What To Do When You Get Swamped with Work

One of the joys of run­ning a ser­vice busi­ness is deal­ing with the ups and downs of a full and emp­ty sched­ule. Most of my clients are paint­ing con­trac­tors. In the win­ter months, they are all scram­bling to keep their crews busy. In the spring and sum­mer they are swamped with work. It actu­al­ly is a good prob­lem to have, but some of them are actu­al­ly turn­ing away work due to hav­ing such a full sched­ule of booked projects.

An Exam­ple of the Busi­ness Growth Cycle

A slight detour for a moment (though it is relat­ed) A num­ber of years ago, I shared this sim­i­lar frus­tra­tion to my busi­ness coach I had when I was involved in Vistage Inter­na­tion­al. I told him that we had these ups and downs and had a hard time grow­ing our busi­ness know­ing that win­ter was approach­ing and we’d have to down­size again. The same cycle each year! The busi­ness coach shared with me how a busi­ness works and grows. In short, it is called ​“grow­ing pains.” To grow a busi­ness, it is and will be painful. A sales­per­son­’s job is to sell jobs (prof­itably). He should not be as involved in all the oth­er aspects of the busi­ness such as pro­duc­tion and cus­tomer ser­vice. He just needs to sell. Then pro­duc­tion will see all the jobs he is sell­ing and won­der how he is sup­posed to sched­ule all the work. He will con­clude that he must hire new employ­ees. This brings up anoth­er set of prob­lems, train­ing and cus­tomer ser­vice issues. When you hire new employ­ees there is a train­ing peri­od. The staff that has been with you for awhile also might get a lit­tle frus­trat­ed because they have a ​“green” (new employ­ee) help­ing them. What hap­pens when you hire new employ­ees and have to train them? Cus­tomers might com­plain just a lit­tle bit more because of the grow­ing pains you are expe­ri­enc­ing. This too is nor­mal, the busi­ness coach told me. You will then be forced to make sure you have good train­ing and pro­ce­dures in order. You will also make sure you deal with your cus­tomers con­cerns. There is no way around it. So there is the cycle. To grow a busi­ness, you have to be ready to face the fact that you will have those grow­ing pains. You need to face them head on or you will con­tin­ue to go up and down in your busi­ness.

4 Things To Do When Swamped With Work Now

Now back to the main pur­pose of this blog, what are a few things you can do now when you are swamped with work. 

1. Make sure you have a plan. Pre­pare in advanced for the uptick in work. You need to look at the pre­vi­ous few years to see when work real­ly picks up and slows down. If April 1^st is the date (his­tor­i­cal­ly) when the phone real­ly rings off the hook, then your plan should begin ahead of sched­ule. This might be look­ing for an esti­ma­tor in Jan­u­ary and Feb­ru­ary. It might mean hir­ing a few extra employ­ees in March.
2. Raise Your Prices: If you are real­ly swamped, you also need to look at what you are charg­ing for work. To keep staff busy dur­ing a slow sea­son, most com­pa­nies will low­er their hourly rate, even oper­at­ing at break even num­bers for a time. Stick­ing to your plan of when you know you will typ­i­cal­ly be busy, start bid­ding work at your nor­mal and prof­itable rate ahead of sched­ule. So in March, don’t offer any discounts.
3. Don’t Let Cus­tomer Ser­vice Suf­fer: This is prob­a­bly one of the most dif­fi­cult things to do. When you get so busy you lose sleep, it is hard to keep cus­tomers hap­py. Going back to step #1 (have a plan) make sure you plan out how you will keep cus­tomers hap­py. Maybe it involves tak­ing an employ­ee from the field and charg­ing him or her with a few new respon­si­bil­i­ties dur­ing the busy sea­son. Make a tem­po­rary posi­tion and call it ​“Cus­tomer Hap­pi­ness Man­ag­er.” Cre­ate a job descrip­tion for this per­son that might require anoth­er 8 – 10 hours of work each week. This per­son can pos­si­bly help estimate/​bid small­er projects, call to con­firm start dates, fol­low up on how the job went, write thank you notes, encour­age online reviews, order­ing sup­plies, etc.
4. Don’t Stop Mar­ket­ing: The last thing you don’t want to do is pause any of your mar­ket­ing efforts. When you send your mail­ers, email blast etc out, just don’t dis­count. Keep your name out there in front of your tar­get audi­ence. This is also a great time to plan ahead. See if you can pre-sell work for those who are not in a hur­ry. Tell them about your slow sea­son or a ​“rainy day” special.

What Do You Do When You Get Busy

I am curi­ous to what you all do now when you get busy, what ideas you have and what you plan to do this sea­son. I do hope you are off to a great sec­ond quar­ter like many of the con­trac­tors I’ve spo­ken to late­ly. Let me know by email or in the com­ments below.