7 June Win at Business by Investing in Yourself June 7, 2022 By sma Business Tips, Franchise business growth, inspection industry, motivation, small business 0 WIN AT BUSINESS BY INVESTING IN YOURSELF June 7, 2022 | Business Tips, Franchise | inspection industry, small business, business growth, motivation The month of June is Professional Wellness Month. In honor of this occasion, your family here at the NPI headquarters want to make sure that you have everything you need to succeed, professionally and personally. With the spotlight on professional wellness, it’s important to check in with yourself and your employees to identify any areas of improvement for your business. Likewise, it’s also valuable to take an honest personal inventory of yourself to see what areas of development you may be lacking in. Although a self-assessment can feel daunting, it’s critical to avoid being stagnant in any area of your life. Life is to be lived in a manner of constant evolution, as dormancy breeds bad personal habits and business practices. Implementing changes that need to be made as a result of your self-reflection and business assessments can at first seem overwhelming. While it’s hard to make a lot of improvements at once, it’s good to have a strategy for implementation in place for future enhancements to your business and for yourself. These changes don’t have to be drastic in nature to make a huge difference to your lifestyle and brand. Lifestyle changes that you can implement can be as small as purchasing an ergonomic chair for report-writing sessions and as grand a gesture as creating an entirely new workflow and schedule for yourself. If you acknowledge that you are at a place in life where change is necessary, but feel that the tasks are too great to conquer, it’s important to remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day. Likewise, any lasting changes you choose to undertake won’t happen overnight. Self-Assessments If you’re stuck trying to figure out where to begin, a helpful starting point is self-assessments (and no, I don’t mean the one’s located in your standard teen magazine to determine what color best suits you). Self-assessments have come a long way from the ones of yesteryear. By utilizing self-assessments in the correct way, you can find out a lot about your personality type, what makes you tick, the style of manager/owner you are versus the one you are capable of being, and many other details about your personality type. At NPI, we use the DiSC personality test. DiSC is a short but efficient quiz that will help determine how you measure up in the areas of dominance, influence, conscientiousness, and steadiness (DiSC). For this test, the participant simply chooses one word out of a grouping that most closely represents their personality and one word that descriptively is their polar opposite. Once this information has been calculated, you will be able to determine which areas of your life and business need a little work. A detailed listing of your strengths will also be notated in this section in recognition of the things that you already excel at. With this test, you will be able to gain further understanding of yourself and make any needed changes from there. Office Evaluations Asking your employees to complete office evaluations is a good way to gain insight about how you’re performing as a leader. The easiest way to set up these assessments is with short, five-minute surveys. These surveys can be completed anonymously and can be sent directly to your employee’s phones. These types of evaluations are different from the DiSC assessments in that instead of selecting a word that most closely resembles the climate of your business, a number from one to five is selected on the agreeability of a series of statements. If you get more results back from your employees that are three and below, that’s a strong indicator that some changes need to be made to your business model. Customer Reviews Another crucial viewpoint to obtain is that of your customers. Ensure that you’re requesting feedback from every inspection client. To automate this process, consider signing on for the Marketing Tech Suite with NPI. After every inspection you perform, a text message and an email will be sent to your customer to request they leave you an online review. You can also acquire feedback by asking for Yelp reviews in person upon completion of the inspection. This information combined with the self-assessments and office evaluations will provide a clearer view of how your business is perceived overall and what strengths you already possess to make improvements. Take Baby Steps According to Pippa Lally, a research psychologist from the University College London, it takes 66 days on average to completely form a new habit (as opposed to the myth that the “standard” is 21 days). Therefore, it is essential to be patient but persistent with yourself about changes you hope to achieve in your business and on a personal front. Afterall, your competition is not with your NPI neighbors, it’s with the person in the mirror. With NPI you have a community of support from your fellow franchisees, which is what makes us different from other inspection companies. If you ever find yourself at a deficit, remember you have a wealth of resources available to you from your knowledgeable fellow inspectors to our training instructors, marketing and sales teams. Comments are closed.