Today’s business breakthrough I’d like to talk to you about is: Beat the Clock.
So what does beat the clock mean to you? Well, what it means to you is more profit.
What it means to the company is: I’m setting a standard and letting the employees know the timeframe that they need to get something done.
When you build a price, you’re building a break even, and you’re looking at material, time and overhead and all these things. At the end of the day it tells you to get this job done in this amount of time, with this amount of material, and at the end you have a profit.
But a lot of times we are not clear enough with the employees and letting them know exactly what’s involved with the number.
If you don’t believe me, go to one of your installers and ask them how much time they really have to complete a certain task, and what would it mean to beat the clock.
What we do is take a big red marker, and on all our jobs we write on there the time that they have from when they leave the office to the time they get back to complete the job.
As long as they beat that, they beat the clock.
Then, you can build an incentive program on beating the clock.
I want you to take a step back, if I gave you a start time and an end time of your day, how would they function differently? How do they function now with a fuzzy window of time?
When we come in the next morning we congratulate those who have beaten the clock, and if they do it a lot they get an incentive plan. If they didn’t beat the clock, we don’t beat them down. We have a conversation about what went wrong, so we can make little improvements for next time.
Business Challenge: Take this concept of beat the clock, and bring it to your employees. Let them know the exact time frame that they have to get something done.
Mike Agugliaro, Business Ninja
