Business Building: Do You Enjoy The Benefits of Business Ownership?

George Hedley

Why Do People Start Construction Companies?

• They want to work eighty hours per week
• They want to be stressed out and out of control
• They want to be overworked and underpaid
• They want low price, low margin competition
• They want to manage employees
• They want to make more money and create wealth
• They want the freedom of business ownership

The top two reasons entrepreneurs go into business are the pursuit of freedom and wealth. Freedom from working for someone else and the ability to do business as they please. Freedom to say no to bad customers, jobs, employees, or contracts. And the freedom to go to work if and when they want! Wealth creates financial security and a lifestyle, which allows them to make decisions on how they spend their time and money without worry. Wealth also allows owners to hire the best managers to run their companies and invest in people, systems, equipment, and technology.

Unfortunately, freedom and wealth are not the norm for most smaller, growing $1 to $15 million revenue construction business owners. When owners work too many hours on details, contracts, purchasing, scheduling, estimating, project management, or field supervision versus business strategy, coaching people, and building customer relationships, they don’t make enough money or have time to reach their goals.

For those owners who are working more and more, not making enough money for the time invested, and enjoying it less and less, consider these questions:

• Does earning a living give you time to do any living?
• Do you ever stop and wish it would get better?
• What’s it going to take to make it work for you?
• Are you too busy working to make any money?

The More You Do, The Less You Make!

When you spend all your time doing small work, you aren’t spending time doing the important, big, strategic things that can move your company to the next level. When you are too busy to hire people, manage your money, grow your field crews, or implement solid systems, you are stuck. When you are overworked, you can’t create enough time to seek better opportunities, customers, or project types with higher margins against less competition. And when you do too much yourself, you can’t build wealth, make good money, and have the freedom to enjoy the benefits of business ownership.

When I talk to business owners, many say they aren’t content or happy with their company, management team, customers, or financial results. Yet they stay in business doing what they know how to do because they don’t know what else to do. They aren’t sure what to fix first, hesitate to hire professional managers, and don’t want to invest in major improvements to get their business to work. They say: “I can’t afford to change right now, so I’ll just keep working harder, and maybe it’ll get better someday.” My conclusion is that most business owners become comfortable being uncomfortable and get used to the pain.

Choose To Take Control Of Your Future!

Is your problem a lack of time, knowledge, ideas, or commitment to stop doing the less important work yourself and delegate it to someone other than yourself? What are you afraid of or what’s holding you back from making a decision to change, take risks, hire, delegate, upgrade, let go, or try a new way? 

What are you doing you should delegate? I recently spent a few days with several of my BIZCOACH construction business owner clients, helping them draft plans to achieve better results. Each client has thirty or more managers and employees on their teams who are competent, good, qualified people. But the biggest problem I observed was owners who were doing what they shouldn’t be doing. For example, I observed one of them setting up their field superintendent’s computer, ordering snap ties for concrete forms, meeting all field workers daily at the shop at six a.m., going to Staples to pick up printer ink, dropping by Home Depot to get plywood for the field, scheduling the mechanic to repair a broken-down truck, meeting a concrete saw-cutter at a jobsite to layout work, and doing all project receivable invoices for all their jobs. What I didn’t observe was him creating time to meet with a new major customer who was willing to award them a significant amount of work.

Do What You Should Do!

To start enjoying the benefits of business ownership, start with doing what you should do versus what you are currently doing. Make a list of everything you can delegate to your current staff and give it to them to handle going forward. Keep a list of these responsibilities and check in with them weekly to make sure these tasks are getting done on an ongoing basis. 

Next, decide what else you could do if you had more help. For example, by hiring a project administrator and assistant, you could delegate numerous duties, including job set-up, downloading plans, managing the submittal and shop drawing process, keeping track of the estimating schedule, filling out bid documents, cost coding and entering all invoices for your review, updating your website, tracking equipment maintenance, organizing all job reports and documentation, coordinating the hiring and recruitment process, scheduling meetings for you, keeping track of anything you need, and leveraging your time to be more efficient. For a small amount of money, this one additional person would improve your time management enough to allow you to go out and build relationships with better customers or mentor your managers to accept more responsibility.

Freedom And Wealth!

To create more freedom, you have to decide to put yourself first and take more time off. One of the best decisions I made as I grew my company to $50 million in annual sales was to leave the office every Friday afternoon and play golf with my close group of pals. As a result, I gained lifelong friendships and forced myself to be more efficient at the office. Guess what? Working fewer hours actually made me more focused on achieving my goals as I had to delegate and concentrate on doing high-priority things with the highest return. To start building wealth, I worked hard on seeking higher-margin customers and projects and spent time developing opportunities to invest our efforts into income-producing properties. Start doing what gives you the highest return on your time and let go of the small things others are capable of handling as part of their jobs.  

Fall Down To Improve!

As a youngster, my dad took me snow skiing in the local mountains. As I watched experts racing fast down the slopes with perfect form, he’d say, “You’ll never get better standing there watching and wishing you could ski like them.” With that, I tried to ski down the mountain as fast as I could. My goal was to fall down on every run, which ensured I was pushing it to the max. You don’t get better if you don’t fall down, take risks, and try new ways of doing things. What new tactics have you tried in your business lately to improve, make more profit, grow, or start hitting your freedom and wealth goals? Have you noticed successful people always get up when they fall down? And the really successful ones fall down a lot!

About The Author
George Hedley CPBC is a certified professional construction business coach and popular speaker.  He helps contractors build better businesses, grow, increase profits, develop management teams, improve field production, and get their companies to work. He is the best-selling author of “Get Your Construction Business To Always Make A Profit!” available on Amazon.com. To get his free e-newsletter, start a personalized BIZCOACH program, attend a Profit-Builder Boot Camp, or get a discount at www.HardhatBIZSCHOOL.com online university for contractors, Visit www.HardhatBizcoach.com or E-mail GH@HardhatBizcoach.com.

Email: GH@HardhatBizcoach.com
Website: www.hardhatbizcoach.com