ExteriorContractor.com |

Running a successful remodeling company is an ongoing challenge. It starts when you walk into your office on Monday morning. You receive a call from one of your carpenters at 7 a.m. letting you know he won’t be showing up to work that day. Soon after that, the client starts calling! So you pull a carpenter off of another project and send him to the jobsite where you need help. You then discover that the lead carpenter didn’t order the materials due on the jobsite that day! Now, you’re in your office, scrambling to put out a fresh set of fires. Is this just another day at the office?

Does this sound familiar? Does your business run in a “crisis management” mode? Did you ever believe that after being in business for 5, 10, or 15 years that you would still be working this hard? What happened? Are you spending too many hours at work? Are all these hours at work taking you away from what time you have left with your family? Why is it that instead of running a successful business, you have discovered that you don’t own a business, but your business owns you, and you have little or no time left for your family and doing the things you enjoy most?

The Power of Systems
There is a solution, but the solution depends upon you accepting a simple realization. This realization is that your daily business demands are not going to change. Daily demands are not only not going to change, but they are also probably increasing as your company grows. The complexity of day-to-day business operations grow as more and more options are available to the homeowners with whom you work, and city and state building codes are becoming more complicated and complex. The realization is this: Since the demands of day-to-day business aren’t going to change, you have to change the way you conduct business.

Integrating “standard operating procedures” into your daily business operations bring the power of systems into company operations, and can shift the load you carry each day. Effective systems maximize the time spent within your business. As a business owner, your most valuable resource is time. Effective systems can assist you in getting 12 hours of work out of an eight-hour day.

Who reading this has “come up through the ranks?” What I mean by this is that your construction career may have started in the field as a laborer. You may have become an apprentice, learned specific construction skills, taken on a supervision role, and then after a certain amount of time, went into business on your own. Most of the tradespeople I know have done it this way. Not everyone, but most. There is no remodeling degree-no formal remodeling university. If there is a school, it’s not a place where you take classes. It’s the school of hard knocks. You learned from experience. Construction training took place in the field, not in a classroom. This field training has had great benefits, but has left most of us unprepared as our companies grew. What was lacking was business development training. It’s not our fault. We didn’t know. We didn’t realize how important these skills would become.