Matt Verderamo is a consultant at Well Built Construction Consulting, a Baltimore-based firm that delivers strategic consulting, facilitation services and peer roundtables for construction executives. Opinions are the author’s own.
I often work with construction companies that are making some money, but it just feels way too hard.
Matt Verderamo
Permission granted by Construction Consultants
The owners feel burnt out. Employees feel underappreciated. Profitability comes and goes. Hard work turns into nothing.
“Makes more sense to invest in the stock market,” some owners think to themselves in their most frustrated moments.
If this is you, or your company, one question to ask yourself is, “What are we doing to win?”
You’re an uncommonly great businessowner. You have some great people. You’re probably doing some really great things, even if everything isn’t turning out how you planned right now. It’s important for your personal morale and the team’s morale to remember you are winning a lot already.
So what are those things that you’re doing right? Make the list now. It should take less than five minutes.
But if you’re not making the money you want or don’t have the culture you want or don’t have the time for your family you want, ask yourself: What’s causing us to lose? What problems do we keep running into over and over again? What is keeping us from getting to where we want to go?
Make another list focused on what’s going wrong. No more than five minutes on it.
Now, instead of ignoring them because they’re scary and sad, lean into your losses and get to work on them. Prioritize the list and work on one at a time. Nothing crazy. It’s time to put them behind you. It’s the only way to start winning more and more.
As an example, one of our clients is a trade contractor with an unbelievable field team. They are truly craftsmen from top to bottom. And they routinely deliver high-quality work ahead of schedule.
Meanwhile, they can hardly ever win a job. They bid on everything, but can’t get a scope review. Can’t get a call back. Not unless they are the low bidder. And they’re not a “low-bidder” kind of company. Like I said, they’re too good at what they do.
So, their field wins. But their estimating team loses.
Instead of continuing to hit their head against the wall, ignoring the problem, wondering why they can’t win work, they identified their top weakness and said to themselves, “We’re going to get this fixed. We’re too good to be stuck.”
They began to focus on how to appropriately sell the value they delivered in the field. Through coaching, training and practice, they’re getting the highest quality opportunities they’ve had in their business’s history. We are still in the process of helping them to load up their backlog, but they can clearly see the direction they’re headed. They’re winning more and more all the time.
Winning principles
There’s a few principles great companies follow when trying to improve:
Figure out how you win. It’s not enough to start a business. It’s not enough to say you’re different and better than your competition. You have to actually be different and better. And your clients have to believe it.
Explore what makes you different and better. Get extremely clear on it if you want to build a sustainable, valuable business.
Don’t ignore your weaknesses. If you can spot them, your clients can too. Your reputation is too important to let your pride keep you from addressing them.
Know where you want to go. Knowing your weaknesses without knowing where you want the business to be in one, three, five or 10 years makes it a lot more difficult to prioritize which weaknesses to tackle first.
Slow down to speed up. Too many companies are “too busy” to slow down and meet as an executive team to do things like identify and address weaknesses or build a strategic plan. But if you don’t slow down and put in work on your business, you’ll suffer way more. Slow down, make a plan, and then speed will come naturally.
