Closing the business at the end of the day can be a great feeling. How you feel at the end of the day when turning the key in the door to head home has a lot to do with your overall happiness in life and in conjunction your effectiveness at work. It can provide a sense of accomplishment or a temporary pause from the onslaught of the day. As a business owner your effectiveness as a leader can be reflected in the hours you work. Long hours, tough workdays, and stress are all words used to describe the lives of many owners and managers. Owners and managers of collision centers are putting in longer and longer hours. This can be exciting if the work is focused on growing the business and exhausting if it is focused on finishing the business for the day. The effectiveness of the owner or manager can be directly measured by the differential between the closing time posted on the front door and the time the owner actually closes the business for the day.
As an owner or manager, it is important to step back and analyze your performance in order to ensure continued professional growth and success. The first step is to take pause from the day to day operations and examine how much time you are working after the posted closing time of the business. While a business may thrive due to the hours and amount of work the owner produces, it may not be a sustainable model if only the owner or manager is making this success possible. To grow, outperform, and succeed in your business you must be able to achieve success through people. The barometer of success will be the amount of time you are spending after your posted closing time at work. Knowing whether you are staying 15 minutes, 1 hour, or 3 hours after closing is key to gauging your effectiveness as a leader.
Once you know how much time is being worked after the posted closing time, it is time to analyze what type of work is being done after hours and why. There is always room to improve and best your best. Analyzing the work performed after posted business close will provide great insight into where improvements are possible. There are two types of work performed after hours, working on the business and working in the business. Working on the business is staying after closing to refine SOPs, perform training, or any other activity geared toward strengthening and growing the business. Working in the business is when you are staying late washing a car, writing an estimate, locking and securing the premises for the night or completing another coworker’s task. Each time a reason for staying late is identified the acquired knowledge is a gift and it points directly to an area for improvement. Most often after-hours work can be traced back to an inefficient upstream process that is delivering late or low-quality products.
Addressing inefficiencies in your business that are causing you to work late pays huge dividends. While many owners believe that doing whatever it takes to deliver a car on the day it is scheduled is a valiant effort and a winning scenario, it can actually burnout and disengage employees if the current process is causing them to work late as well. To enable efficient closing of the business at the posted closing time requires documented procedures. Procedures that exist only in the owner’s or manager’s head, are not procedures, and are not empowering to employees. Procedures that are well documented empower employees and drive efficiency and accountability. While creating the written procedures may take work, operating a business without written procedures takes far more work from fewer individuals. To enable on time business closing requires on time, high quality products and communication by all upstream processes. It also requires certain closing operations to be performed every day. Identifying tasks such as powering off equipment, setting thermostats, draining compressors, staging vehicles, securing the parking lot, and turning off the lights are all procedures that can be documented and delegated to trusted employees. Trusting employees is key to closing the business on time. Depending on the task and the security level related to the business, roles can be split amongst different trusted employees. The final step is to put the process into action. The results will be evidenced by the differential in the closing time on the front door and the actual closing time for the manager or owner.
Analyzing, creating, and streamlining your business’s closing process can pay huge dividends. It can make your business operate more efficiently while it is open. It can create more time for you to spend working on the business to grow it when it is closed. It can create more time to spend in your personal life. Your success is only limited by your ability to achieve with your team. Creating written processes is a key step to letting your team know what you need from them and enabling you to operate more efficiently as an owner or manager.
