With so many hours focused on managing your painting business, sometimes it’s hard to take a step back and see beyond that description of your business. While your business is a painting business, it’s also a small business. And while all small businesses are different, they also have a lot in common. So while it’s critical to stay informed on what it takes to make a painting contractor successful, sometimes it’s also important to take a step back and ask “What makes small businesses successful?”
Everyone has a different spin on the most important factors for success in small business. Some focus on customer service, some focus on the product being delivered, and others focus on profit. But there’s one area that most people agree is essential to success. In fact, the Small Business Association, Entrepreneur magazine, and USA Today have all discussed the importance of this one factor: planning.
Planning sounds daunting, because it involves designing a set of business processes. Of course, not all business plans are giant, detailed documents. A good business plan can be concise. But it does need to exist. Because, while plenty of businesses survive without one, that doesn’t mean that they’re successful.
The most valuable part of a business plan is a statement of what you built the business to do. There are more than a hundred thousand painting companies in the United States, but you decided to undertake the major task of owning your own business for specific reasons.
What do you want your business to provide to you, the owner? What do you want it to provide to your customers, and to your community? If you have employees that rely on you for their own livelihood, what do you want your business to provide to them?
It’s not until you can clearly state your goals that you can start planning how to meet them. In the process of this execution, you’ll almost certainly find things that need to be done differently to achieve your goals. You’ll probably consider ideas that seem great until you ask if they’ll actually help you achieve the goals that make your business worth owning. In fact, you might find out that your goals change entirely. But having those major goals in place, and working towards accomplishing them, is ultimately what makes business ownership fulfilling.
If your business is in no immediate financial danger, but it’s still not making you happy, it might be time to go back to those core goals of your business. Beyond a salary and business survival, what do you want your business to achieve? How can you get there? And how will you measure that success? Asking these tough questions will do more than make your business more profitable – it will make all the work you do to keep it thriving more fulfilling.
To learn more about how ProPainter Websites can help your painting business achieve success, call us at 866-665-1605 or email us at Team_PPW@ProPainterWebsites.com.