Installations have now been running at record levels for approaching 12-months. We saw incredible growth in demand throughout summer 2020, hitting a hiatus in June, with new sales up 46% on May. This followed the 350% bounce in May on April, a time when our estimates suggest up to 80% of the industry was still not back at work.
They remained high all the way through to October, slowing slightly during the second lockdown and then again as we ran into the Christmas period. But that doesn’t automatically mean that installers have been making record profits. A lot of retailers are going to get to the end of this period of boom and realise that margins weren’t as great as they thought they were.
When you’re busy it’s very easy to lose track, especially if the systems you use to run your business aren’t connected to one another. Things can slip through the net and you don’t get an accurate picture of where you’re making money and where you’re not.
For example, you may be selling aluminium for more but if you’re getting call backs or it takes longer to fit, you may actually be making more money on PVC-U installs, despite a lower selling price.
The point is, if you aren’t tracking time on site against your forecasts, the cost of any remedial or service calls, you don’t have a complete picture of the cost of the job against what you sold it for.
If you’re finding out that you weren’t making as much as you thought you were or where you thought you made it at your year end, is too late. If you’re tracking it in real time, you stop relying on gut feeling and get to adapt your business, picking up problems before they cost, and maximising opportunities by founding your business on data.
Business Pilot brings that data to your fingertips. You can see what’s making you money – and what isn’t – because it gives you visibility of each and every aspect of your operation, from lead generation, installation scheduling to aftercare and financial reporting. That means you get real time insights into each individual job as it happens. Is a member of your sales team under-pricing jobs?
You know and you can manage it. Is a fitting team constantly over-running? You can see it. Are you losing or making money on a particular product – Business Pilot tells you because we track everything to do with the operation of your business and bring it together into a single resource.
It allows you to plan, execute and review business through a single tool in real time from your phone, laptop – from anywhere you happen to be. That’s a pretty powerful set of data to have in your back pocket when you’re at an event like FIT. With the industry in one place, it allows you to target the products and suppliers which will help you maximise margin.
Register here to visit Business Pilot on stand L6, FIT Show, the NEC, Birmingham 10-12 MAY 2022
