The Design Builder's Blog

How To Create A Ladder Of Opportunity For Your Employees

Note: This is the second article of a 3 article series on this topic (Click for article #1)

Look ahead to where you want to be

Creating a ladder of opportunity requires that you create a vision for where you want your business to go and how you will make it happen.  It also requires that you sell the vision to existing and recruited employees. Help them see the vision and growth plans of the company so they can see where they have opportunities to fit in and contribute to the growth as well as, at the same time, accomplish their own personal goals.

The Ladder of Opportunity strategy requires that you develop a career planning strategy based on a deliberate balance between how the company needs to grow and how employees envision their roles. For example, a designer who possesses previous field and production management experience will likely generate designs that are easier, more efficient and cost effective to build. Projects designed using such experience are also more likely to be consistently profitable.

Grow or get out of the way

If qualified employees do not see themselves as part of the evolution, you must either decide to keep them in their current roles, if possible, and/or realize that you will eventually need to hire someone else to fill future positions as the business grows. Be sure to seek out and retain the right people on your bus and take the wrong people off of the bus. Tolerating poor performance from some employees may give the wrong message to the more motivated workers.  

For smart employees, climbing the ladder of opportunity in a growing business means that someone else may be on that ladder rising right behind them.  Aspiring and high performance employees may become frustrated and lose motivation if they are held back in their career paths due any inability to climb the ladder of opportunity.  This being the case be watchful for the employee who tries to sabotage or hold other employees back as a way to maintain their status.

Managing career paths

Establishing employee career paths that benefit the business requires that you create a plan to Design/Build both the business and its employees. Decide where you want to take your business, what employee skills are needed to get there and how you will incorporate those abilities into your team’s existing pool of strengths.

To help manage the process of building employee skills, avoid mutual mystification. Clearly detail your vision and sell the goals involved to your team members.  Ask for a commitment for this required growth, both personal and professional, from each team member. Ask them how they see themselves fitting into this vision. Employees can choose to grow with the company, or, to be fair, perhaps they should be told that the company will out-grow them.

Be proactive with job descriptions

As an added caution, be careful not to develop job descriptions based on who you already have on the team. This would be like Design/Building a project for a client by only using the left over and miss-ordered materials that are collecting dust in your warehouse. How could you fulfill the purpose of the client’s project if you limit the design in such a way? Instead, Design/Build your business by creating job descriptions specific to your company’s vision and the path required to achieve it. 

If you are the business owner, create job descriptions for employees who will complement the skills you bring to the business.  This helps you to concentrate on what you are best at and/or prefer to do yourself.  If you plan to eventually give up certain responsibilities, keep an eye out for your replacement and include mentoring as part of that person’s career path.  Mentoring helps socialize the employee into the nuances of the already established norms and values of both the job position and the company.

Watch for the follow up to this blog (article 3 of 3) which will be titled "How To Make The Ladder Of Opportunity Happen"

Related articles:

Article #1 of this series: Successfully Grow Your Business By Creating a Ladder of Opportunity For Employees

Article #3 of this series: How To Make The Ladder Of Opportunity Happen At Your Construction Business

Government to Contractors: Start Hiring Convicted Felons!

Mentor Me, Please - Gen Y Business Owner Offers Peers Advise

Contractors: How To Work With Generation Y From One Of Them

Gen Y Member's Advice To Peers: How To Develop A Good Work Ethic

In Remembrance of Walt Stoeppelwerth: The Godfather Of Remodeling To Many

On February 18^th, 2013 Walt Stoeppelwerth passed away.  Walt was the President of HomeTech Inc in Bethesda, MD for over thirty years.  I have always been an admirer of Walt and all he did for me as well as our industry. Walt Stoeppelwerth's obituary only offers a small piece of what he did in his lifetime. 

During my early years as a remodeler I observed that Walt made many predictions about the future of the remodeling industry.  Those predictions included trends, challenges, shifts, business systems and methods of production.   Many of his predictions came true.  For a whole variety of reasons, other predictions may have been challenged by a lack of continuous development or adequate leadership within the industry.  Regardless, Walt kept beating his drum about what our industry needed to keep top of mind.  Until that is, he could no longer fend off the challenges of Alzheimer’s disease.

