Accelerate Your Service Business in 2014: 3 Steps to Achieving Success Faster

This article originally appeared in the January-February 2013 issue of Snow Business.

Success! The word has a nice ring to it. We all want to be successful, right? And the only thing better than success is attaining it faster. So here’s my take on how to speed up the success of your snow business.

Getting ahead in the business and achieving success doesn’t come easily to most contractors. I came to find that having a clear vision for what I was working tirelessly toward was what kept me going.

When I was operating my company, GroundMasters, success meant different things to me at different times. In the beginning, it was winning as much work as I could. In the end, before I sold GroundMasters, it was about benchmarking all areas of my business so I could measure every possible aspect of it and improve where I was lacking.

No matter what success meant, I always wanted to get ahead and had some vision of how to do so. I then turned that vision into a plan our team could execute. Once I got this process down, the success of GroundMasters accelerated tremendously.

Here’s the simple success formula I followed: See it. Review it. Execute it.

See It: Visualize your Success

The first part of the success formula is deciding what success means to you. You need to see it and define it before you can accelerate the achievement of it.

Now is the time to do this. It’s the beginning of a new year, and there is no better time to sit down with your closest business influencer and talk about how your business defines success.

By taking the time to drill down on the subject, I believe you will get a much clearer view of what you would describe as “success.” I also think you will be surprised at how achievable this vision is once you precisely identify it.

The key is to be specific. It’s not enough to say we want to “grow the company.” Be specific about who, what, where, how, why and when. A more specific growth goal is to say: “We will grow the company 15% in Q1 by increasing our ready fees 5% and the number of leads generated by 20%.”

Review It: Get Clarity

Once you have defined your vision, meet with your key staff to discuss it. As they review it, they are sure to have ideas, suggestions, concerns and other feedback.

This staff feedback creates a reality check that can be key to accelerating success in your business. It provides clarity on how achievable your specific vision of success is. It allows you to put some checks and balances in place so you know you are headed in the right direction.

Reviewing your vision for success with staff also helps identify those important “why” questions: Why we are doing certain things? Why we are not doing things?

A clear vision allows you and your staff to make solid day-to-day decisions based on the path you have chosen.

Execute It: Go in the Same Direction

After you have defined your vision, and reviewed and refined it with the help of your staff, you have the ideal conditions to accelerate your success with proper execution.

Your employees are now guided by a reality-based vision of success, one that is defined by specifics and refined by key people in your organization. Your employees are all on the same page about the direction in which the company is moving. Their daily execution of the work is focused and purposeful because it’s driven by this vision. When challenges or problems arise, your employees can make better decisions because it’s obvious what choice fits or does not fit with the vision.

Cheers to Your Success

Now is the perfect time to accelerate the success of your business. It’s a simple formula—apply it and year over year you can really get ahead. After three, four or five years you may look back and say, “Wow, we have really gotten somewhere!”