How to stay on track while growing your stone shop

This article is about how to grow your business and make your future plans come to fruition.

Here’s the deal.

Many small business owners don’t do any business planning and the ones that do often fall behind on executing those plans. I want to explain how to actually make sure that doesn’t happen to you.

There is a system to set and achieve goals, and here’s how it works. Let’s say you want to increase revenue by 50% in 2020. In order to do that, you need a plan.

So you devise a plan to grow the retail side of your business by improving our marketing efforts. This will increase the results, or ROI, on your marketing investment. You also decide to do more outreach to grow your revenue 50%.

Then you break down that plan to what’s called quarterly priorities and for quarterly priorities you can set up a very simple spreadsheet what we call a quarterly priorities manager.

The quarterly priorities manager is just a list of things that you want to accomplish in any given quarter, and implementing one is an important part of running a successful business.

The way we do this at Stone Fab Marketing is we set an annual goal, write up an annual plan and then break it down into quarterly segments with up to five priorities in each department.

Departments are: marketing, sales, production, HR and management. Those are the top five departments we focus on. Every department gets up to five goals that need to be accomplished every quarter.

Your stone shop can be fairly small. You may not have a manager for every department and that’s alright. You still have priorities in those areas and you decide the right goals in that area.

Write down everything you want or need to accomplish to hit your growth numbers, and then break it down by category, and then further into priorities.

If you do not have the staff to run marketing internally, you inform your marketing company that you want to up quarterly objectives in that area.

Achieving goals isn’t easy when there are so many tasks to tackle in a given day. So the way you ensure you’re on top of your plan is to insist on two meetings with each team lead, every month.

These twice monthly meetings are when team members actually report their accomplishments to date and what roadblocks, if any, they’ve faced along the way. Your job is to remove those roadblocks so progress can continue.

What we do at Stone Fab Marketing is hold a progress meeting mid-month and a monthly departmental performance review. In both cases, we look at the QPM, or quarterly performance manager, that spreadsheet I mentioned earlier.

Having these meetings regularly keeps everyone accountable and on top of their tasks, because they know that, every couple of weeks, they will need to report, in front of others, their accomplishments.

This kind of transparency is also a helpful motivator, because everyone will know who has done work to move the needle in the right direction to help the company grow.

If you need a digital marketing company to help you grow your business, contact us and we will schedule a consultation to discuss all your business needs.