keep doing the marketing and sales, you will grow your backlog and grow your revenues.
What If I Slow Down and I Hired a Bunch of People?
This is the first question most small businesses ask themselves when they are considering hiring someone. They usually talk themselves out of it.
But guess what, then they aren’t going to be able to get all of the work done well without killing themselves if they can do it at all.
Several self-fulfilling steps usually happen at this point:
- They turn off the marketing and sales because they are slammed. I don’t need more business, I can barely get this done.
- They may or may not get all of the jobs done on time or well.
- They are exhausted and looking forward to a rest when the jobs are done.
The jobs get done, one way or the other, and you have some money in the bank. But now you need to rest and are just spending the money you made to live on. Once rested and ready to work, you don’t have any or many pending jobs.
You have to start the whole process over again. You have to find work, ramp up, and get it done so you don’t go broke.
If you were so confident that you had tons of work, then why were you not confident to hire someone?
If you were confident that you had enough work, and could turn off all marketing and sales efforts, why couldn’t you hire someone?
If you knew in the end, after all the jobs were done and you rested, that you would have to crank it back up and kill yourself getting new business, why weren’t you confident enough that you could just keep getting business and pay the team you were building?
I get it. It can be scary. But you grew your business to begin with. You did it. It didn’t just happen. And you can keep doing it. It takes hard work. It takes stepping out in faith and hiring people. It takes marketing and sales efforts.
It takes doing it all….consistently.
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