Want a crash course on S.M.A.R.T. goals before diving in? Find everything you need to know in our previous article!
Before you can dive into creating goals for your business, it’s important to have a solid understanding of where you stand and how to position yourself for success. As you take a closer look at your numbers from the preceding months, take the time to note the circumstances that have had an impact on your progress — natural disasters, a shifting economy and employee turnover can all play a role, for instance — to see where you had to pivot and how those changes affected your ability to meet your goals.
When you consider how those circumstances come into play and start to view those factors with S.M.A.R.T. goal setting in mind, you’re ready to start focusing on your current figures and the goals you should be setting for the future. The process starts with exploring top-level data to see where you stand on your current long-term goals to gain insight into setting new goals that push your business in the right direction — and you’ll find it all in WorkWave PestPac.
Tools for Tracking Revenue
As you start to see a wider story in your data, drill down to get into the specifics and gain insight into the changes you can make to drive the changes you want to see in your business. With your overarching goals in mind, explore metrics not only year-over-year but month-over-month and week-over-week to see where you succeeded and where you fell short. Use the Invoice Register and Payment Register to take a closer look at the billable work and income received during a given date range. As you examine these numbers, think of it as a business health check-up.
Most importantly, ask yourself why these changes occurred. Did you change your processes? Did your team know what goals were the most important for your business? Focus on what worked, what didn’t and what you can do to embrace the momentum behind positive numbers and how you can implement new changes that will move you toward your big picture goals.
Tools for Tracking Efficiency and Finding Areas of Opportunity
As you start to think about setting goals for the future, you’ll find yourself looking for the areas where you can make tangible changes to drive improvement. By taking a closer look at your business’s current standing, you can narrow down your most promising areas for potential improvement.
The Business Valuation Report within PestPac provides future projections of your potential revenue based on your current service setups and renewals. With this information, you can spot trends, identify the various times throughout the year that your business tends to dip or swell, and plan accordingly to identify changes you can make to help you meet your goals.
Taking a closer look at your outstanding balances and credits can help you spot missed opportunities for cash flow. Examining your Accounts Receivable Reports with broad search criteria gives you an overview of your open credits and balances. If you find that the information isn’t what you expected, reevaluating how you approach outstanding balances can be the first step toward establishing a goal for improving your processes moving forward to streamline your future cash flow. Consider options like setting up auto-bill, requiring customers to keep cards on file, updating the verbiage on your customer-facing documents or providing e-pay links to make paying more convenient for your customers.
Improving the efficiency of your technicians in the field is another potential area of focus when it comes to making changes to help you meet your goals. PestPac’s Tech Production Report breaks down the time your technicians are spending in the field, giving you a straightforward look into how much you’re investing into labor and your return on that investment. If you have a high ratio of callbacks vs. billable work, for instance, you may want to set a goal of shifting that ratio and implement a plan for achieving an attainable shift on a realistic timeline.
Tools for Evaluating Your Internal Processes
While auditing your metrics to get a firm grasp on your business’s current standing, it’s important to take the time to look inward and evaluate how your internal processes are directly affecting your numbers.
To start, review your Invoice List in PestPac to see how much potential revenue you missed out on over the past 12 months as a result of canceled services. This potential revenue can account for a significant amount, and reevaluating your internal processes can help you to avoid facing the same problems in the coming year. Explore the information and begin forming a plan for how you can minimize cancellations.
There’s no one-size-fits-all option for improving the situation moving forward; it all depends on your existing processes. You may need to reevaluate your existing cancellation policies, provide your technicians with more training to improve customer retention or use PestPac to confirm appointments with customers beforehand — or a combination of all three. However you approach your internal processes, it’s key to make sure all of the players on your team are on the same page when it comes to your goals and any changes to your processes so that you’re always consistent when it comes to handling not-serviced visits and callbacks.
While you’re taking a closer look at your internal processes when it comes to common problems like cancellations, be sure to examine your scheduling processes, too. Determining how effective your current scheduling allows you to identify gaps in your efficiency and make changes to enable more accurate scheduling and more efficient deployment of your technicians. PestPac’s Schedule to Actual Comparison Report highlights gaps in your scheduling, giving you the foundation you need to identify inaccuracies and make the necessary changes.
As you identify discrepancies in your scheduling, you can review your Service Setup list to plan for adjustments that will keep you on track. Examine your active setups for different services and, if your Schedule to Actual Comparison has highlighted recurring issues, make changes that will enable more accurate scheduling moving forward. Be sure to consider these updates as you consider other facets of your business, such as job pricing, technician workloads, frequency tracking and special scheduling instructions.
Honing In on Objectives to Help Your Meet and Exceed Your Goals
Using PestPac to shed light on your current metrics and processes, you’ll likely begin formulating goals for your business without even realizing it. Make a note of those goals, then review them with the S.M.A.R.T. goals criteria in mind. By ensuring all of your goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-oriented, you can naturally start prioritizing which goals are the most important to your business’s success and determining the steps you’ll take to achieve them.
With each goal, take the time to consider how it impacts your team and what you’ll need from them. Ask yourself how you plan to inform them of these new goals and their part in achieving them, as well as where they’ll need to begin. Work with your team to delegate individual steps of the process appropriately, ensuring that you and your team all have access to the resources needed to achieve the S.M.A.R.T. goals you set.As you work toward these new goals together, hold yourself and your team accountable by using the tools available in PestPac and sticking to each element of the S.M.A.R.T. philosophy. As time goes on, you’ll see the time you take to set and monitor these individual objectives pay off as you achieve your goals and your business reaches its full potential! Learn more about how the right software can help you audit your metrics, set the right goals for your business and achieve those goals by visiting PestPac online today.
