Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts

Death By A Thousand Paper Cuts © improveit! 360 | 866-421-33602

Death by a Thousand Paper CutsThe Top Three Ways Manual Processes Cause Your Business to Leak Profits and Miss Revenue

Table of Contents

Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 3

From Starting Your Business to Drowning in Paper – How Did You Get Here? ................................. 4

The Top Three Ways Manual Processes Cause Your Business to Leak Profits and Miss Revenue ..... 5

#1 You’re wasting time updating spreadsheets and looking for information .......................... 6

#2 You can’t nurture your leads until they’re ready to buy ...................................................... 9

#3 You can’t see what’s going on across your business ............................................................ 12

Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................ 14


Introduction

Using paper was a natural way to manage your business when you first started. But, as you’ve grown, so have the stacks of papers, folders, post-its, lead sheets, spreadsheets, quotes, invoices...and your frustration. It feels like the paper is taking over and bigger boxes, larger whiteboards and more sophisticated filing systems don’t help. Who needs that chaos?

Did you know that 25% of the work day is wasted looking for information? That’s 10 hours per week. At $20 per hour, that’s $10,400 a year, per person you’re throwing away. If you’ve managed to migrate to software for some functions, then you’ll have to add the wasted time spent entering data into multiple, disjointed programs that don’t talk to one another and hours spent compiling spreadsheets that get stale soon after production to that bucket of lost cash. That’s the cost of chaos. It robs you of real profits and precious time.

improveit! 360 has helped thousands of remodelers, contractors and home service pros get organized and streamline their operations to lower costs and end money-wasting inefficiencies.

improveit! 360 doesn’t stop with controlling the cost and chaos of paper and giving you more free time. It revs up your revenue generation engine by automating lead management and consistently nurturing prospects until they close without putting a heavy workload on your shoulders. In fact, it actually allows you to simplify everything and easily manage every part of your business – marketing, sales, finance, service, projects, compliance, and administration – from one centralized location, no matter where you are, in the office or on the road.

Drawing on over a decade of industry leadership and experience and providing real life case studies, this Guide identifies the inefficiencies of the paper-based methods that you may feel are cheaper than any other options. It’s paper, right? Fact is...its costing you more in wasted dollars and lost sales opportunities than most businesses can imagine.

If you’re buried in paper, it’s time to look at the three money-draining and profit-robbing ways manual processes are keeping your business from reaching its full potential.

“...$10,400 a year, per person you’re throwing away”


In the early stages of your contracting or home services business (HVAC, Windows, Roofing, Painting, Remodeling, etc.) it was pretty easy to keep your leads on paper (using lead sheets, notebooks, or other things), to create quotes and invoices manually for each customer, and to manage your finances using Excel (or even ledgers). As your company grew, you’ve had to add more of everything –paper, folders, notebooks, binders, spreadsheets and people - just to keep up.

These manual methods of managing your business begin to take on a life of their own, devouring valuable hours of the day and adding payroll and material costs. Information must be tediously transferred manually from one place to another, wasting time and increasing the risk for errors. Spreadsheets that took hours to produce become s t a l e shortly after completion. Information you need at the job site is not readily accessible once you leave the office. Each time there’s a change in your business, you and your staff find yourselves working to find ways to make your current methods fit, placing one band-aid solution over another.

The ‘sinking in quicksand’ feeling is common in the home remodeling industry. In the earliest stage of your business, you needed to keep your start-up costs low and focus more on sealing those critical first deals. You’re good at what you do so as you work on your new business it grows, somewhat effortlessly on its own, until one day you find yourself mired in multiple haphazard methods. You’ve gotten so busy working in your business that you don’t have time to work on your business. The chaos of managing day-to-day operations prevents you from organizing and running your business the way you should, hinders your ability to respond to new leads and close sales, and needlessly delays your customer response time, putting customer satisfaction in jeopardy. It’s like death by a thousand paper cuts.

If this chaos sounds familiar, you are not alone. Home improvement and home services companies often find themselves with what seem to be ‘accidental’ business management methods. No matter how they’ve arrived at

this point, remodelers and contractors at this cross-roads will identify with the pains discussed in the next section:

Three money-draining limitations of your current business processes.

