Rueben Taylor

Do you wish your team was more accountable?

Most business owners I meet hope their team will step up and be more accountable.

Hope is not a strategy.

Instead, focus on putting the right structures in place that cause accountability.

Here are the three accountability standards I install in every client's business. Read on and score yourself as to what you have in place as you go.

#1: Weekly leadership meeting focused on key business drivers.

Not a catch-up. Not fifteen topics and no decisions.

A meeting built around the 2-3 numbers that actually drive the business - every single week.

Miss this one, and problems get discovered in months instead of days.

#2: Team scorecard, so every team member is accountable to their KPIs.

Every person on the team knows their numbers and can see them.

Miss this one, and performance becomes a matter of opinion.

Your best people carry the load quietly, your coasters coast quietly, and both get treated the same.

#3: Regular performance reviews.

A documented, systemised, scheduled way to review each team member.

It measures performance across 2 areas - how well they are fitting in with the team as well as how well they’re meeting their KPIs.

That way every team member knows where they stand.

Miss this one, and your A-players have no path forward and the poor performance is never addressed.

How many of these do you have in place?

If you have installed all 3 standards, accountability lives in your business, not in your head.

Anything less, then everyone answers to you, whenever you get around to it.

Which means the standard moves depending on how busy or tired you are that week.

The fix isn't working harder at holding people to account.

It's building the structures that do the heavy lifting for you.

Comment ACCOUNTABILITY and I'll send you the exact agenda I use to run leadership meetings that drive results.

Because being in business should give you more life…

Your margin doesn't disappear in one big hit.

It leaks out of five small holes you've stopped noticing.

I've reviewed the numbers of hundreds of trade and service businesses.

When the profit doesn't match the effort, it's almost always one of these five.

1. Outdated pricing.

You set your rates two or three years ago. Since then wages, materials, insurance and fuel have all gone up. If your prices haven't moved with them, you're absorbing the difference.

Fix: review pricing every six months, minimum. Put a date in the diary today.

2. Unbilled variations.

The client asks for "one small change" on site. Then another. Nobody writes it down, nobody invoices it.

Fix: every variation gets recorded and priced before the work is done. No exceptions.

3. Quiet discounting.

Rounding down the quote to win the job. Knocking a bit off for a mate. It feels small each time - across a year it's thousands straight off your bottom line.

Fix: track every discount for one month. The total will change your behaviour on its own.

4. Cost rises you never passed on.

Your suppliers put their prices up. Did you put yours up? If not, that gap comes straight out of your pocket.

Fix: when a supplier increase lands, adjust your rates the same week - not next year.

5. No job costing.

If you don't know which jobs made money and which didn't, you'll keep quoting the losers the same way.

Fix: cost every job when it closes. Actual hours, actual materials, actual margin. Twenty minutes that pays for itself every time.

You don't need more revenue to make more profit.

You need fewer holes.

Plug the leaks before you pour more in.

Which of the five is costing you most right now?

Comment MARGINS below and I'll send you the simple checklist I use to find them.

Because being in business should give you more life…

When I first met Katie her profit was just $11,973.

A year later it was $271,916.

Her revenue barely changed.

Read that again.

She didn't double the business.

She didn't hire a sales team.

She didn't work more hours.

So what happened?

When we started working together, Katie and her husband Richard were effectively running two businesses.

Katie ran the design and drafting side. Richard ran cabinet making.

They were flat out. Good reputation, plenty of work, always busy.

But busy across two businesses meant stretched across both.

Then we did something simple: we looked at the numbers properly.

And the numbers told a story they'd never had time to see.

One side of the business was quietly making the money. The other side was quietly eating it.

So they made the hard call. Consolidate. Focus on the profitable side. Let go of the part that was draining the cash.

From there, it was discipline, not magic.

A business dashboard so they could see the numbers monthly.

Quarterly planning.

Annual targets broken into weekly drivers.

Hiring A-class people instead of whoever was available.

Twelve months later: roughly that same revenue, 22 times the profit.

And the bit that matters more than the numbers?

Richard's home earlier.

Katie's present with the kids.

She didn't grow the business. She fixed it.

If you're flat out and no better off, the answer probably isn't more work.

It's finding out which part of your business is quietly eating the profitable part.

