For many people, the new year gives us an opportunity to focus our efforts on things we’d like to accomplish during the upcoming year. Creating New Year’s Resolutions can give us a renewed sense of purpose and motivation – at least for a little while.
But as the demands of our every day lives creep in, many of those resolutions quickly fall to the wayside. According to a 2018 New York Times article, more than half of all resolutions fail. Why? Experts say our goals are often too vague or we don’t have a realistic plan to achieve them.
This desire to make meaningful changes at the start of a new year also widely applies to businesses. I’ve worked at companies over the years that use the new year as a chance to unveil big changes and grand plans. But as with the resolutions we make in our personal lives, these goals often lack concrete ways to achieve them. And more often than not, things go back to the way they were.
So how can your company make and stick to New Year’s resolutions? Online publications offer a whole slew of advice to business owners about how to achieve your goals in 2020 – from vague declarations to “be happy” to very specific advice about “adapting to new laws affecting your industry.”
Be SMART
As an expert in the backflow industry and a business owner, only you know what goals will work best for your company. But one recurring theme that I noticed in many articles (including on forbes.com and entrepreneur.com) was to make your goals SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely.
Using the SMART principles, let’s explore how Syncta can help you achieve a goal. For this example, we’ll say our goal is to increase the number of reports that testers complete per day by 20%. Using this example, let’s say your testers currently complete 12 tests per day. An increase of 20% would mean an average of two more tests per day. (I know the average number of completed tests can vary greatly depending on your company’s location, the accessibility of backflow assemblies and many other factors. For this example, we’ll stick with 12 tests.)
Specific
If your testers are still filling out paper test reports, you can easily increase the number of completed daily tests by 20% simply by changing from paper forms to using an online system. Using Syncta, testers can use the smartphones, tablets and laptops they are already using today to enter the test results. In the user interface, testers are only shown the fields that are required for the type of device they are testing, helping to reduce confusion and allow them to focus on testing.
Measurable
How will you know if making the switch to Syncta is working? Testers who have switched from using paper test reports to Syncta have reported they are able to complete an average of 20% more tests per day. And more tests means more money to your bottom line.
Syncta’s reports can help you see if you’re on track. For example, do want to know how many tests each tester has completed in the first 90 days of using Syncta? There’s a report for that! The Testers’ test totals for the past 90 days report shows how many tests a tester has completed within a given time period, broken down by test totals per day. Using this report, you can quickly see if you are on track to meet your goal.
Achievable
We recently interviewed over 750 testers around the country. On average, we found it takes testers 10-15 minutes to complete a test report using a paper form. Using Syncta, this takes only minutes. But what’s realistic for your testers? 10 tests per day? 20? More? You know better than anyone what’s actually achievable. To see Syncta in action, click here to complete a test in Syncta in 60 seconds.
Realistic
It’s important to be realistic when deciding how many more tests you want testers to complete each day. Keeping in mind driving time between stops, how many more tests can you realistically add to each tester’s schedule? One? Two? Five? Using the report we mentioned above will allow you to start seeing trends and help you decide what’s a realistic goal for your company.
Timely
Finally, you need to decide on a time-frame in which you want testers to increase the number of completed test reports per day. While we always want to achieve more results faster, sometimes it’s better to set a timeline that makes sense. If your business operates in places like the northwest, chances are you won’t be doing as much testing right now in the winter. So, setting a goal of three months to increase completed tests right now probably isn’t realistic. But within six months? That might make more sense.
Syncta Can Help Improve Your Bottom Line in 2020
One of our customers told us that it used to take her company two days to test 26 assemblies in an apartment complex. With Syncta, she reported that her tester finished all 26 tests within three hours! They went from an average of spending 37 minutes per test to under seven minutes. That’s more than a 50% reduction in time spent per test.
With Syncta, just imagine the possibilities! We only focused on one goal – increasing the number of completed tests per day. By using our Routing, Invoicing and Notifications features, you can also streamline many other processes that you might do manually today. All of this means more time in your day to focus on other things. So maybe the online advice to business owners to “be happy” has some merits. With Syncta, you can ditch the paper, increase your company’s efficiency, and most importantly, increase your bottom line. Who wouldn’t want that?
To learn more about Syncta, click here to sign up for our free 30-day trial.