Hello,
Sunday night I was in the sauna with my phone and wanted to know which of our trucks had cost the most in repairs last quarter. Typed it in, thirty seconds later I had the truck, the number and the three jobs behind it. The phone bit is a party trick though. The thing underneath it is what matters.
a couple of weeks back I wrote up how we built the business a brain. Since then it’s finished and it’s changed how we run the place. It has sight of everything, every sale, every customer, every quote, every truck, every price, plus months of the business written down properly, and any of us can ask it anything about any of it and get a straight answer from what we actually know. No report, no spreadsheet, no waiting on somebody. We ask the business questions now that we never used to ask, because getting the answer used to be too much bother.
here’s four from the last week. We ask them in thirty seconds. Underneath each one is how you’d ask it with a spreadsheet export and the projects from the earlier notes, because you can do every one of these without anything like our setup, and most businesses never do.
which five customers should our sales team phone this week? ours gives five names, why each one and what they used to buy. your version is sales by customer by month into a project and asking for the five that have dropped off most against their own history. that’s a call list, not a report.
which five target accounts are most likely to come to us? ours ranks them from quote history with the reason for each. yours is quotes by customer, won and lost, into a project, and asking which prospects keep coming back for prices without converting. the ones who keep asking want a reason to switch.
is our timber priced too cheap against the competition? ours tells us where we are, where they are and what it’s costing us. yours is your price list plus whatever competitor prices you’ve got, even photos of shelf tickets, and asking where you’re under them on volume lines. swap timber for whatever you sell most of.
which truck is costing the most to keep on the road? that was the sauna one. yours is repairs by vehicle from whoever does your maintenance, into a project, ranked by cost. the answer’s usually the one everyone already moans about, with a number that makes the decision for you.
twenty minutes each with an export, and worth every one of those minutes.
at twenty minutes a question, you ask four a month. At thirty seconds, with a proper knowledge base that already holds everything, you ask twenty a day, and the sales team ask their own, and the answers are there before the decision’s made instead of after.
Asking constantly is what’s going to make a significant difference to our profit this year, because every call list, every price, every truck decision now has a real number behind it instead of a confident guess. The questions were always worth asking. We just never had the time to ask them.
if you read those four and thought of the four you’d ask about your own place, reply and tell me what they are. I’d genuinely like to know, and I’ll write up the best ones.
Andrew
Ps. should probably stop taking the phone into the sauna.