Imagine if you only paid your staff for four days in the week instead of the five days they worked. You’d have an uprising taking place. The pay officer would be getting nasty emails and irate people at her door. When you fail to invoice someone for all the work you did it is just the same as meekly accepting a four day pay packet. Your staff would never accept it, so why should you. Good job cards with good communication ensure you always get paid what you should.
A test of a good job card system is how well extra parts and labour to the original job get picked up and recorded. If all the changes are not recorded then you have short paid yourself.
Ensuring a high level of productivity is the most important area to manage in a service business to make a good profit. It is surprising how many business owners think they are flat out, yet when we measure their productivity it is only 50 to 60 percent. The staff are busy, but a lot of that time is not being billed out to the customer or cannot be billed to them.
If your productivity is below 80% then you should investigate why. Are changes not being recorded, are jobs taking longer to do than you quoted? Is there a lot of travel time not being charged for? Keep measuring the productivity for each person and the whole business.
To get the maximum benefit from your job cards you need to involve the staff and let them know what is expected of them in terms of weekly productivity. You also need to let them know what time they are expected to do a job in before they start the job.
Just as communication is important with your staff, so is it with your customers. Communicate at the start of the job what the price will be or a range. When changes occur during the job communicate with the customer about them and gain their approval before proceeding.
Good job cards can tell you what type of jobs you are making money on and which ones are not profitable. You should then try to get more of the jobs that you make good money on. Those that you make poor money on you can either put your price up, think of a way to do them more efficiently, or don’t do them.
The old saying “You cannot manage what you cannot measure” is true of all businesses. Job cards provide an invaluable tool to measure and manage your business for greater profits.
Published by Toowoomba Chronicle www.thechronicle.com.au on Saturday 2 April 2011.