From starting your business to drowning in paper


The Top Three Ways Manual Processes

Cause Your Business to Leak Profits

and Miss Revenue


#1. You’re wasting time updating spreadsheets

and looking for information#1. You’re wasting time updating spreadsheets

and looking for information

The spreadsheets are taking over!As your business has grown, you find yourself using more and more spreadsheets to electronically store important information. You go to a home show and bring back a stack of leads. Where do they go? Someone has to enter them into yet another spreadsheet. The games of “Is the spreadsheet ready yet?” and “Is this the most current spreadsheet?” have become an all too common occurrence. And, because not everyone follows the same file naming methodology, or stores them on their computer hard drive versus the shared network, you waste even more time trying to find needed information. Beyond leads, compiling reports like net sales by component, rep or source type, or yesterday’s appointments results, take hours, even days or weeks, because you’re just too busy, not tracking the information anywhere, or have no idea where to start. Even if you manage to create reports in Excel, how accurate are they? More wasted time spot checking numbers when you’re already late for the next appointment.

The stacks of paper grow and grow!You and your employees are tied up for hours each day transferring data from paper slips to spreadsheets, QuickBooks and other stand-alone systems. Hours are spent each week manually inputting and re-inputting information into quotes, invoices, work orders, payroll, sales compensation, and more. On the left side of your desk is a stack of quotes that need completed or corrected. On the right side of your desk is a stack of unpaid invoices that need to be captured. As you complete payroll, you realize that you are paying someone to do nothing but enter data, over and over again.

Has anyone seen the Johnson file?You have to dig through files, spreadsheets, notebooks, emails, stacks or boxes of lead sheets and dozens of sticky notes to find what you need. It’s difficult – if not impossible - to find the data you need when you need it. Inc. Magazine sites a study that states that 7.5% of all documents get lost and 3% of the remainder is misfiled. This suggests that ten documents out of every one hundred are sitting on the wrong desk, being removed from the office, or have been set adrift to who knows where. It may be difficult or impossible to recreate some documents, including leads, if lost. Plus, when you leave the office, you lose access to the data you need.

If these things sound familiar, then you are clearly investing money,time and energy with little or no return; you are spinning your wheels.


The Paper The Problem25% of the work day is wasted simply looking for what we need. That’s over $10,000 per employee, per year, down the drain. Chasing people for information, or searching for it in paper stacks, scribbled on post-it notes, buried in folder and boxes, and locked in spreadsheets, costs real dollars.

Managing leads manually makes it virtually impossible to continually follow-up and nurture your prospects until they’re ready to buy. You waste time trying to find them, figuring out who to call next, or losing them altogether. It also causes inconsistent lead flow and seasonal highs and lows, missed sales, and wasted time and money spent continually trying to generate more and more leads.

With no access to the paper with your customer data when you’re out of the office or just down the hall, you waste time trying to track down the right person for the information you need. If they’re on the phone, out to lunch, or just busy, even more time goes down the drain.

When you’re managing by paper, the hours spent daily on data entry – time transposing or updating manually tracked information from paper to lead sheet, to calendar, to quote, to sale or service order, to finance, to job board – cut directly into your profits and limit time for revenue-generating activities. Add to that the cost of duplicate data entry because you’re managing multiple systems that don’t communicate with one another, and your profits take another hit.

You and your staff either waste time tracking down the person who scribbled the information illegibly so they get it right, or you play the guessing game and enter wrong data that can cause you to miss a lead, botch a sale, or even lose a customer in the middle of a job.

Hunting for information

Lead management

No access to data from the road, job–site, or across the office

Duplicate data entry

Deciphering handwriting and fixing associated errors

12345

Top 10 TIME wasters caused by manual processes


The Paper The Problem

Running appointments on unqualified leads (like mobile homes or apartments) wastes time and takes hours away from saleable appointments.

Manually finding and printing directions to each appointment not only wastes time and paper, it’s tedious. Plus, what happens when what you find doesn’t get you where you need to go? More time wasted driving around and calling for better directions.

Whether its recovering data from a crashed hard drive or a salesperson that leaves with your laptop, recovering your information not only takes time, it’s often an unsuccessful exercise. Paper puts your most valuable asset at risk.

