How Contractors Can Thrive This Spring By Aligning Their Team, Time & Numbers w/ Business Consultant, Frank Bourque

And our, our objective is to see things as they are. You know, if a challenge is coming, uh, maybe it's a person, maybe it's a financial challenge, whatever it might be, but not worse than they are. Welcome to the Sales Made Simple podcast. This podcast is dedicated to helping overwhelmed outdoor living professionals, landscapers, and hardscapers just like you increase your closing rate to over 75% without doubling your workload so you can build a seven-figure business that doesn't need you. I'm your host, Joshua Gillow. Let's dig in. [upbeat music] Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show, your host here, Joshua Gillow. Today, we're gonna talk about the top three things that contractors need to focus on right now, springtime, hammer time, when it's just craziness out, and I brought Frank Bork back on the show. Uh, he's, he does a lot of business consulting in the industry, and I really wanted to get his sense of what he's seeing his customers, his clients, what they're out there struggling with right now, and what we need to focus on as an industry to not just survive the spring but to thrive through it. So Frank, welcome back.

Hey, thanks for having me, Joshua. Appreciate it.

Ab- absolutely, man. I'm excited to have our conversation today, so I'd love to just dig right in.

Yeah.

So what are the top three things you think contractors need to be focusing on right now-

Yeah

... that's gonna help them thrive and not just survive the springtime?

Yeah, it, you're right. It, it almost feels like it's all at the same time. Oftentimes for landscapers, uh, the springtime is, it's busy and sometimes it's busy being busy, so we gotta be careful that we don't let the busyness around us take control. And so the first thing that I usually... And I kinda put this into a framework to help my own clients is, is it's like the spring survival framework is what's the first thing that we all need to do when we get really busy? Make sure you're in control, right? So it's about planning the week. So the first three things I would look at is do you know your top three priorities? I'll give you an example. I asked one of the business owners I work with on a weekly basis, and my question to him was, for that week was, "Okay, if you're starting to be busy, what are your first three priorities for this week?" And I kinda saw the look in, in his eyes that, that I see often from a lot of business owners is, "I have more than three priorities, Frank. Like, how could I just n- like, bring it down to three?" And I said, "Well, think about, um, for you, what do you need? Like, who's responsible for what in your business? What needs to get done this week, and when does it need to be done? Like, by what time does it need to, to, to be done?" And so that started that conversation around, well, okay, my priorities, I have a lot, but here are some examples, right? Do you need certain jobs finished by the end of the week? So what does that look like? What are those jobs? Do you need a certain amount of money collected by the end of the week, which helps the business run? And then what does your leads look like? Do you need to take care of that funnel that brings you those leads, that