Setting long-term goals for your company is vital. But to make an immediate difference in your business, you must begin with immediate action. Often, construction business owners postpone deciding what they must do to improve their companies. The day-to-day activities of bidding, negotiating contracts, scheduling crews and meeting with customers force them to keep their heads down to finish projects. Stopping these continual activities for a short time to create a business plan, review goals or make tough strategic decisions never seems to be a priority. Being too busy is a curse to business owners and becomes their excuse to tolerate poor performers; allow project managers to miss deadlines; let customers continue to pay slow; finish projects late; not get change orders signed before you do extra work; win work based on low prices; or make unacceptably low margins for the risk and responsibility you take. So, how do you get off the “busy” treadmill?
Decide What You Need to Fix
To halt the insanity of staying too busy and going nowhere fast, you must take time to plan your next step. Stop. Shut the door. And make two lists: one for what is working and one for what isn’t. If you have a management team, gather everyone together for a few hours to identify every part of your company and describe how well it is doing:
- Sales, revenue and growth
- Profits and dividends
- Equity, wealth, investments and cash flow
- Accounting, finances and financial management
- Customers, markets, services, projects and contracts
- Business development, sales and marketing
- Organizational structure, leadership and management team
- Project management and field supervision
- Estimating and preconstruction
- Employees and training
- Field operations, productivity and job cost tracking
- Equipment
- Technology
What’s Working?
First, decide what parts of your business are working well and don’t need much improvement. Often, business owners dedicate most of their time to areas they enjoy or are skilled in and allow unfamiliar areas to remain a problem. For example, managing people is not easy for many owners, so they shy away from being tough with their employees and let them off the hook too often. Other managers who are good at scheduling crews and ordering materials spend their time doing these tasks rather than delegating them to key managers who also could do this coordination well. Too often, business owners aren’t comfortable with finances and don’t focus on their numbers, maintain accurate estimating pricing or review their financials every month.
What’s Not Working?
Next, determine which areas of your operation need improvement. Be objective. Look at your company like a consultant, and don’t take bad news personally. If your weakness in an area is the problem, identify it as an opportunity for growth. Each person has strengths and weaknesses, so be truthful in your analysis.
If your strength is building customer relationships, estimating and preconstruction, then you may then need to address managing projects and field operations by hiring a senior manager to handle that part of your company. If you can’t grow your company profitably, take a hard look at your administration and project management systems. Without written systems, your business will remain out of control. If you aren’t attracting new or profitable customers, you’ll need to address how you acquire contracts, your sales program and your proposal follow-up systems. If your projects continue to finish over budget, you’ll have to fix your job cost tracking systems, estimating standards and field productivity issues.
Create Three-Month Goals
Prioritize what improvements will make the biggest difference in your company the fastest by identifying what you must improve during the next three months. From your list, select the top three to five areas you want to fix fast, and write three-month goals to address each problem. Delegate to specific teams the responsibility to find a solution for each “fix-it” area. Have each fix-it team meet weekly until each of the priority problems has a written procedure or solution to implement in your company.
Three-month goals can be managed without a major overhaul of your operations. By breaking down your improvement program into three-month, bite-size pieces, you’ll make time to work on your company. Some of your challenges, however, may take longer than three months to fix. So be realistic in your approach, and modify your fix-it goals to address these long-term solutions. To help you get started, email GH@HardhatPresentations.com to get your copy of “Business Tools To Boost Your Bottom-line!”
To make sure you actually work on your company, meet regularly with an accountability partner to discuss your commitment and progress. Help each other with ideas, encouragement and suggestions. Work together to keep on track and make improving your business a top priority.
