Setting your goals.

Week 1: Evaluation of what you have and determining your goals.

Management thinker Peter Drucker is often quoted as saying,

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”

I enjoy watching the TV shows Shark Tank, The Profit, and Pawn Stars. Why? Because it’s all about the numbers. The best way to build a business is to run it by the numbers.

Every successful business measures something. Every sports team, every entertainment company, and every charity measures something. Ever watch a baseball game? The stats that they keep are extraordinary. Ever look at the Google Adword dashboard? Ever wondered who keeps all the stats for the stock market?

Your window covering business is no different. Fortunately for you, there is only a handful of things to measure

If you are not tracking where your leads come from, this will be your first task.

Activity	Cost	# Leads	$ Sale	$ Average Net	Cost Per Lead
Yellow Pages
Local Paper
Direct Mail
Referral Plan
Strategic Plan
Website/SEO
Pay Per Click

The best way to get started is to write down what you’re doing now and evaluate.

This can be done in an Excel spreadsheet or in QuickBooks. A quick note: If you’re unsure of how to use either one of these programs, there are thousands of people who will do it for you for very little money. QuickBooks offers coaches and finding a person to set up the Excel spreadsheet is as simple as asking someone. A FREE resource is YouTube. Thousands of video tutorials are available.

Let’s talk about benchmark goals like sales goals, revenue goals, and growth goals. We need a starting point and a goal. For most small window covering businesses you will only have 5-10 items you track.

You can set up groups like sales and marketing, financials, and operations. This is how great businesses are grown.

This is where you need to take control of your business. Once youknow your numbers you’ll be able to sleep at night. This exercise will shine a light of truth on your business. It’s scary and at the same time it’s very exciting. Clear Numbers = Clear Minds

Many owners take this much further and start to measure every aspect of their businesses. I have a friend who has a business with 179 employees and has built a dashboard to measure everything. He knows where every dollar out went and where every dollar in came from. He knows which sales people are doing well and which ones are struggling. He knows how many jobs are being installed each day and how many were sold. His dashboard is a thing of beauty.

It’s time to start building your dashboard.