Today we’re going to talk about growing your construction business, and not just your brand or your reputation, but your overall business. I am so thrilled that my business gives me a chance to talk to all kinds of contractors; from small, one-person shops to large, hundred-million dollar home builders, and I get to participate in their ideas and concepts and what works and what doesn’t work, and I get to share it here, on the blog.
In taking in all that knowledge, I’ve been able to see firsthand what needs to happen if you want to grow your construction business from one truck to three trucks to five trucks to ten trucks or more.
A bit of history
When I first got out of school, I was in the wireless industry and my job was to get local entrepreneurs who had wireless shops to carry my product. Back then it was Omnipoint, the phone company with the little parrot. We competed against Comcast and Verizon.
Most of my accounts did 50 to 100 activations a month and were paid $300-400 per activation, so life was good. Then there was the other 20%, you know, Pareto’s 80-20 rule?
This is where the big money came in
These accounts had five locations, twenty-five locations, fifty locations, a hundred locations, a and a few even had a thousand locations. Nationwide mom-and-pop companies that did 500, 1,000 or 5,000 activations a month, earning over two million dollars A MONTH or more!
These accounts took the quantum leap, but the people running these companies weren’t any better at business than the guys and girls running single locations. What got them there was having processes in place.
The key to growth is processes!
Putting systems and processes in place is how their stores were able to run when they weren’t there. If they had five stores, all five stores were doing things this ONE way. From what happens when somebody walks in the door to what happens when the inventory shows up on the dock to what to do when a window breaks or someone quits.
And that’s what you need to do to grow
If you are looking to grow through the rest of this year and beyond, you have to put processes in place and have people in place that execute on these processes.
How do you start?
If you are a small, one-person outfit, you start the systems yourself, you start yourself so that when you do add layers you teach the process, not the job, now it can be replicated from one truck to two trucks to as many as you want to have.
Now you’ve grown
All of a sudden, you have a large operation going because you’ve successfully installed these systems, and as the economy continues to grow and expand, so do the business opportunities that you’re going to have. And to stay competitive, you might HAVE to consider getting bigger just to compete.
Before and after
I talk to a lot of people who say “I was this big before the market crash and now I’m this big.” Some of them want to get back to that size and others are just fine just the way they are, because they know what gets sucked out of their lives dealing with five crews when they don’t have systems in place.
But for those of you who want to grow again and build that big business or who want to do it for the first time, the best thing you can do is start to implement a series processes now. I can’t tell you how to do it and what to do because I don’t know what needs to be done. We can talk about it if you’d like with a coaching or consulting program, but you have to be the driver of change and WANT to do it!
I really hope you get something out of this. I hope you see that you can’t grow to a place until you know where you’ve been, and that your ideas and concepts that work at one level, don’t at another, so start planning now.
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