Driven Performance Advisors

So, you want to grow your shop.

What are you doing to make it happen? Do you have a plan?

How detailed is that plan? Do you know what you need to do today to take the next step in the direction of growth? Without a detailed plan, you can have all the big ideas in the world, get excited to come to work every day, and work harder than you’ve ever worked before…and get nowhere.

Here is my simple formula to create a detailed plan for growth for your shop.

To grow, you need three key ingredients:

Direction + Resources + Efficiency = Growth

Direction

What is your shop’s strategy? Here are some questions to help you define it:

Who are your ideal customers?
What jobs is your shop designed to handle?
What services does your shop do best?
Why should a customer buy from you? Are you the cheapest, the highest quality work, the best customer service, the fastest, the most knowledgeable about their car?

Clearly defining the answers to these questions provides you with the direction you need to grow. Without these answers as a part of your detailed plan, you will aimlessly jump from strategy to strategy in order to try and increase your sales.

Resources

There are two resources you need to have in order to grow. Time and money.

Are you profitable? Do you have a budget? Do you know where you should invest to keep growing? Do you have savings and access to credit?

If your answer is no to any of these questions, take the time to make your answer a yes. Invest in talking to an accountant. Work with them to create a budget and use it to save, start a banking relationship, and work out how to become profitable.

Can you afford an hour a day to spend on growth? You can spend time interviewing, hiring, training, talking with advisors, planning, making designs, taking classes, scouting new locations, or any number of other things you need to do to execute on your growth strategy.

If you can’t, audit your time. Take 60 seconds at the end of each hour to track what you did in the past hour. Was it productive? How much time were you on Instagram, having an unnecessary conversation, or walking around your shop, “supervising?”

In contrast, were you in important meetings, creating value for your shop, or learning something new?

It only takes a small investment of time and money to unlock a massive amount of resources. Take the plunge and make the upfront investment.

Efficiency

Now that you have the direction and the resources, I assume you want to achieve your growth goals in this lifetime. In order to make that happen, you need to be efficient. Efficiency can take a number of different appearances, depending on what you have envisioned for your shop.

For example, a speed shop that handles custom German sports car builds puts out 30 cars a year with a team of 6 people. However, the shop spends a lot of time with nothing to do, waiting on parts. They have strong cash flow management to make sure they can keep paying the bills while sitting on big projects, but want to expand with a second location 300 miles away to serve customers in another part of the state. Right now, they don’t have the cash flow to sustain the loan needed to build up that location. They can get creative with credit, but that will take time and create more stress than they need.

Alternatively, start with addressing sales numbers. If you put out 35 cars a year (totally possible if you fill up the current idle time), you’ll see a 15% increase in sales.

Efficiency creates resources, and efficiency can define direction. But most importantly, efficiency gets you there faster, with less stress, and with greater financial stability.

In conclusion

This is your growth formula. Define your direction, unlock your resources, and create efficiency to draw up a detailed plan to grow.

Let me know how it goes – email me at arun@drivenperformanceadvisors.com.