You've heard it before. Your time is valuable. But did you know that inflation has taken its toll on this commodity also?
It's not that there are fewer hours in the day, although it may seem like it. It's not even due to rising employee costs, which is also true. The real problem is hiring. Why hiring? One of the biggest struggles we hear from companies all over the country is the difficulty finding, hiring, and training new employees - especially inspectors. This means that there are fewer total hours available to complete the revenue generating activities of your business. That, in turn, means that every minute spent by an employee who is capable of doing inspections on activities that don't involve actually doing inspections is costing your business valuable profit.
Too often when times gets tough, the first reflex is to cut costs. While we will always encourage you to watch excessive spending, some costs will make you money. Here are a few examples:
Inspection Report Creation - If you can reduce the number of hours required to create and send the inspection report to the client, that inspector could take on additional inspections. Report writing software generally costs money, but if it allows you to complete more tickets, it essentially pays for itself.
Call Handling - If anyone doing inspections is also handling calls, you are asking that person to choose between a potential future job or the customer experience of the existing one. Of course you want both! It may or may not make sense for you to have a dedicated person on staff to answer phones, but there are many options available for phone answering services of all levels.
Wearing Multiple Hats - It's a requirement of all business owners to be flexible and wear multiple hats. But if you are also doing inspections, now is the time to take off some of those other hats. It can involve substantial time, money, and training to hire people internally to get these jobs done (plus, we're back to the hiring problem!), and not doing them at all is not a good option either. Looking to specialists can often be a cost-effective solution with minimal transition time. This might mean utilizing more digital marketing that can be managed by an outsourced team, finding solutions to keep your books and records up to date, or finally investing in that payroll software that will reduce the time it takes to pay your employees.
Sometimes it can feel painful to make changes when you already feel like you are buried in work, but these are investments in your business and your sanity. When the market shifts and you have had a chance to get new inspectors onboarded, you can use all this extra time to work ON the business rather than IN it.
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