Accountability

Location Homes is based in Taranaki, in New Zealand.

We design and build affordable luxury homes for discerning clientele. We like to mark qualified people who we want to work with and we focus on in-house design, in-house pricing and in-house build, all with an awesome group of people.

We Needed To Refine The Way We Were Doing Things

We went through some rapid growth financially and with staff in a short amount of time.

This was two to three years ago, so that stretched our resources, stretched our processes and our systems and we needed to refine the way we were doing things. My business partner and I struggled to find consultants, accountants and lawyers who could give us specific construction advice.

We saw APB being advertised on Facebook and it took about six months for us to sign up and here we are four, five months later in this process, and we honestly could not recommend it highly enough.

We Saw Value In APB Mentoring Straight Off The Bat

We became APB members and we went into the mentoring program straight off the bat, because we saw the value in that. We saw the one on one coaching as invaluable to our business, to replace any other consultants or strategic advice that we weren’t being offered.

We had three goals that we have achieved in the program so far.

Number one goal: we’re accountable to someone. There’s a system in place so we can be accountable to that; we have our targets set for the next financial year, and we’re monitoring that monthly.

The second goal: we’ve now achieved an increase of 22% in our gross profit, through some of the work we’ve done in pricing and in running the projects, which has been amazing.

The third goal has been related to the structure of our company; the organisational structure, getting people in the right places and making sure that structure is in line with our overall revenue.

Those three things are the biggest things we’ve done and they’ve created huge gains for us.

The APB program is clear and we are accountable to that. Right from the start in the online system, you can see the percentage of the course you’ve covered. You can see where you’re at in the videos and working through all the content. The content is invaluable to us; before we go into a client meeting, or before we hire a new staff member, we can watch a video or a segment and do some up-skilling straight away.

That’s been amazing for us, having that resource.

Then there’s the dashboard, the online Google sheet, where we can clearly see all of our tabs, that indicate what we need to do. The one on one coaching is really good, too.

The biggest and best thing for me as the director of this company, and for my business partner, is we weren’t really accountable to anyone, apart from our lawyer and our accountant. Now we feel accountable to the system and it keeps us on track.

We set aside probably three hours a week for APB. We do our research, do the work, and we make sure everything’s updated to report back to APB.

The resource is amazing, but you only get out of it the work you put into it.

Our favourite topic is the APB Mentoring Program. It’s impacted us hugely as a company. The first thing that our coach said to me in the first coaching session was, “Think of your company as an aeroplane and all of the instrumentation is your company and all the parts of it at your disposal. The plane flies like that – it’s either ascending or descending, depending on how you control the aeroplane.”.

We’re Hitting Targets And Make Sure We Are Heading In The Right Direction

On the financial side, the targets and everything in the resource that has been given to us, we make sure that everything is updated weekly and monthly. We can see that we’re hitting targets, we’ve got our leads and our sales funnels are topped up. So, we make sure our plane is heading in the right direction.

We focus in on the financials, because that’s our main goal, at the end of the day. We’re accountable for those and for making sure our sales team is on target.

It definitely took a lot of time to learn how to use the targets tabs, to understand the process and understand the system, but now four months in, we pretty much understand every tab and how to use them. It’s taken a massive amount of work to put them at our disposal, so that’s been invaluable.

We’re still learning some of those, but we’re in this for the long haul so we’ll continue to learn.

We would definitely recommend the APB Mentoring Program to other people, just not those in our region! That’s probably a common view, but it’s true. We’re always trying to improve, we’re trying to be number one in our region in what we do.

I Haven’t Experienced This Kind Of Help Before

To anyone else internationally, the value that’s been added by our participation in the APB Mentoring Program has been excellent. We can’t compare it to anything else. I’ve been in business for fifteen years and I haven’t experienced this kind of help and support before. We’ve been working with a lot of different professionals and strategic coaches and training organisations; we’ve done all that, but with APB we can do the training and actually implement it in our business. It’s just another cost you add to your sale, but we’re seeing huge results, so I’d definitely recommend it to anyone that’s thinking about it – just do it.