Weeding.

In a New York Times feature on his summer garden to-do list, Timothy Tilghman, head gardener of the Untermyer Park and Gardens in Yonkers, New York, shares tips and advice to home gardeners.

“If you can’t enjoy weeding, you won’t be a happy gardener. Everyone enjoys the neatness of a fresh planting, but unless you’re willing and eager to get in there and weed…”

He could just as easily be giving business advice.

Everyone loves the rewards of management, marketing and leadership. No one loves the “weeding” of oversight and discipline.

Here are three areas you and your team leaders can go “weeding” this week:

Reactivation List – How often are you reviewing and contacting your pending list of customers, patients, clients or donors who have not completed the next step in their journey with your company? A significant portion of business inside any successful firm is achieved through coordinated, consistent communication, not random chance.

How many pieces of communication (email, letter, phone call, text message, etc.) were sent out by your business this week to customers who need to be reactivated? Who is responsible to complete this critical task each and every week? What are the incentives in play? What are your goals and how will you measure if your efforts have been successful?

New Customer Phone Calls – Have you or a team leader listened to every single new customer phone call and reviewed all of the inbound communication from Facebook, social media, email and your website?

Which days of the week and hours of the day are the most successful in terms of utilization and conversion? How many new customers do you need this month, this week, each day to achieve your revenue goals? What lead sources created the new customers? How do your results this week or this month compare to the same time period last year?

Referrals – In my writings I list five reasons why customers don’t refer. How many of these five have you addressed in your business? What are your referral goals and results? On a scale of 1-10, how would you rank your effort in establishing and maintaining your business as a referral-based organization?

Just like the gardener who wants to enjoy neatness and beauty must weed, you must embrace the parts of your business that most people ignore or dislike.