I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase Time is Money. This is so true when it comes to your Grounds Guys investment. Time is labor, and labor is your largest business expense. It’s influence on your bottom line profit is measurable. It all starts with your leadership and the culture you influence. A culture of understanding, awareness and personal accountability to time is essential to your business success. Educating and empowering your employees to manage their time from the point when they clock in until the time they leave at the end of the day is essential.
Implementing systems and processes to will help you and your team accomplish this. The tool you will use is named GGPro. Your budget and item catalog inputs are the first influences you will put into place. Production rates are used when estimating to help identify direct billable labor time on jobs and service tasks, while unbillable / indirect time percentage is used to account for time related to loading, unloading, traveling, HUDDLE, training and maintaining equipment.
About eight years ago, I had the opportunity to join a team that asked me to come in and help them save their company. It was losing money and was very close to going out of business. After evaluating the reasons why they were where they were, it became evident that the biggest opportunity to correct this was improving how they managed their time. A closer look revealed that their people were very good at managing their on the job time which we refer to as direct labor. Yet their off the job time or unbillable / indirect time was not being managed very well. At that time, over 32 percent of our production labor expense was unbillable / indirect. This was unacceptable. I decided to influence a correction through empowerment, systems and processes. We first brought in the production team and asked them for their input. We white boarded all the areas of opportunity to we had to improve our time management and discussed how to implement them immediately. The problem was we didn’t have a system set up and operating to help us track or manage our progress. Fortunately, we had a software system in place that was very similar to GGPro. The tool we needed was already there, we were paying for it, yet we weren’t using it to its fullest. Once we educated our our employees how to use it we were able to get the information everyone needed to positively influence and manage their direct billable and unbillable / indirect time.
The result of our efforts was staggering. In a little over a year and a half, we saw a 22.17 percent improvement in our unbillable / indirect percent to labor! Our team was able to drive their unbillable / indirect percentage down to 9.83 percent using our culture, systems and processes. Our overall labor expense at the time was $1,596,000 (38 percent of income). Had we continued our 32 percent track, we would have spent $510,720 on unbillable / indirect time. Our 9.83 percent improvement in unbillable / indirect labor management resulted in a savings of $383,833. Our overall labor expense to income percent dropped from 38 percent to around 24 percent. This money dropped straight to the bottom line. It was the largest influence in making the company profitable again. But wait, there is more. Our people not only reduced their unbillable / indirect hours, they still worked the same hours as before, which means they converted those previous unbillable / indirect hours to direct billable labor hours. They were able to drive an additional $572,885 in top line revenue because of their influence on our unbillable / indirect time.
Time really is Money! You are making a huge mistake if you aren’t using the tools you have at your disposal to influence your top line sales and bottom line profit. GGPro is that tool! If I was in your shoes, I would use it! Work with your FC to identify what you need to do to fully capture the benefits of GGPro and the implementation of empowerment and a time management culture within your company.
We have scheduled two webinars to help you with better understanding how to set up and use GGPro Time & the Time App. Please register now to reserve your spots in these two informative webinars!
The first webinar is “GGPro Time Sheet Review Edit Approve” and will be presented on 2/12/19 at 10am CST. Please use this link to register for this webinar: https://webinar.ringcentral.com/webinar/register/WN_ai8Y-D-7QdCn-9yBa6dhuQ
The second webinar “GGPro Time App Guide” will be presented on 2/14/19 at 10am CST. Please use this link to register for this webinar: https://webinar.ringcentral.com/webinar/register/WN_Mou9rwDcTqaOG0iQH9J5BQ