How to Drive New Growth with Your Existing Fleet

Whether you work in HVAC, plumbing, landscaping, as an electrician or in another service-based field, starting a business from the ground up and willing it into success is a challenge only owners completely comprehend. Your money and time have been completely invested in managing every exchange with clients to make sure they feel valued and that your value is properly communicated to encourage return business. However, a “good” problem owners face once their business becomes successful is how to generate more revenue to continue positive growth without imploding what has worked so far.

Currently, you may have the tools, equipment and people around you that have gotten your business this far. As you start to experience a burgeoning of new clients and jobs, you’re ready to ramp up and take your business to the next level. Your first instinct might be to throw money at each of your commodities because that’s the only way you can imagine getting more work completed on a daily basis, but before you run out and invest money in additional equipment or staffing, it’s imperative you explore ways to first improve business efficiency without unnecessarily overextending yourself or your business. We’re offing a few suggestions on how you can better utilize your existing fleet to produce better business outcomes for your operation.

Reclaim your time

It’s no stretch of the imagination to assume that, when you started your business, you poured hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours into securing it’s success because you served, rightfully so, as the face of the brand. In the beginning, every employee and customer looked directly to you for guidance in support of your vision and for evidence of operational credibility. To take your business to the next level, despite how off-putting it sounds, it’s time to relinquish the reins and reclaim your time.

Telematic solutions provide flexible scheduling software designed to help you make better use of your time, as well as your mobile workforce, resulting in increased productivity of your existing resources, helping you do more with what you already have. Additionally, automated solutions allow you to assign jobs to staff and plan routes quickly and efficiently, then measure and report key performance metrics to equip you to analyze how those decisions are affecting your people in the field. You are in the unique position of being in charge of growing your business. If you’re spending the bulk of your time managing schedules and times, let alone last-minute jobs and call-ins, you’re left without adequate time to dedicate to seeking out new customers, which means you’re less likely to achieve any significant traction toward your larger goals.

Learn how Lamar Advertising used technology to improve business efficiency to observe what was working well, set up alerts to passively monitor day-to-day operations and save valuable time.

Audit current workflows

Improving the way your business runs comes down to managing workflows in your existing infrastructure to make the best use of your resources. Though automating and thereby simplifying something as small as paperwork from regular customer transactions might seem insignificant in the scope of your business, any place where efficiencies can be put in place will save you money as well as time in the long run, and even more so as you increase your employee pool. Removing back-office chores for your staff allows them to spend more time interacting with customers directly or producing work for your business. Furthermore, this allows customers to interact with your business directly without demanding your direct attention in every transaction.

Staying ahead of the curve is difficult for managers in every industry. There always seems to be a new fire to put out, whether a worker calls in sick, a vehicle won’t start, or an urgent customer request comes in. These disruptions can make scheduling difficult, but taking the time to plan out weeks and even months down the line will help you anticipate and adequately prepare for problems to minimize their impact. Setting your staff up for success with a well-planned field service schedule keeps them “in the know” and will help them feel more directly invested in the success of the business.

The simplest solution is oftentimes the best solution (e.g., buy more things to do more things), but when it comes to taking your business to the next level, avoiding the temptation to stick a bandaid on a problem by spending money on additional equipment and instead optimizing your current operations system will yield greater return in the long run to help stimulate efficient revenue increase.

Finding out more about how to find the right solution combination can help you get more out of your business.