A Roadmap to Your Business’ Success
Growth is clearly fundamental to every business’ survival. Though the idea is to have more profit than before, determining “how much more” may not be very straightforward. It is first necessary to analyze the huge amount of raw data in RMPro related to your past activities in order to determine your exact goal. This calculation, if done manually, can be extremely overwhelming, and may involve an expert for days and weeks. The next challenge is how to reach your goal.
This is where SMART Growth enters and takes control. SMART Growth is a management tool designed to measure, plan, and track your business’ growth. Basically, to grow, a company needs to either increase the number of invoices or the average amount of invoices. Thus, you only need to specify a preferred growth rate for each or both of them, and let SMART Growth handle the rest.
Smart Growth makes calculations based on your past information. It not only comes up with an automatic goal estimation, but also lets you keep your employees motivated by offering incentives. Furthermore, through the use of visual charts and detailed reports, it provides a clear understanding of where your organization stands in relation to these goals, and what steps need to be taken to achieve those goals. In other words, Smart Growth is a catalyst for growth.
Monitor Historical Sales Trends
Setting a realistic goal that is neither overly ambitious nor overly cautious requires a great deal of thought and consideration. Ideally, goals should be set based on historical sales or service data collected on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis. Analyzing the accumulated information over three previous sales and service years, and calculating the averages, will ensure that the goals are attainable.
Looking back over the past 3 years, and separating by either Weekly, Monthly, or Quarterly, SMART Growth identifies the total amount of invoices and number of invoices for each period, and averages the 3 years together to forecast the next / current year.
Identify Patterns Throughout the Year
Different times of the year bring different traffic, and the SMART Growth tool helps you identify busy periods versus slow periods. During each period, you may decide to target a specific goal based on these patterns.
Set Meaningful Goals for a Period of Time
As mentioned previously, the SMART Growth module’s main purpose is to identify a target for your business’s growth, and to set a plan to reach it. There are basically two plans for growing your business:
1- Increase the number of invoices (Sale or Service invoices).
2- Increase invoice’s sale amount; or both at the same time!
For each time period (Week, Month, or Quarter), set your desired goal for business growth. You can let RMPro forecast each period for you based on your yearly goal, or you can override each period with a more specific rate as you see fit. For example, you may target a higher rate of growth during the holidays than during the rest of the year.
Keep Track of How Far you are from Goal
Your goals are transparent to your employees so they can see how close or far they are to reaching them. For example, the RMPro home screen can show goals next to the current period, or they can view a chart showing their progress.
Pay Out Incentives when Goal is Reached
Assign employees to different groups, and set up incentive payouts for each group for certain time periods. For example, if the monthly goal is met, one group can receive $100 each and another group receives $50 each. Then, if the yearly goal is met, one group can earn 1% of total profit, and another group can get 0.75% profit.
Keep Service Goals Separate from Sales
Services and sales are two entirely different things, and shouldn’t be mixed up. A low increase in inventory sales may be fine for your company, but you might prefer a much higher increase in services. For example, your sales goal can be a 10% increase by the end of the year, while your services can be a 30% increase.
What Else do I Need to Know about SMART Growth?
- Growth only happens by increasing the average invoice or number of invoices
- You can set separate goals for each location or for all
- Incentives are not the same thing as commissions
- Incentives can apply to all employees, including drivers and laborer
- Each incentive period can be based on % of Sales, % of Profit, or a flat amount.
- Sales Impact helps prevent you from paying more than you’re able
Final Word
With RMPro SMART Growth, you can track your progress toward your business objectives and develop strategies for achieving them. Our goal is to help you take the next steps in growing your business.