Comment MARGINS and I'll show you where to start looking.

Because being in business should give you more life…

I’ve just finished reviewing interim results from last financial year with my clients.

We use this as a base to set targets for this financial year.

Did you know the Australian average net profit margin for a well performing business sits around 10%. The best ones push 20 or even 30% and unfortunately many sit well under that.

One of my clients was sitting at 28% net profit margin which is pretty solid.

The previous year it was 10%. That’s a 173% improvement!

At our planning session, we set a new challenge: what if we got to 30%?

That one question helped focus the entire strategy for the year.

Not "how do we win more work".

Not "how do we get bigger".

How do we get smarter and more efficient with what we've already got.

Because here's what most trade and service business owners get wrong: they treat every problem as a sales problem.

Quiet month? More marketing.

Tight cash? More jobs.

Stressed? Grow your way out of it.

But if your margin is broken, growth just compounds the problem.

More clients at a thin margin means more wages, more vehicles, more stress and more risk - for roughly the same money in your pocket.

Margins first. Then growth.

When you fix the margin, everything downstream gets easier.

You can afford better people.

You can say no to bad clients.

You can survive a quiet month without panic.

And every dollar of growth after that actually lands in your pocket instead of leaking out the sides.

Turnover is vanity. Margin is what pays for your life.

So here's my question: do you know what drives your profit margins?

And where could you focus this year to shift them.

Because being in business should give you more life…

Here are 4 signs your calendar is running you - not the other way around.

1. Your week runs you.

You react to whatever comes up. You're available to everyone, all the time. By Friday you're exhausted but couldn't tell you what you actually achieved.

2. Urgent things always win.

You try to plan. You even block some time. But by Tuesday it's gone - overridden by whoever called loudest or whatever felt most on fire.

3. Your protected time isn't actually protected.

You have some structure. But interruptions still win more than they should. You finish the week feeling like you were busy but not productive.

4. You're the first call for everything.

Your team knows you'll answer. So they ask. And you do - because it's faster than explaining. And the cycle never breaks.

If you saw yourself in any of these - you're not alone.

Most of the trade and service business owners I work with land somewhere in this list when we first start.

The good news is every one of these is fixable.

Your Business Independence Score will show you exactly where your time is leaking - and what to fix first.

It takes 2 minutes. And it's free.

Comment TIME below and I'll send you the link.

Because being in business should give you more life…

Most business owners look at their numbers once a year.

Usually when the accountant sends through the end of financial year accounts.

And by then, the year has already happened.

Whatever the numbers say, there's nothing you can do about it now.

That's why the year keeps surprising them.

I review results with my clients every single month.

It’s not just because I love spreadsheets 😊 - it’s because that's how we shift results.

Here's the thing about an annual result: it's just twelve monthly results in a row.

And each monthly result is just four or five weekly results.

And each week comes down to a handful of daily drivers - the calls made, the jobs quoted, the margins met.

So we don't wait for the year to tell us how we went.

We set the annual target, break it into monthly targets, and dial in the weekly drivers that get us there.

When something starts to drift, we see it in weeks, not in July.

We adjust often and early.

It's why the majority of my clients hit or exceed their targets.

And my average client grew their bottom line by 198% last year.

There are no surprises at the end of the year, because we've been driving the result all the way through it.

So how often are you revieing your numbers?

Comment NUMBERS and I'll share the five numbers I review with every client, every month.

Because being in business should give you more life…

Elon Musk gets 24 hours a day.

Your biggest competitor gets 24.

You get 24.

The game isn't finding more time. The game is what you do with the 24 hours you get each day.

Here's what I mean.

Think of your day as a time jar. Every task you do goes into it. And every task has a value on it.

Your job is to fill that jar with the highest value activities possible.

The problem for most business owners is they have their jar packed full of low value tasks that someone else should be doing. Or tasks that don't need doing at all.

So how do you fix it?

There are four steps (in this order):

1) ELIMINATE

Andrew ran an electrical company. Before lunch he'd already taken 60 phone calls. His team asked the same questions over and over. Jobs kept stopping because they ran out of materials.

We put in simple systems and trained the team to handle it. He got a full day back every week.

2) AUTOMATE

Is there software or AI that could handle this entirely?

