Your Canadian Contractor 30/60/90-day action plan

You have a pile of things you need to get to within your business, but what will will return you the best bang for you buck?

It’s common in all businesses to prioritize initiatives, so here is a way to prioritize yours. This downloadable Word File:  CC 30:60:90-day action plan is a two-page form we call the 30/60/90-day action plan for your company.

Take a look at the second page (shown here). Enter your current Revenue, Gross margin, Markup and Net Profit in the boxes provided. Those numbers are your baseline. They are the ones you will want to improve after you have made the changes you contemplate.

Improving your top line

The next step is to look at the kind of impact your intended change will make to your top line revenue. You don’t need a hard number, just a good guess whether the impact will be “None,” “Some,” “Lots” or “Even More” (you can name the columns anything you like.) There is a number associated with each of these ratings. Place that number in the appropriate row.

Now look at the first column. We have provided general categories of business, but you can be very specific if you want. For instance, we have “Systems” as the first area where improvements could be made. You can replace that with, “Install BuilderTrend” or “Install Quick Books.” Where we say, “Logistics” you might put “Outsource delivery.” In some ways it is better to keep the various areas of your business generic, as out list does, so you can think at a higher level about affect of the improvements contemplated.

So, how much room for improvement is there in your Systems, and how much do you think they will impact the top line? How about if you improved you public relations efforts? What kind of revenue increase do you think you could expect? Or if you got your cash flow under control? Go down the list and note your best guess.

But what will your improvement cost?

The next page is where you consider the cost of the improvements you evaluated on the previous page. Getting a good system installed will increase your revenue a lot, but at what cost? Getting your cash flow under control doesn’t have the same impact on revenue, but it doesn’t cost anything to fix. For every area of your company, consider now the cost of the improvements and check the box that most accurately expresses it.

We’ll mention here that if you don’t have a particular project in mind, it’s still a good idea to rate a category anyway. For example, there is a category here named, “Leadership.” You have never questioned whether your leadership is impacting your company negatively, but if you improved your leadership, what would that do to the company? Is there room to be better? Is there revenue to be found with improved leadership?

Your top four initiatives

Once you have evaluated the affect on revenue potential and cost and recorded the appropriate number in the box, look at the total score of each row. Those areas with the highest score are the areas you should attend to. Pick the top four and list them in the final table. Next to each, put a goal down for either the expected increase in revenue or decrease in costs.

This is a simple chart, and you may find to not detailed enough, but if you are stuck trying to make a decision on exactly what you should focus your attention on, mostly because there are too many things going wrong, this sheet is a handy help for getting unstuck.

Again, you can download your own copy of this Word file here: CC 30:60:90-day action plan Please let us know if you used this sheet and if you did, how useful you found it. You can email me at rkoci@canadiancontractor.ca