Trying to use spreadsheets, QuickBooks, whiteboards and more to piece together what’s happening across your business is not only close to impossible, it’s a time-consuming, error-prone process.

The stacks keep piling up while hours are spent each week trying to get them organized, filed, and stored. Beyond that, time is spent ordering a never-ending supply of paper, ink, file folders, boxes as well as finding or renting more and more storage space.

Going to an unqualified appointment

Looking up directions and notbeing able to find the prospect’s home

Reconstructing data when lost (or stolen)

Lack of visibility

Administrative upkeep

678910

Top 10 TIME wasters caused by manual processes


According to Replacement Contractor magazine, the average cost of a confirmed appointment is $234. It’s no wonder that most remodelers say that their leads are they’re most expensive asset. At that price, it’s critically important have a high closing percentage to turn a profit and keep your doors open.

What makes that so difficult is that in addition to having little time and an abundance of to-do’s, manual business processes cause you to treat your leads like a limited time chance to make some money instead of your biggest, long-term money-making asset. If your leads are scribbled on post-it notes, stuck on paper, locked in a spreadsheet or lying dormant in a box, it’s like keeping your money under a mattress where left untouched has no chance to grow. Without continued nurturing, your unsold leads have little chance of closing in the future.

#2. You can’t nurture your leads until

THEY’re READY TO BUY

“Not all leads close

initially, but

not now doesn’t

mean not ever.”

- Brian Leader, CEO improveit! 360

Is your sales team making the attempts needed to close,or are the leads simply slipping away after one try?

Did anyone ever call that Johnson lead again?We know all leads don’t sell initially. The ever-growing piles of paper and out-of-control spreadsheets have made it impossible to keep track of who has called which leads or what, if any, follow-up has been done. Even if you found the time to focus on sales, how would you know where to start?

You may not realize it, but every day missed opportunities are eating at your profits; sales are slipping through your fingers because manual processes make it virtually impossible to continually communicate with your leads until they’re ready to buy.

If you have a sales team, how certain are you that your leads are receiving follow up? While you’re busy juggling all your other duties, you think that’s covered, right? Are you sure?


If you’re buried in paper, you may not realize your leads fall into one of three buckets:

This bucket contains the leads that have not set an appointment with you or bought from you yet.

These leads have been generated likely from a variety of sources and marketing activities, from home shows, to advertisements, to referrals and more.

They may or may not have expressed any interest, but for one reason or another, never booked an appointment with you. This bucket is your lead pool.

These are the leads that had an appointment with you, but for whatever reason didn’t close. But, just because they didn’t close initially, doesn’t mean they’re bad lead and won’t sell at some time in the future. Let’s face it - salespeople have off days and customers have bad days and a thousand excuses.

Consider this: 50 - 70% of prospects don’t close after 1st appointment, but 63% close after 6 or more follow-ups/contacts. Remember, not now doesn’t mean not ever.

This bucket is full of all the people who have bought from you in the past. They already know the quality of your work. You already have a relationship with them. They’re prime targets for future business, and you’ve already paid for the lead.

Regardless of the quality of your past work, when it’s time for a new project, homeowners will forget about you and start back at square one, gathering information and quotes from various remodelers. No matter how great your reputation or how satisfied they were with your prior service, homeowners will not wait around for you to get back to them and they certainly won’t chase you down. If you aren’t top of mind, you likely won’t even make the first cut.

RECYCLE REHASH REPEAT

Leads that have not set an

appointment yet

Leads that had an appointment but did not buy

leads that have bought from you

in the past

LEAD BUCKET 1 LEAD BUCKET 2 LEAD BUCKET 3

Paper makes it virtually impossible to nurture your leads

until they sell.

Case Study: The Gutter Shutter Co.Like many replacement contractors, Gutter Shutter’s business was highly dependent upon the ability to effectively compete against its local competitors in a somewhat seasonal market. It would receive lots of homeowner’s inquiries, but found it difficult to keep track of all their leads, get to them quickly and continue to follow-up with them until they won the business. They reported spending more and more on marketing activities to get their leads, only to realize they were slipping through the cracks with no return on their investment.

