It’s been said that businesses are either growing or shrinking; there is no such thing as status quo or neutral. If you are working at growing your horse business, you are always interested in ways to leverage your time. The concept of leveraging your time means understanding your time is precious and delivering your products and services is your main business objective.
Training horses, selling horses, and riding lessons may be some of the ways you deliver your products and services. The limited work hours available in each day dictate the amount of sales you alone can generate. There is a maximum created by the length of each workday. The way to leverage time and increase sales and, ultimately, profits is to have others assist you in what you do.
Your hired assistants are good at what they do and are patterned in your style, but they are not you. In an ideal world, we would be able to clone ourselves and generate sales and profits to grow the business. In our imperfect world, the assistants that help leverage your time aren’t exact replicas of you.
Professionals who have great confidence and faith in their employees sometimes forget that their customers haven’t had enough experience and exposure to their associates’ skills. When customers think they have hired you to train their horse and find out that your employee has been doing all of the training, they can become disappointed and may even feel misled. When students expect hands on help from you at a riding lesson and discover that your trained and skilled assistant will be giving the lesson, they may feel cheated out of “The Real McCoy”
The way to avoid having the client feel let down about dealing with your associates is to maintain a campaign of team awareness. On a regular basis, reinforce the concept that your business is a team, led by you. The team works together in delivering the same type of horses and services that represent the personal brand that you have created.
Use expressions like:
- We work as a team in this business to deliver the best possible service.
- Sometimes Judy will be training your horse. I’ll be closely watching your horse’s success, but to get faster results for my clients, Judy fills in for me when I can’t be here. Is that OK?
- I’ve found I get better results for my clients by having a well-trained team to back me up. Our styles may be slightly different, but the foundation philosophy and core program is the same I have successfully delivered for years.
The idea is to let your clients know in advance that even though you, the owner, may not be hands-on all of the time, they can be comfortable and confident that they are getting the “Real McCoy” for their money from your associates.
This week, be thinking about how you can leverage your time to leverage your profits.