Walt help shape the Remodeling Industry

What I observed to be unique about Walt was that he not only predicted the future, he also participated in making it happen.  I suggest he was a visionary with a unique ability to identify, fully understand and solve existing as well as future challenges within the industry.  He would share his observations, speculate on the likely consequences if the challenges were not addressed, and suggest or predict the solutions he felt would address the challenges.   His brilliance was his ability to then create and provide the required solutions, and, through his consulting, direct others who wanted to participate in making the evolution happen.  

Although some feel such tactics might be self-serving, I disagree.  It is my opinion that Walt was a truly caring person who loved and gave his best to the industry, always willing to help people.  I think of him as a man who did and gave great things to the industry and the people he loved, and he found a way to be well paid while doing so.  By being well paid, he could afford to keep doing what he did and, perhaps more important, he kept getting better at it!  A good example for all of us to consider for our own businesses.

Walt was always up for a good debate about industry topics. 

Fortunate for me, I got to have many of those debates with Walt.  His purpose was never to prove anyone wrong or demonstrate his authority and knowledge.  Rather I observed his purpose was to always gain additional understanding and insight from others, so he could then use what he learned to complement what he knew and in turn offer better solutions to those he worked with.  I always left those debates with more knowledge and a greater understanding of each topic we explored.  In many ways he was a mentor to me.  I was and am still today honored to have taken his spot as a columnist for Remodeling magazine.

Carrying on Walt's example

From what I observed, Walt lived the value of continuous improvement.  His business model was not reactive to the perceived and often misguided needs expressed by remodelers and industry partners, but rather proactive in creating and providing the solutions and the guidance remodelers and industry partners really needed to improve and foster true success.

In summary, Walt had the intimate knowledge, insight, creativity, resources, contacts, relationships and solutions to change the industry and cause tremendous social benefit at the same time. 

When people feel better about themselves and their businesses, they listen and seek for more of what helped them. Additionally, many then share what they have and know with others with the hopes that they too will benefit.  Walt was a master at setting that example and making it happen for so many remodelers.

I am grateful for his example and for all I learned from Walt.   He may have left our industry, but he will never be forgotten.  I know many of you feel the same way.

Please feel free to share your thoughts and memories about Walt and what he did for you and your business.  I’m sure his family will be grateful to know.

Thanks Walt.

Rebuilding Your Construction Business On Purpose in 2013

Most remodeling and construction business owners didn’t start with a plan for where their business would end up; they just ended up where their businesses took them.   As they did business the employees and subs who worked for them, the clients who bought from them and the project types they bought are often the factors that eventually defined the business and therefore defined who their target customer type and job types are today.  If you’re not happy with where your business ended up, and you had to downsize during the recession, your current position might just provide an opportunity to rethink how you move forward before the economy and your business picks up.  Here’s a path to consider if you want a different business going forward.  Reflect back on and take advantage of lessons learned in the past as you map out your plan.

First establish goals for your business.  

Make sure the goals support both your professional and personal ambitions.   If you want to work to live, rather than live to work, now is your opportunity to make the change happen.

Your goals must be measurable

Next, establish metrics by which you will measure whether your business is on the right track and is achieving those goals.   In your metrics include ways to measure things like financial health, quality of service, quality of work, company culture, when you will be ready for the next stage of growth and the related employee growth or advancement that needs to be achieved. 

Decide who you will need for employees

Now that you have a clear idea of your goals and have defined objective ways to measure whether you’re achieving them or not, you can develop organizational charts for each stage of growth as well as job descriptions and candidate profiles for the people you will need to hire and advance.   Rather than let who you hire define your business and the job descriptions for those people, you will this time be able to proactively define, seek out and better qualify the right employees for each job position you will need to fill as the business grows. 

Here are a few examples. 

If you want to use a lead carpenter system, hire field staff with both trade and management skills.  If you can’t find real lead carpenters with management skills (because in reality very few exist) find good carpenters with the cognitive abilities and desire to learn and use those skills.  Then, train them yourself or find someone else to properly train them.  Your lead carpenter job description will help define the training you will need to provide.   If you want managers who will lead employees rather than supervise them, make sure you include that consideration in the employee profiles you will use to complement your job descriptions and hiring decisions. 

Putting the pieces together

If you hire the wrong managers you will be compromising your ability to hire and keep the right employees to do the work.   If you have to compromise on who you hire to do the work they will not be able to live up to your metrics or you will have to lower the standards by which you measure their performance.   If you drop the bar on your metrics you will either have to accept that you will never achieve your business and personal goals, or you will have to drop the bar on those too.

