In his first two years since joining EC, James has been busy working ON his business, not in it.
James says, “It’s been a whirlwind of activity but I’m enjoying it so much and to be honest it’s turned the business round completely.
I do my 90 minutes pretty much every day. It’s enabled me to get loads of stuff done that has really moved the business forward:
Staff:
- Employed the services of a 24hr UK call centre to ensure we capture all the data from every call and to alleviate the time pressure on my part time office manager
- Recruited our first Apprentice, John, who has worked out really well
- Recruited another full time technician who is a plumber and a qualified carpenter and he is also training as a gas engineer
- Outsourced HR to keep us in line with legislation, due to my expanding workforce
- Outsourced a bookkeeper to better manage my cash flow and to know how much profit I can invest to hit my 130% t/o increase target
- Recruited a full time Gas Safe engineer to strengthen our service offering
- Wrote two new recruitment ads, which have elicited response from some great people.
Website and social media:
- Filmed two video testimonials and put these on our website; I also changed the position and prominence of our testimonials page
- Filmed a series of five videos which are online and the first one is on the home page
- Invested in a company Facebook page, Twitter site, YouTube Channel, Google places, Google +, Flicker and LinkedIn. (This could actually count for 7 actions implemented really!)
- Set up a Google AdWords campaign with the help of Google
- Set up a LinkedIn PPC campaign
- Set up Google analytics
- Implemented 16 improvements to our website.
Self-improvement:
- Read Dan Kennedy’s managing people and profits book: it’s a great book
- Read “Delivering Happiness”
- Listened to Tom Hopkins Selling CD, Zig Zigglar’s “How To Get What You Want” and Jim Rohn’s “Art of Exceptional Living.”
- Read Brian Tracey’s “Eat that Frog” and “I Can Make You Rich” by Paul McKenna
- Started two new personal disciplines.
Sales and marketing
- Written a one minute presentation for networking meetings
- Carried out a customer spend analysis to establish my 80/20 split and used the data to create the Trust Club, an exclusive club for top 17% of my customers
- Had my first press release published in the Northampton Business Time
- Written a script for the technicians to use when greeting customers; this incorporates the referral scheme mentioned earlier. The winner gets a weekend away with a convertible. There is a minimum level to achieve for all
- Designed and printed (for free) business cards for the technicians, to make them feel even more professional
- Designed a leaflet to drop around the houses that we are working on with an Ad tracker number from the firm in Botty Rules (cheers for the deal, Nige!)
- Set up a referral scheme
- Designed a direct response ad for a village mag going to 8500 homes with an idea from Bill Glazer’s “Outrageous Advertising That’s Outrageously Successful” book, and published an article in YourPropertyNetwork magazine, a national property investor magazine
- Created a new incentive scheme following on from my employee costs analysis as per Dan’s book.
Systems:
- Systemised my induction process for new customers
Results
Customer numbers up, sales up, turnover up, confidence up, profits up, enjoyment up. EC works!
