3 Reasons Your Kitchen Remodeling Business is Underperforming
Is your kitchen remodeling business performing to its full potential?
Market conditions are good. There are more than 80 million owner-occupied housing units in the United States, and they’re growing older every year. That’s a massive pool of potential customers.
In fact, since the kitchen remodeling business is resilient in almost any climate, market conditions are generally a poor excuse for an underperforming company. Whether the owners are looking to settle in or sell, remodeling makes sense.
If your marketing, systems, customer service, and behind-the-scenes infrastructure is all in place, your kitchen remodeling business should be thriving.
But you’re not. So what’s the problem?
Unfortunately, these things are rarely monocausal. Bad things happen in bunches; one failure usually leads to another somewhere else. For example, scrambling to fix a scheduling error might stretch the staff so thin that customer service or installations suffer that day. That might lead to a bad web review, which in turn consumes resources to fix, which leads to under-researched marketing that performs poorly, and so on and so forth.
Since we can’t consult a crystal ball to diagnose your business, this post lists some common reasons kitchen remodeling businesses underperform, in hopes that they will help you spot whatever it is that’s holding you back.
- Poor cash flow. They say it takes money to make money, and it’s true. In the kitchen remodeling business, you need working capital to purchase materials for the job, and cover the usual marketing and overhead costs.Unfortunately, many businesses set themselves up for a long, stressful wait “in the red” with poor invoicing processes that stifle cash flow. This approach effectively freezes the growth and opportunity-seizing potential of the business during the waiting period, forcing businesses to live paycheck by paycheck instead of playing a long-term game.
At Kitchen Solver’s, cash flow is never a problem. We designed our platinum sales process so that 90% of the cash flow revenue is collected before the project installation ever begins. This means your material costs are paid upfront, so you never have to work yourself out of a hole or ruin team morale with delayed paydays.
- Poor planning and start-up surprises. Benjamin Franklin said there’s nothing certain in life but death and taxes, and that’s true. However, while you can’t expect a business start-up to go exactly according to plan, it’s still critical that you plan.Do your research. If you’re a self-starter who’s not yet begun, accept that it’s going to take time to learn enough about marketing, inventory, and licensing to estimate your start-up expenses. But it’s non-negotiable – failing to plan is planning to fail. You need an idea of how large of an investment is required, factoring in working capital post-launch. And you need to know how soon your break-even point will be reached.
If your business is already running, it’s equally important to have short and long-term goals in place. Without these, you’re just treading water.
With Kitchen Solvers, you’ll know exactly what it costs to start your kitchen remodeling business, and we will support your short and long-term planning with the Franchise Vision Plan. Learn more here.
- Poor leadership structure. Remember that too many cooks spoil the broth. Like any company, your kitchen remodeling business needs a clear leadership structure that supports your singular vision. Kitchen remodeling businesses who use too many subcontractors sometimes run into issues here, which is why most Kitchen Solvers businesses are limited to 1-2 employees trained to do it all in-house.
Learn more about how to run a successful kitchen remodeling business at https://www.kitchensolversfranchise.com.
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