Today I want to tell you about a very common mistake that almost every business owner makes,including carpet cleaners. If you are making this mistake, you are missing a fantastic opportunity to add huge profits to your business. You are also potentially flushing money down the toilet, wasting precious time and putting effort into ideas that seem good, but give you terrible returns.
If you haven’t guessed it yet, the mistake is not tracking and measuring results. Let me explain…
Without Measurement, You Cannot Manage
In any business, 20% of the work you do generates about 80% of your profits. This is called the 80/20 rule,or Pareto’s Principle. If you don’t track and measure, you can never know which 20% earns you the majority of your money.
Not only that, if something isn’t working, you will continue doing it blindly. But if you dot rack and measure, you can figure out what tasks and strategies make you the most money. Then you can spend more time and effort on them. That’s why the focus on today’s task is to start tracking your results.
TODAY’S TASK: Don’t guess, track your results
If you’re not tracking, you’re guessing. Things aren’t always what they seem, so you must track your results and let the numbers tell you what is going on.
Here are some steps you can take to track your results:
- Place Google Analytics on your website.This is a free program that allows you to record which pages people visit on your website and what actions they take. If you’re feeling up to the challenge and want to try the installation yourself, follow the instructions here. If you are not a technical person, you can hire someone to do this on Upwork for a few dollars.
- Key your print advertising. From now on when you send marketing material to a client, put a unique campaign code on it. When the client calls you, ask for the code. This helps you to track which ads and direct mail make you the most money. For example, “Call XXX-XXX now and quote the code “CARPET99”to claim this limited time offer”.
- Track everything.Advertising and marketing is only one area to track. You should also keep tabs on costs (with software like Xero) and time spent on jobs or admin (with software like WorkflowMax).When you see numbers in black and white it can be a huge eye-opener.