One electrician I worked with implemented ServiceM8. It saved him and his team three and a half days a week. From one piece of software.

3) DELEGATE

A cabinet maker was doing all his own onsite measures. Quotes were piling up - late or not going out at all.

We worked out quoting was worth $3,000 an hour to his business. Every two hours on site was costing him $6,000 in lost quotes.

We got him a laser measurer and a junior staff member to do the measures. He stayed in the office and kept up to date with his quotes.

Revenue went up. Stress went down.

4) FOCUS

When you eliminate, automate and delegate - you create space in the jar for the work only you can do. The highest value activities that actually move your business forward.

Start with eliminating time wasters. Most people skip straight to delegate and wonder why nothing changes.

Have you tried any of these? Which one made the biggest difference?

Let me know in the comments below.

Because being in business should give you more life…

I love helping my clients make more money.

Not so they can buy more stuff.

So they can use it to buy back their time.

See, when you first start growing your business, more revenue means more work.
This often leads to more pressure because it needs more of you.

But there's a point - and I've seen it with hundreds of business owners - where the extra profit stops being something you spend.

And I have seen way too many business owners making plenty of money but not having the time to enjoy it.

Instead use the extra money to buy back your time.

Hire a team member who takes something off your plate.

Or software that streamlines the admin you hate.

Every dollar of profit, invested the right way, buys you back an hour of your time.

And here's what I know after 26 years of coaching business owners.

Time is worth way more than money.

As Jim Rohn once said, “once you spend your money you can always go and make some more but once you spend your time it is gone forever.”

So stop asking "how do I make more?" and start asking "how do I buy back my time?"

This is the path to freedom in business.

Where your business stops running you - and you start running your business.

So what would you do with an extra 10 hours a week if you had them? Let me know in the comments below.

Why don't most business owners have good systems?

There are 3 main reasons. And only one of them is about time.

1. Everything is in the owner's head.

The way jobs get quoted. The way clients get onboarded. The way a complaint gets handled. It all lives up here, in your head, and nowhere else. Often that's not laziness, it's because you've been flat out running the business and never had a clear hour to sit down and write it out.

2. "Nobody can do it as good as me."

Sound familiar? It feels true. It might even be true today. But it's a belief that's quietly running your business into the ground. "By the time I explain it, I could have done it myself" feels efficient in the moment, but that belief alone is costing you at least a day a week in tasks you should have handed off years ago.

3. "It's faster if I just do it myself."

And you're right. Today, it is faster. But every single time you complete a task without writing down how you did it, you are choosing to do that exact task again. And again. Forever. There is no version of "I'll write it down next time" that ever actually happens, because next time you're just as busy as this time.

Here's what this actually costs you. It's the reason you can't take a decent holiday without your phone buzzing every twenty minutes. It's the reason a new hire takes three months to become useful, because there's nothing for them to follow except watching you. It's the reason that when your best person finally does leave, a piece of the business leaves with them.

Systems are how you buy back your time, your headspace, and eventually, your ability to step away from the business without it falling over.

Every time you do a task without writing it down, you are destined to repeat it. Forever.

So here's the real question. Which of these three is costing you the most right now? Not having the time to document it, the belief that nobody else can do it as well as you, or the short-term comfort of "it's just faster if I do it"?

Comment SYSTEMS below and I'll send you free 2 minute Business Independence Score. It shows you exactly the gaps to plug to create a business that can run smoothly without you.

Because being in business should give you more life…

Systems run your business. People run your systems.

Read that again.

Most business owners have it backwards.

They think their people run the business.

So when someone leaves or the owner isn't there – things start to fall apart.

Here's a test:

Think about your best team member.

The one who just gets it and knows what to do without being asked.

Now imagine they resign on Friday.

What would leave with them?

If the answer is "a lot" - you don't have systems.

You have people holding your business together.

The reason this happens is everything is in the owner's head: The way jobs get quoted, clients get onboarded, complaints get handled.

Usually because the owner has been too busy to ever write it down.

And every time you do a task without writing it down, you're guaranteeing you'll do it again and again. Forever.

So here's something to try.

Think about your business and answer this:

What are three things you keep repeating, answering, explaining, doing - that if it was written down once and delegated, you'd never have to do again?

That's your next system.

Document it this week.

Because being in business should give you more life…