One definition of insanity is to keep doing the same things but expect different results.  If you want 2013 to be the year you changed the direction and performance of your business, you would probably be insane not to consider the path described above.

Thinking about figuring all this out on your own? 

If you and your business have the ability, the time and the money to learn all this stuff on your own check out this list of Five Great Books for Remodeling Business Owners.

Rather work one-on-one with a coach to help you?

Contact Shawn to find out how he helps remodelers and other construction related businesses all over the country achieve the business and personal results they desire.  If you're not earning and keeping enough money for your retirement yet he can help you change things.

Five Great Books for Remodeling Business Owners

 I have always loved reading to learn about new subjects.  When I was first in business as a remodeler I read a lot of articles in trade magazines.  They offered great ideas, best practices and sample paperwork or forms I could put to use right away.   However, right about the time I sold my business I also started reading books on business related topics.   After reading a handful of titles I came to the realization that the articles in the magazines were helpful and offered individual solutions for a variety of typical business challenges, but the books I was reading offered much broader and more comprehensive views about big picture business strategies and opportunities. 

In many ways the books I read helped me understand how I had grown my business, what made me and my business more successful than many other remodelers and their businesses, and they helped me better understand why my business had salable value beyond just the value of the hard assets.  I quickly came to the realization that, had I read those books much earlier in my career, perhaps I could have increased the level of success I enjoyed.   I also came to realize that I would have dramatically reduced the time it took to build my business had I read those same books when I first started my business.  

The books in the list I offer below fall into the top five books I think remodelers should read if they want to grow a successful business and reduce the total time it takes to do so.   More importantly, these books can help remodelers avoid the frustrations, wasted time and wasted money that come with the trial and error approach of going it alone as a business owner.   Even if you still can’t build the business you want on your own after reading these books, you will definitely know what help you will need to get there

“The E-Myth Contractor” by Michael Gerber

This is one of several E-Myth books by Gerber.  They are all worth reading, but if you’re a contractor this one gets right to the point about what you need to do to build a contracting business that runs without you needing to do everything yourself and be there every minute of the day so things get done.   If you ever want to sell your remodeling business, or at least be able to take an extended vacation, make sure you grab this book.

“Good to Great” by Jim Collins

Many business owners are happy having good businesses.  Others decide that their businesses, when compared to other businesses, fall into the good category; a term sometimes referred to as relative success.   If you want more than just a good business Collins and his team has done the research to figure out how it’s done.  He offers some great strategies to consider as well as some great examples of companies and their leaders who made the jump from good to great.  He also shares the importance of and the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.

“The Great Game of Business” by Jack Stack

 If you would like to have an open books business that involves all employees in the creation of and sharing of company profits you should definitely read this book before you do so and well before you start creating your plan.  Not only does Stack share strategies for doing so, he lets you know the challenges to expect, how to get ready for them and how to identify employees who will never go along with the changes.  He also shares a process to use to help educate employees about business financials relative to their job positions, how profits are earned and how they can measure their individual contributions in ways that are real for them.  As I mention in my blog about profit sharing, businesses that share profits often earn more profit as a result!

“Selling the Invisible” by Harry Beckwith

Back before the September 11^th attacks my remodeling business was humming and qualified leads came in faster than we needed them.  Then, after the attacks and up through February, we had only sold about $15,000 worth of new work.   I had to do something to get the business back on track.   That’s when I found “Selling the Invisible” and it changed forever they way I looked at and did marketing.   In his book Beckwick discusses the difference between the “outside perception” people gain of your business from traditional marketing and the difference a business can enjoy if its marketing projects the “inside reality” customers who do business with you come to know.  Customers spend way more money to get something they consider different.  If your business has an inside reality that really differentiates your business from the competition you will not regret reading this book.

“Managing for Excellence” by David L. Bradford and Allan R. Cohen

There are all kinds of books available on the subject of business leadership and I’ve read at least a handful of them during my career.   In my opinion this is the best book on leadership that I know of.  If you looking to not only be a great leader yourself, but also create a whole team of leaders at your remodeling business this is the book that best describes how.  As a word of caution; if you’re afraid that one of your employees might become a better leader than you, don’t bother getting this book.  As you will learn in the book, the only way you can become a great business leader and create a great business is to create other leaders who can replace you.  If you want to sell your business someday you need to read this book.