After implementing improveit! 360, Gutter Shutter was able to finally end the seasonality in their business and enjoy consistent, predictable lead flow. The automated communications with built-in templates helped them consistently nurture their leads until they’re ready to buy. “We experienced a 40% increase in business within the first 90 days.”

- Roger Reyes, President, The Gutter Shutter Co.


Regardless of where your leads came from, or what bucket they’re in, if they’re in buried in stacks of paper or stuck in spreadsheets, finding the time and being organized enough to know who to call, when, is virtually impossible. Even if you could, how would you continue to nurture them along the buying cycle with the right message, at the right time, to close the deal? The problem with manual processes is that due to the lack of organization and automation, leads slip through the cracks and opportunities are lost.

What if you could continually market to all your leads, regardless of stage or bucket? Automated nurturing of your Recycle, Rehash, and Repeat leads has the potential to effortlessly grow your business. Remodelers who implement the improveit! 360 Business Management Application report new sales increases of 20% for Recycled leads, 15% for Rehashed leads, and over 20% from Repeat business.

With built-in, customizable email templates, you can quickly and effortlessly increase your marketing efforts while decreasing your marketing costs, delivering the right message and the right time. These professionally designed templates will impress customers and instill a higher level of confidence in your work instantly differentiating you from your competition. Including a coupon on one of the professionally designed email templates has demonstrated increased conversion rates of as much as 250%.

What could numbers like these mean for your business?

Case Study: Thompson Creek

Replacement Contractor magazine calls Thompson Creek Windows “a company that does many things well”. President Rick Wuest will tell you one of those things was the decision to get on board with improveit! 360. In fact, Rick credits much of Thompson Creek’s rise from a small $1 million family-run business to a $50 million hall-of-fame company visited in 2011 by President Obama to improveit! 360.

Like many small remodelers, Thompson Creek spent decades buried in chaos and inefficiency, struggling to make and close leads, and spending too much money on marketing with no consistency or idea what was working. Since making the change to improveit! 360, Thompson Creek has seen double-digit growth year over year. “With improveit! 360, the transformation has been incredible. We now see close rates greater than 40% and have experienced double-digit growth in each of the last seven years of business. In a business where everything is changing – technology, communication, the customer - improveit! 360 is our secret weapon for staying ahead and staying in control. We are absolutely where we are today because of improveit! 360. No business, small or big, should be without it. I can’t recommend it enough.”

– Rick Wuest, President / CEO, Thompson Creek Windows

IF YOUR LEADS ARE BURIED IN STACKS OF PAPER, IT’S HARD TO NURTURE THEM TO CLOSE.

improveit! 360 automates your marketing and nurturesall your leads until they’re ready to buy.

+20% +15% +20%


Would you drive a vehicle with an empty dashboard containing no gauges to show you what’s going on under the hood? Common sense says that you wouldn’t head off down the road if you couldn’t see if it had enough gas, knew how fast you were going, if the engine was in jeopardy of overheating, or could show signs of other problems.

You need something that shows you this information in order to navigate safely to your destination. Without visibility into what’s going on with your vehicle, you could be headed for trouble and not even know it.

It’s the same with your business.

Or, you make bad decisions because of lack of information....

Managing your business using paper, white boards, spreadsheets or stand-alone software systems that don’t connect to one another is like operating in a maze while wearing a blindfold. It’s almost impossible to get to your destination. If you do manage to make it, it will take you longer and you’ll be more likely to suffer setbacks (and injuries) along the way.

#3. You can’t see what’s going on

across your business ???

Case Study: Cap City Home Remodeling

Like most home remodeling companies, Cap City wasted a large amount of time searching for prospect and job information. And to make matters worse, their staff did not have access to information from job sites.

Using the reports and dashboard standard in all improveit! 360 applications, Cap City was able to save an average of 12 hours per month. They now have the insight, metrics and accountability needed to reduce costs while improving sales.

“improveit! 360 has completely changed how our company processes customer job data and now all of our staff can access it, from new prospect to project completion, wherever they are on the road. The detailed data that it tracks provided an immediate time savings throughout our company. Just last month we saved $2,500 on an underperforming lead source. We would have continued to throw away that money every month (over $30,000 a year) without improveit! 360.” – Mitch LaBorwit, President, Cap City Home Remodeling


Intuition vs. InformationThat Yellow Pages ad you’ve been running for years produces a good amount of leads for the cost, right? Or does it?

