Using this sales goal template, College City Design-Build’s salespeople build their own year by projecting reachable targets and charting progress. The individual sales plan takes into consideration the salesperson’s capacity, ambition, and desire for income, so the template drives results, says Bjorn Freudenthal, the Lakeville, Minn., company’s vice president of marketing and sales.
Each salesperson is given the same template with a different number of bids, leads, and project types. The template is divided up by month, quarter, and by number of projects and type of project.
Although goals are set at the beginning of every year, Freudenthal meets with each salesperson every two weeks to review leads, bids, and jobs sold and to review sales goals and year-to-date results.
Freudenthal, who developed the template with a local supplier, Charlie Bradburn, the sales manager at Automated Building Components’ millworks division, says it allows salespeople to be more strategic about their performance, which “leads to company buy-in ... . We have people who [see] themselves as owners and manage this form as an owner would ... a P&L.”

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Small Bites
The budgeted sales for this individual are $1.3 million. For the first quarter, $325,000 is his sales goal. As of January he had reached $215,000, but he still had February and March to hit the $325,000 mark. He was just 33.8% behind his quarterly goal.
Sales Strategy
Some salespeople lean toward certain types of projects and have an easier time selling those. “But if you say that you want to sell more kitchens,” Freudenthal asks his sales team, “What actions are you taking to do so? Taking workshops, going after prospects, striking up relationships with showroom reps?” This is a way for salespeople to look at their own sales more strategically.
Goal-Oriented
Freudenthal and each sales rep review the document to see if the salesperson is on track and if activity goals and volumes are on target. “If we’re not,” Freudenthal says, “we ask why and [look at] what obstacles are in the way and how can we get to the desired results.”
Make Your Margins
This is your company’s average closed margin, which you put in. After the contract is executed and the project is built, that closing margin is tracked, and that’s the number on the sales template for a particular salesperson. The goal is to have the closing margin be the same as (or better than) the pre-construction margin.
Which Path?
“D/B” is for those design/ build jobs that follow College City Design-Build’s 12-step system. (Small jobs have a lead designer and don’t follow the D/B process.) These numbers are used for tracking.
Suggested Follow-Up
These cover goals and objectives and how best to attain them.

http://www.storeforparts.com/

New Law Will Save Big Bucks for Small Businesses

A bill was sent to President Obama’s desk yesterday that repeals a small part of his own healthcare legislation. However, if it becomes law, it will make life a little easier for remodelers, contractors, and any other small business that uses its fair share of vendors.

By a vote of 87 to 12, the Senate approved the Small Business Paperwork Mandate Elimination Act of 2011 on April 5. The law repeals a burdensome tax paperwork requirement that was part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act approved last year. This would have mandated that starting next year businesses would be required to file a 1099 for every vendor that provided more than $600 in services or goods throughout the course of a year.

The annual $600 limit was for all vendors so contractors would find themselves sending out a stack of 1099s not just for their subs and vendors but also for mundane purchases such as coffee, office supplies, and even fuel.

No doubt the requirement — had it become a law — would have meant that businesses would have to spend resources on accountants and bookkeepers to adhere to the rule rather than on expanding their operation in a more meaningful way.

Aside from eliminating the 1099 requirements, the new potential law also repeals a component in the Small Business Jobs Act of 2010 that stipulated that as of Jan. 1, 2011, landlords had to submit 1099s to vendors that supplied them with more than $600 of services.

Contractors, remodelers, and other small businesses can continue sending out 1099s as they have been in the past based on the IRS’s reporting procedures.

www.StoreForParts.com

Having choices is essential to business agility

The economy shows signs of picking up momentum, yet unemployment, housing values, and world events remain unsettled. Funding is still elusive for our businesses and our clients, yet banks are reportedly hoarding cash. We are seeing more activity than we have since the fall of 2008 (yes, the double meaning is intended), but will it translate into actual revenue?
Mixed signals and uncertainty create more personal and business stress than times of clear direction. Is it better to hold onto our cash and live to fight another day? Or is it prime time to risk investing to gain market share and get a leg up on our competition? We all have responsibilities — to ourselves, our families, our teams, and our clients — and investing in the wrong areas at the wrong times could spell disaster.

Finding Options

In times like these, having all my chips on one uncertain investment or direction is too risky for my taste. I like options. I want to seize opportunities as they arise, but I also want the flexibility to pull back if those opportunities lose momentum. Think “nimble” — a mouse dancing in the moonlight.
Diversified services. Options come from looking at our business as a “portfolio” balanced to suit our appetite for risk. Large, design-intensive renovations such as additions, kitchens, and master bedroom suites offer great returns in good times, but they dry up quickly when clients are forced to focus on need-based projects and repairs.
To balance this risk, we try to serve our clients regardless of project size. Our smallest project last year was $78; our largest was more than $700,000. We have also balanced our business portfolio by offering services beyond just home remodeling.
Variable costs. Options come from making our costs as scalable as possible. We have blended more independent contractors with in-house labor over the last two years. We are using more temps in the office to fill short-term needs, and we have outsourced more elements of our business, such as payroll, hosting services, and graphic design. Hedging our decisions through investments in variable, rather than fixed, costs allows us to be nimble.
Team effort. Options come from transparent communication with a committed team. My goal is to have the entire team on the lookout, not only for risks and new opportunities but for creative reinvention strategies as well. To achieve that goal, they need the authority to think creatively, which requires knowing where the company is heading and understanding the decisions we make. And they need to be committed — to doing what’s best for the business, to breaking out of traditional boundaries, to wearing multiple hats. Team members need to become “utility players,” adding value in myriad positions.
Every business is affected by forces that it cannot control — competition, the economy, even the weather. Effectively positioning around these externalities, especially in such uncertain times, is a competitive advantage. We are following the path of flexibility through options — a mouse dancing in the moonlight.

http://www.storeforparts.com/