Checklist: Is Your Remodeling Business at Risk of Becoming Mediocre?
As you grow your business day to day management and leadership considerations can quickly creep up on construction business owners. Profitably growing a remodeling business to any volume, but in particular growing past the $1M threshold in produced work, definitely requires advanced business skills. Growing and running your business by the seat of your pants is a sure way to create a mediocre business that will never generate maximum profits. This article offers several ways business owners can determine if they and their businesses are headed for mediocrity. It also offers options to help you and your business get back on track.
Here is a checklist of indicators that your business is becoming mediocre:
- Your business lacks written policies and procedures.
- Even if you have policies you do not have predetermined consequences for violating them and or you do not enforce them.
- You complain about things customers and or employees do or don't do; but then do nothing about them.
- Concerned employees point certain concerning things out and you do nothing to address and or correct things.
- Your employees point things out to you and you actually make them feel guilty for doing so or that they are annoying you by pointing them out.
- Your customers offer feedback or complaints and you make excuses for why things happened, rather than embrace their help and use what they share with you to make improvements or corrections.
- Long term customers stop doing business with you and you don’t bother to ask them why.
- You create artificial harmony by ignoring culture deficiencies and or tension between team members and pretend everything is OK.
- When something happens you always find a way to make it someone else's fault rather than take responsibility as the leader.
If these things are happening at your business you have two options
The first is to let them keep happening. If you allow things to continue you will likely lose customers, compromise your brand, have high employee turnover and you will never fully achieve creating a successful and profitable business. Eventually, when your family and others ask you why you never really succeeded in business, you will again have to resort to rationalizing why it was someone else's fault.
Your other option is to recognize these things are happening and start addressing why they are happening. Only until you know and recognize why they are happening will you be able to work on preventing them from happening.
Preventing these things from happening may require two different solutions
The first is to stop certain things from happening all together by no longer tolerating them. Put your big boy or girl pants on and be the leader you should be. To hold others accountable make sure you create and follow through on consequences.
The other is to change how you do things so they just don't happen anymore. Put policies in place and make sure they are enforced. Those policies should also include clear consequences for violating them.
Lots of remodeling businesses are becoming mediocre as they try to grow in this improving economy. Will you join them or will you stand out from the crowd by becoming the reference standard for what it means to be a professional contractor in your marketplace?
