FLOORING INDUSTRY BLOG & NEWS
Running Your Business
by the Numbers
How to prevent margin erosion before it starts
Why do people put a fence around their property? Mainly to keep the good in and the bad out. Why is there any difference within our business? Auditors even have an expression called boundary control. The idea is if you have the right rigor at the boundary you can prevent the garbage in garbage out…
Unlock your cash and profit with our free WIP calculator
Most of you have had to pay attention to your cash position and your cashflow in 2020 and 2021. PPP provided some protection But our benchmarks show many of you are acting like banks and not flooring companies. You are loaning your customers lots of cash and not charging them any interest! That money should…
You don’t need to be a CPA to understand your numbers
The ultimate scorecard is your financial statements. Your company value is a product of not just higher revenues in the income statement, but of a healthier balance sheet and strong cashflow generation. You need to improve all three, which requires an understanding of how they work. We believe the more people understand how the numbers…
Are you afraid of change orders?
One thing is for certain in installing a floor. There will be bumps in the road. Hiccups, unforseen by the GC, or whims expressed last minute by the owner will generate change orders. Do you fear them, or do you love them? Our commercial flooring database tells us that change orders represent about 16-20%…
The power of maniacal customer focus
We had the pleasure of meeting with a 30-year flooring veteran who consistently delivers $5-10million of flooring contracts every year at industry leading margins. You would expect his Rolodex to be chock full of an enormous range of customers, right! Nope. Just two. Most people would be scared to have just two eggs in the…
Dig deep and find gold
Many owners are reticent about sharing their financials with employees for several reasons: They don’t want employees to know the amount of money the business is making. They are concerned that the numbers may leak to competitors Financial statements are private, it’s an owner thing and has nothing to do with anyone else. It’s a…
What the numbers tell us about Covid’s impact on flooring
There are many anecdotal stories of how Covid affected the flooring business. At Flooring by the Numbers we like objectivity. So we looked to the numbers to tell us. We have aggregated 19 flooring company financials and pipeline data to decipher the COVID dynamics. We segmented the data into 3 buckets: Pre-Covid: …
Why cradle to grave will take you to the grave
Note that the title is not “cradle to grave salespeople“. Why? Because they don’t exist. Maybe, in the first generation of your third generation business life, cradle to grave salespeople used to roam the earth, gaily cavorting alongside unicorns. In today’s cut throat competitive world that dog won’t hunt. I hear you gasp is horror!…
Building a Revenue Factory
Flooring companies often experience wild swings in revenue. One month you don’t have enough installers and the next your people are sitting on buckets. Is it possible to construct a “flooring factory” where we can dial in demand and match it with our ability to supply? In other words, your sales machine delivers sufficient end…
Winning bids is all about the “F” Word
In working with over 60 commercial flooring companies we have identified 4 competencies that when mastered, significantly improve business performance and consistency. They are: Lead Generation Pipeline Management Work in Progress Management Performance Management (Know your numbers) There is massive variation the maturity of these competencies from business to business. We will headline some key…
Making more money in less time
Most owners think their purpose is to make money. In fact the owner’s purpose is to build a business that makes money. The problem we see is that most owners either don’t make enough money or their business consumes so much of their time they don’t get to enjoy the fruits or their labor. The…
Why Flooring Companies don’t make money
Having seen inside the financial statements of over 60 flooring companies we can reveal the average net profit is a miserly 1-2%. Shocking. Some owners may be OK with that as they have taken a decent salary and maybe a bonus. But this lack of profit means you aren’t building equity and have less ability…