Do you ever feel like you're barely treading water? Does it seem like you're so weighed down with tasks or daily fires that you never actually work on the things that would have a significant impact on your business?
This is a day in the life of nearly every leader, whether they are a tire dealership owner, a manager or even a parent: a million tasks to do and no time to work on personal growth.
What if you didn’t do all those tasks?
When you miss an email, go on vacation or are out of the country on a dealer trip, somehow your store doesn’t stop working, customers don’t stop coming and the tire trucks keep delivering. But if that’s the case, then how come when you're there, you feel buried with work?
The truth is that a lot of tasks are not urgent. But we tend to just complete those tasks rather than delegate them. Most tasks completed by most managers or owners are tasks that easily can be handed off to other teammates, but it feels easier just to knock it out ourselves, rather than delegate them.
The challenge with that is by handling these tasks ourselves, the people who needed those tasks completed now contact you for every other subsequent task. Before you know it, you're doing every little task and almost none of these tasks have a massive impact on your business.
Problem two with not delegating these tasks is that your best employees get bored and don’t feel challenged or trusted as much as you truly want to trust them. The mere act of withholding these chores makes your top employees feel over time that you don’t trust them enough to give them more.
If you can take some of these tasks and spread them out to your employees with the words, “I want to start giving you more challenging things to help you grow,” you’ll find that they will beam with pride, knowing that you trust them. Get as many of these tasks as you can off your plate.
Now that you’ve begun delegating, the goal is to free your mind and time for strategic thinking and strategic doing! If you think hard about your business, what's the goal you would set five years from now? The goal could be multi-faceted, like $5 million in gross profit and spending three days a week away from work.
The first thing you'll need to do is to break down the gross profit number. What’s your average repair order? How many repair orders do you need to see each year to get to $5 million? How many tires do you have to sell? Once you can break your target into manageable pieces so you know exactly what you need, then you can get to work.
Let’s say you need to add an additional eight cars per day, increase average repair order gross profit by $50 and sell an additional four tires per day. (But don’t forget, you also want to be able to stay home three days per week, right?)
Doing that one thing
A few years ago, I read a book titled “The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results,” written by Gary Keller of Keller Williams Realty fame and Jay Papasan. The book is a great read or listen - only five-and-a-half hours in audio book form - and is highly motivational to get you started on your path to achieving extraordinary results.
The premise of the book is that we tend to be so overwhelmed with multi-tasking and micro-management that we aren’t getting a ton accomplished. But if we can break down our goals and devote 50% of our working time to the things that truly matter, we'll be much more likely to achieve our objectives.
Ask yourself this: what's the one thing you can do this year to achieve your five-year goal? Then what's the one thing you can do this week and this month? What's that one thing you can do to achieve your goal today? Perhaps it’s working one-on-one with your service teammates, helping them improve their vehicle inspections? If that’s your focus – your one thing - it must not be interrupted by other tasks.
If you devoted four hours a day for two weeks to doing nothing but working a couple days with each of your service teammates - walking, talking, chalking and helping them become more proficient with vehicle inspections - do you think by the end of those two weeks you could get your average repair order up by $25 or $35? Heck, it’s probably going to go up by $60 or more!
Let’s rephrase the question. If you keep doing what you’ve been doing, but just tell your team they need to do a better job on inspections because your shop’s repair orders are below average and customers aren't getting the information they need to properly care for their cars, how much will your ticket average go up? By $7? Maybe $15? Probably zero dollars. And if you do see gains, will they sustain themselves?
The current issue with goal-setting is we may set the goals, but we don’t work on the daily pieces to make achievement of those goals a reality. Concentrating on that one thing puts your most insurmountable goals within reach and gives you a plan to execute. Good luck implementing your one thing today!