From Toolbelt to CEO: The Hidden Challenges of Construction Growth

You work for years in the trade and hone your skills to the pinnacle of quality.  As your work becomes known, usually by word of mouth, the requests for your skills come in with handsome payments and suddenly you are a contractor.  Profits seem easy and your business takes off like a rocket.  But then you reach a point of needing to hire help and at some point that help doesn’t have your skills yet and you have to spend your time to train them, inspect their work, and deal with them being mentally absent when personal events come calling. This is where becoming a real business owner gets real and where most start up construction companies fail.

Means to an end

Construction businesses, no matter the age, are always susceptible to decay and erosion of values if they don’t develop tools to monitor and forecast their activity.  Heavy equipment can run quite a while with deficient maintenance, but the catastrophic cost of the decline in productivity and ultimately in repair cost often goes unnoticed until the profits collapse.  Your human resources are the same.  Do you hire new workers at the same rate of pay as someone who has helped you be successful for years?  

Not measured = not watched!

Systems inside of your construction business should be aligned to give you timely feedback on productivity and unit cost.  Learn the need to know metrics and key performance indicators that will help keep you on the road and out of the ditch financially.  Some are simple even if the “experts” tell you that it needs to be complicated to be adequate.  “Common Sense” comes from experience, not from software.