Our Success Cycle

A wise man once said, "It is easier to copy genius than to invent mediocrity."

This is a bit of the philosophy that is practiced in Remodelers Advantage. We believe that each of us is a bit of a genius in some aspect of business-it might be marketing, production systems, customer service or design.

And, we know, that if we put this genius together, combining our individual talents, knowledge, expertise and experience, we will move faster, easier and more effectively in the direction we want to go -- toward building a successful company.

Now, in the over the 30 years we've been in business, we;ve worked with thousands of remodelers and we've seen this genius at work - and, using what we've seen, we've developed a practical, workable philosophy of how to be successful in business that we want to share with you.

We call it The Success Cycle.

The first element of the Success Cycle is to Create Leadership at all levels.

We agree with international business expert, Peter Drucker who said that leaders of the most successful companies share three abilities:

• To define and establish a sense of mission. Good leaders set goals, priorities, and standards making sure that these are not only communicated but maintained.
• To accept leadership as a responsibility rather than a rank. Good leaders aren't afraid to surround themselves with talented, capable people. The do not blame others when things go wrong.
• To earn and keep the trust of others. Good leaders have a personal integrity and inspire trust among their followers. Their actions are consistent with what they say.

It's not always easy being the leader but as business owners, this is one of our greatest responsibilities.

The Second element of the Success Cycle is to Set S.M.A.R.T. goals,

Running a business without goals is like shooting a rifle in the fog. You know there's a target out there somewhere --but you certainly don't know where - nor do you know if you hit it!

Successful business people don't operate like that. Instead they set goals for what they want to see happen. And the best use S.M.A.R.T. goals. These are goals that are:

• Specific--what exactly do you want to have happen.
• Measurable--what will success look like? How will you measure it?
• Attainable--you don't want to develop a goal that are so far out there it can never be reached. When you don't reach it after lots of hard work, it can be demoralizing to both you and your staff. Or, if they realize at the very beginning that they'll never succeed in reaching it, they might decide not to try at all.
• Realistic--again, set goals that are realistic and not pie in the sky.
• Timely--set deadlines. Goals should never be open ended.

The third element is to Execute Effectively through People and Systems.

This is probably the most difficult part of the entire cycle. If you're like me, you probably have dozens of great ideas that you think would work but you're just having trouble putting them to work. Let's just review a few things that make this execution work.

First is to have top performing employees. It's not easy to find and hire great employees - nor to keep them once you found them. But this is exactly what successful business owners do. They invest time and money to recruit, hire and train employees and they don't flinch at getting rid of those that don't work. We call this Freeing Up Their Future or Gifting Them Back to the Community.

To help your employees do their jobs well, you need to have well thought-out job descriptions so that each person understands what you expect of them and agrees with these expectations.

Lastly, using systems and procedures are a major tool for producing consistent results - and we're talking results in the quality of the product, in customer satisfaction, in efficiency of the internal processes like the sales to production handoff.

The fourth element of the Success Cycle is Measuring and Assessing Constantly.

It doesn't matter if you set all the goals in the world if you are not regularly reviewing the results and making the comparison of where you are now to where you want to be. The beauty in this regular review process is that you find out if you need to take different actions - WHILE YOU STILL HAVE TIME TO AFFECT THE OUTCOME!

You may find that you're right on track and just have to keep doing what you're doing. But you might find that, if you just keep going, you'll miss an important goal.

You're assessing and measuring so that you know:

• where you are compared to the goal,
• where you are falling down in performance,
• what you can do immediately to improve, and then,
• how can you improve performance overall in the future.

Now, I hope you can see that how the Success Cycle works... but we haven't yet talked about the last element - the final element on which the whole process rests.

This foundation is Accurate and Timely Information.

All of these steps we've discussed predicated on the fact that the information flowing through your business and helping you make decisions is correct. If it's not - if your reports are not formatted right, if costs are not sorted accurately, or if you don't know how to decipher the information that is delivered through these reports, none of the other elements will work.

So, in Remodelers Advantage University, this is where you start. We'll spend the next several weeks helping you review your information systems, putting improvements into place if necessary, and then, once everything makes sense and is correct, then we work on learning how to use all of the information to make the absolute best decisions possible for the company.