Growing a field service business takes a lot of hard work. It not only requires a financial investment, but it also requires a time investment.
But it also requires smart decision-making. All the hard work and long hours in the world won’t guarantee rapid expansion. But if you invest in the following four things in addition to hard work, your odds of growing are likely to improve:
Invest in Great People
A business is only as good as it's people. So if you want to grow, you're going to need to add some great people to your business.
Hiring great people isn't easy, especially for a small field service business. There usually aren't great benefits or pay. So it's vitally important that you create a culture where people want to work. Here are some tips to help you do that:
- Leadership They Can Trust - People are willing to work harder for leaders that they trust and that look out for their best interests. So be open and honest with your employees. It’s not always easy, but it’s usually the best way to deal with employees.
- Reward Success - Good employees like to make a difference. They may settle for less pay and benefits if they feel like they’re more than just a cog in a machine. So let your employees make decisions and reward them for their successes.
- Great Teammates - People want to work with other great employees. If you have an employee who isn’t a good teammate they may be bringing your entire team down. Sometimes the short-term pain of losing an employee is worth trading for long-term success.
Want some more tips about how to find great employees? Check out our free eBook, How to Hire the Best Employees for Your Green Industry Business.
Have a Marketing Strategy
The greatest group of employees in the world isn’t going to grow without some kind of marketing strategy. Even if your strategy is to simply encourage word of mouth referrals, you need to spend some time determining how you’re going to market your field service business.
Some questions to ask include:
- What does my ideal customer look like?
- What problem do I solve?
- How do I solve that problem better/differently than my competition?
- Where do does my ideal customer congregate?
- Where are most of my ideal customers?
- How can I cost-effectively reach my ideal customer?
The best marketing advice I ever heard is simple: Try as many marketing tactics as you can. Measure them. Do more of what works.
The other great piece of advice: You need a website that sells your business. If you want rapid growth, the easiest way to do that is by investing in a website that sells. That’s important today and it’s going to be even more important in the years to come. According to our 2014 Green Industry Buyer’s Report, buyers are nearly 5 times as likely to turn to the Internet to research contractors as they were 10 years ago. I expect that will continue to grow.
Know Your Pipeline
One of the biggest mistakes I see businesses make is not tracking their sales pipeline. This is especially true of small businesses. They lose revenue because they lose track of potential sales. It’s understandable - typically in a small field service business, the owner wears many hats, including office manager, field foreman and more. Sales become an afterthought.
But if you want to grow, you need to focus on selling. To do that, you need to pay close attention to your pipeline. Track every prospect as it moves through the process - to an estimate and to either a win or a loss.
Doing so makes it easy to follow up on bids that haven’t yet made a decision, helping you sell faster. But the biggest benefit is the ability to improve your field service sales process by analyzing your sales data to make business decisions.
For example, let’s assume you sell irrigation services to commercial and residential businesses. With a field service CRM, you can track the close rates of each service. You may find that you sell commercial irrigation at a 10% rate, but you nail down 80% of the residential irrigation business you bid on. Using that data, you can make smart business decisions. Perhaps you decide to focus on residential properties and grow into other neighborhoods. Or maybe you decide to refine your commercial pricing. Whatever you do, having solid data can help you sell smarter.
Invest in Software
You may call this self-serving, but good field service software makes your business more efficient - and profitable. The numbers don’t lie - according to our 2015 Green Industry Benchmark Report, HindSite customers are nearly twice as likely to have experienced revenue growth in excess of 20% than non-customers. Software can play a big role in helping you grow.
There are a number of reasons, but the biggest one may be that it forces you to create and follow processes. For example, our mobile field service software forces your field workers to time in and out of every job when they arrive and leave, delivering accurate time records. It may seem like a small thing, but once you build those process habits, you eliminate a lot of error and inaccuracy in your business.
What happens if you aren’t using field service software to time in and out? Your field worker is probably writing down his time-ins and outs. He’s probably rounding, too. It may seem insignificant, but if you’re billing time and material and you’re consistently losing 3 minutes on every job, it adds up to a lot of money over a year.
So invest in software. For the typical HindSite customer, that usually means a couple hundred dollars a month. For that couple hundred dollars, that means better scheduling and routing, complete field data and, faster invoicing, better sales management, a complete electronic customer database and history, and a whole lot more. The ROI of field service software is outstanding, and eliminates a lot of the issues business have trouble growing beyond.
Just starting out and don't want to make mistakes that hinder your growth? Check out our free eBook, Owning a Service Business: 16 Tips for Success.