• Do you know your lead costs by source?

• Can you accurately track conversions by source?

• Do you know which of your sales people is the real top performer?

(Hint: sometimes it’s quite surprisingly not the one with the highest gross sales.)

Without visibility, you don’t have the insight you need to make the best business decisions and you are most likely wasting money on poorly performing lead sources and under-performing sales people. What you don’t know or can’t see can cost you big...in wasted dollars and missed opportunities.

The only way to change this is to gain real-time visibility into every aspect of your business.

To run a successful home remodeling business today, you need full visibility into your company data and all aspects of your business – marketing, sales, finance, service, jobs, compliance and more.

With improveit! 360, built-in reports and customizable dashboards designed specifically for home remodelers allow you to see, at a glance, all of the metrics you need to track your lead costs and measure the return on your marketing expenses, keep a beat on sales rep and appointment performance, and much, much more.

Just like the gauges on your vehicle tell you what’s going on under the hood, the dashboards and reports in improveit! 360 will show you what’s working and what’s not, while keeping you on the right path and guiding you to success.

improveit! 360 gives you the visibility to see your way to success.

HOW YOU FEEL IN YOUR GUT

BUT in reality....


Conclusion

Paper and stand-alone software-based business systems not only waste time, lower your profits and put your customer information at risk; they prevent you from capitalizing on all the opportunities to grow your business. If you’ve struggled to get or stay organized, can’t continually follow-up with customers, or stay awake at night worried about the security of your information or the longevity of your business, then you need the improveit! 360 business management application.

improveit! 360 makes it easy to go from manual processes that waste your time and cause you stress to higher profits and more free time with its easy approach to savings and growth called The Power of 6.

The Power of 6 doesn’t change what you’re doing. It takes the six pieces of information you’re already gathering (prospect details, lead source, product interest, sales rep, appointment time and appointment result) and makes it work for you, delivering greater predictability, visibility and profitability. Its how Thompson Creek went from $1M to $50M in under 10 years, after being stagnant for over two decades. Don’t worry if you’re a small firm. The Power of 6 works for companies of all sizes.

The Power of 6:

• Controls your chaos and streamlines everything for improved productivity and lower costs.

• Reduces your stress and gives you more free time, plus more predictability and profits.

• Ensures you never lose a lead (thanks to our exclusive Results Wizard) and pursue each of them until they’re ready to buy.

• Effortlessly organizes and nurtures all of your leads, regardless of stage or type (or delays and stall-tactics).

• Gives you a 360o view of your business so you can see how everything, and everyone, is performing.


Instead of keeping lead details in file folders, scribbled on post-it notes or stuffed in a box, make the 30 seconds you already spend capturing them pay-off by simply by entering it into the industry’s most powerful and affordable business management application, improveit! 360. Enter the 6 pieces of data once and watch the system take your business from chaotic and unpredictable to streamlined and profitable.

But, we’re more than just a tool to manage your business with an easy way to get started.

We support you to success.

A variety of educational options and a library of resources including on-demand videos created for you by people who know your business, made even more effective with the help of Success Coaches, is the difference between just having a new place to put your leads and making the change from ordinary to extraordinary.

You need a system that doesn’t require constant upgrade or upkeep, a product that has the things you need now and years from now. With additional versions for you to grow into, a comprehensive training academy and a knowledgeable Customer Success Team, the improveit! 360 Business Management Application is a system that that fits your business now and will continue to in the future. Based on customer feedback and the latest technology advancements, improveit! 360 provides upgrades at least 6 times each year which require no work on your part and no dollars from your bank account.

Want to Hear More? Ready to leave the paper and chaos behind? Learn how improveit! 360 can take you from chaos to greater prosperity. Visit www.improveit360.com or call 866-421-3360 for your complimentary business assessment with one of our specially trained Success Coaches.

When you call, be sure to ask about our zero-risk Money Back Guarantee.

Date post:	28-Oct-2014
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Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts

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