Job Tracking & Costing
From Principles of Applied Arts
As you encounter different situations in your career you should keep records of the relationship scenarios for future reference, not just for you but also for your future employees. Keeping track of what you do on every job in writing is the only to way track your success or failure and refine your business in the future.This can't be stressed this enough it may seem awkward at first to be writing down every thing you do in detail or maybe even irrelevant but your business will grow faster from this than any other business practice or secret learned.
Imagine that within two years of working by yourself you have refined the system of your daily routine and every job you have done through the year was a learning experience in itself. Now you have a lot of work and you are booking out in your schedule far enough that your thinking of adding a helper or an employee. At this point all the knowledge that you acquired during these two years needs to be conveyed to your new employee in order to have a good working relationship. If this information is all in your head and not on paper in an employee manual you are going to spend a lot of time and money getting your employee to understand the negative consequence of whispering in the presence of you client for example. Your new employee may not even care about that consequence but you do and if it is set down as a rule in writing for your employees to fallow then you don’t have to spend every moment trying to educate them on subjects they are more then likely not to be interested in.
One more example of this is if you have a decorative finish that you offer but you have only done it once in the last two years it is always good to be able to refer to your notes on that job before starting the new one. This stops you from having to relearning the lessons over and over. At some point and time you are going to want to separate yourself from your business for retirement or what have you, and if your business is you then you’re going to have some difficulty doing that. You don’t have to build an empire just have an efficient small business to see your dreams come to fruition and have relaxing days on the job as opposed to constant stressful ones.
