It’s a familiar scenario for many business owners. You spend an inordinate amount of time working, with very little to show for it. Some months you’ve made just enough to break even – other months you’re so deep in the red that you’re forced to beg and borrow to pay salaries and keep showing up for your clients.

Rhett and Nakita’s story was no different. The brother-and-sister team ran multiple branches of pest control and cleaning businesses under “The Specialists” franchise, and despite their best efforts, they found themselves unable to grow their business further, and unsure of what to do next. “So yes, we’ve got a car, we do live, but it’s always a struggle,” Rhett admitted. He described how there was “never a release from pressure even when on holiday”, and how due to poor cashflow, they’d constantly need to be pulling strings at the last minute to make ends meet every month.

Frustrated, and desperate to make a change, Rhett sought out help. “I asked some people”, he said. “I asked my dad; I asked my wife. My wife actually gave me a suggestion that maybe I must get a coach, so I  I chatted to Nakita and she said let’s look into it, and we did.”

Rhett discussed the matter with his father, who shared Grow’s details after having met the coaching firm at a networking event. And that was the beginning of a rewarding journey to growth and profitability.  

When coaching with Grow began, Rhett and Nakita’s coach quickly identified the lack of leadership and structure in the business.

The leadership team at The Specialists had a large core leadership team of 8 people, which made decision-making difficult. In addition, the poor leadership structure made it difficult for Rhett and Nakita to hold their staff members accountable if any performance issues were identified. The coach attributed this to Rhett and Nakita’s fear of confrontation and their inability to make difficult decisions. Nakita agreed. “…both Rhett and I are very much people pleasers”, she said. “And I think a lot of our business before Grow was very focused on that.”

After a few sessions with their coach, Rhett and Nakita were able to reduce the size of the core team to three. In addition to Nakita’s role as Head of Operations and Rhett’s CEO and Sales Lead role, The Specialists created a new General Manager role responsible for financial and office management, and appointed Jean into the position. This, as the coach explains, ‘changed the game” because it allowed Jean to take charge of parts of the business that had previously been neglected.

Jean had been part of The Specialists for some time as Financial Manager. During the initial coaching sessions, he displayed a keen willingness to learn and play his part in actioning the training and advice provided by Grow, which gave Rhett and Nakita the confidence to appoint him in the General Manager role. “Jean did the homework and was interested, and from there he just grew,” Rhett explained.

According to their coach, “the 3 of them are now very unified and moving in the same direction.”

While coaching them on their leadership skills, Grow worked with The Specialists to map a cohesive growth strategy for their business. A key part of this was defining the differentiation factors that would help The Specialists stand out from competitors. 

The team was also tasked with homing in on their target market, which was initially quite broad. “For the cleaning part of our business at that stage, it was any cleaning item for anybody. We can help anybody with anything,” explained Nakita. “We had quite a lot of debates and we really had to drill down to what our ideal customer would look like for both our pest control and cleaning and hygiene sections.”

Every quarter, the team would also have planning sessions with their Grow coach, where they would identify and track their top 3 priorities for that quarter, which in essence were the 3 focus areas that would provide the greatest business impact in the short to medium term. This was a breakthrough for Rhett, who explained that “…there is always stuff to do. But if you just focus every quarter on 3 things, and the next quarter 3 things, by the end of the year if you’ve reached all the goals; you’ve hit 12 big things that you’ve fixed in the business. And if they were the 3 most important, your business will be growing and going to the next level.”

The strategy and planning sessions also revealed how there was a lack of clarity on the sales and expenses numbers.

As part of their strategy mapping with Grow, the leadership team started working on determining their ‘Profit per X’, which is the core driver of profit underpinning their business model. In the case of The Specialists, they defined this as their Profit per Job. Once this was determined, they then did an analysis of their existing customers to determine their profitability against this Profit per X number.

It was an eye-opening process for the team, filled with valuable insights and lessons. As they worked through their job costings vs the prices they charged clients, they were able to identify that they were making a loss on some of their biggest clients and contracts.

One way in which they sought to rectify this was by starting to charge more for services rendered to some clients who were being undercharged. A bold move for the business!

Some clients agreed to the increases while other larger clients declined. Where they couldn’t reach an agreement with the client, the relationships with those clients would then be terminated. And while their turnover subsequently reduced in the short term, their profit increased substantially within 3 months of letting go of unprofitable clients. 

The team also drilled down into costs at an itemised level, such as fuel, labour and sales rep commissions costs per job. They did this to identify where costs were incorrectly excluded from job cost calculations, or where some expenses could be reduced or eliminated entirely.

With their improved profit margins, they were able to reinvest money into their business within the first year of tracking their Profit per X, upgrading their offices which helped build staff energy and morale, and rebranding their vehicles.

While improving profitability on existing business, The Specialists also needed to get new business and increase their overall turnover. 

They did this through a combination of responding to inbound office leads as well as outbound sales, where they’d deploy sales representatives to source new business.

The business however, had a disproportionate focus on inbound sales and needed to improve the performance of their outbound sales team. However, Rhett and Nakita had been unable to hold their sales representatives accountable due to their fear of confrontation. They kept records of performance but did not feel empowered to act on them.  

Together with their Grow coach, the leadership team developed job scorecards for their sales team with clear accountabilities and measurable performance standards, and started tracking their performance regularly.

This, as Nakita explained, helped to take away the emotion from the management team and base their performance ratings on facts. The management team became more comfortable with courageously handling difficult performance management conversations and disciplinary hearings instead of tolerating mediocre performance due to a fear of confrontation.

They also began to drive targets daily for each branch. Information and targets were widely shared with the sales team, with everyone knowing exactly what they needed to do to reach their targets. For example, they established sales call targets which were monitored regularly, allowing them to step in and address instances of underperformance. With the combination of clear metrics and tight management to fix any snags as and when they arise, the team started to improve their sales numbers.

Their coach also helped them improve their hiring successes when it came to new sales representatives. ‘I’ve been working with him (Rhett) on what it looks like to build a sales team because he’s been frustrated,” the coach explained. Their coach helped Rhett determine the key areas to consider when recruiting new salespeople, and as a result, The Specialists are now hiring more effective sales representatives. 

The Specialist’s Grow coach continues to help each of the members of the leadership team develop themselves individually to perform better in their roles and as a team. He explained that the team’s openness to learning has made it easier for them to achieve the desired results. ‘They have a huge willingness; they are very coachable.” 

With a consolidated, unified leadership team, a clear strategy, and improved financial controls, The Specialists are now focused on scaling up alongside their coach. As Rhett put it, “We love being part of the Grow family. It’s really helped our business.”