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These are the days of the week. These are all of your days. When you do this exercise
of writing everything down in this pretty book, then you identify what it is you're
going to be doing, what you are going to be spending your time on. You delegated other
things. You're working on delegating. So you're going to be identifying what you're spending
your time on. For the moment, it may be pricing. It may be doing the quotes, getting the quotes
out. Whatever it is that you do. So you put a chunk of time into your agenda for doing
this. "Oh, this is in my book. It's in the book." You can just flip to Strategy #2. Just
read the beginning of Strategies 1 and 2 between now and the next time we meet.
Maybe meeting with your team is 7 a.m. 7 until 7:30 maybe, I don't know, is meeting with
your team. The tailgate meeting, the getting them out, giving them the scheduling for the
day or the week. If you're doing it by the day, you need to do it for the week. All that
stuff. This is meeting with your team.
Then maybe your secretary comes in at 8:00 and you're going to meet with her. Yes, I'm
sexist, because I'm old, so I can say secretaries and stuff like that. I've been reamed over
the coals for using antiquated words, so I'm letting you know this is who I am. Let's say
your admin assistant comes in at 8:00. You want to have a meeting with the admin assistant.
What's happening for the week? It depends on how many people you've got, that sort of
thing, but your go-to person, your next go-to person. You want to have a weekly meeting
with that person, but it may not be Monday morning. It's just every morning when they
come in, more than "Good morning, how are you? Did you have a good weekend?" -- and
that's important; we've got to talk to our people like that, because they're a younger
generation -- so more than that, "Okay, what's happening today?" If this is just a daily
meeting. Five minutes, ten minutes.
Here's what you're going to be asking. "How can I help you?" That might just be your five
minute meeting, but at least once in the week, you want to add an hour meeting with your
next in line, in the chain of command, the one you communicate with who then delegates
maybe to other managers, and then those department managers delegate to team leaders, and those
team leaders have the players under them. Whatever your hierarchy is in your business,
you need to be having a meeting with those people. Daily, five minutes. Weekly, maybe
an hour. The people out in the field, just a tailgate meeting. Say "Okay, Joe, you go
here." No, that's not enough. You've got to have the meeting at some point. And you can
meet with all of your techs going out. Fifteen minutes. Especially these techs, they couldn't
do an hour. They would just be stir-crazy. Fifteen minutes maybe.
But have an agenda for your meeting. For each one of these meetings, have an agenda. It
could be safety training, it could be what happened on the last job that went wrong and
you want to bring it to everybody's attention, because it cut down on the profit margin and
that sort of thing. Nobody wants to talk to their people about profit. Hear that all the
time. Talk to them about profit. Remember the vision. Share your vision with them.
In order for us to get where we want to get to, we have to become profitable. Solidly
profitable, so that we can take it to the bank, literally. Because this profit margin
like this, or even profit at the end of the year like that, banks are scared of that.
They're employees; they don't know anything about the risks that business -- well, it's
not healthy for your business. A solid minimum profit margin, and then the rollercoaster
ride is the gravy on the top, or the cream on the top.
So quoting, maybe. How long does it take for you to quote an average job? Hour and a half
is doable. Two hours maximum is doable. Your brain just can't keep chugging on on the same
thing any longer than that. Hour and a half is good. So then you chunk in hour and a half
chunks of doing that. That's the average; how many do you do, on average, in a week?
Six hours in a week, so that would be an hour and a half -- that would be four days. Or
it could be an hour and a half in the morning, hour and a half in the afternoon over two days. 8:30 until 10.
You want to do that four times a week at the same time of day? You want to change it up?
Same time of day works? Okay. What else do you do? You meet with your team in the morning,
and then it looks like however it looks like, like 15 minutes here, half an hour here, 15
minutes here. Let's just take a Monday, for example. Put in a two hour chunk on a day
that may never happen. But then as he maps out the rest of his days by chunking time,
then when he gets a call, it's not last minute. So then when he gets this call, then he takes
this chunk of time and moves it over to Wednesday at 2:00. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.
So he moves it to there so that what was there, he moves over to here, because he's got a
couple of days' notice. Then if that doesn't work because that was scheduled to be with
a client or something like that, or a first time and you don't want to put that off because
you want to be able to serve them well, then you may have to -- like that Wednesday thing
that you're putting in there, and you have a client in there, then you want to really
look at who else can do this site meeting? Who else can meet with that prospective client?
So then you're leveraging your time by developing your people.