There are infinite things to do but there is only one of you. There are hundreds of bits of advice from friend’s staff and everyone around you. I’ve tried to refine it for you as best I can - start here, start now.
1.Hire Better Staff
If you do nothing else get better at finding staff, pay them as much as you can and empower them to do good work and trust them to do the right thing. Hiring is an art, if you’re a small business it’s tough and my experience is that recruiters won’t help you much. I have had the best results with seek and some tactical questions. The most important thing is candour and honesty - ask people to name their weaknesses - if they tell you they don’t have any don’t hire them. Lack of candour and honesty leads to a toxic team.
2.Set Clear Objectives
Set Business objectives and measurable results. Set 2 or 3 objectives for your business. But an objective is not an objective unless you can definitely measure it - so how do you know you’ve succeeded? Don’t know what your objectives should be - ask your team this question: If all things remain the same what is the single thing we can do to improve our business? Then ask how will we know that we’ve succeeded?
3.Empower your people and give your team autonomy
Individuals can outperform other individuals by a factor of up to 10x - you’ve probably seen this in the productivity of workers - the slowest carpenter I’ve ever seen work to the fastest is not far off that (the slowest one didn’t last very long BTW and the fastest now runs his old building company) - so the 10x seems about right. But did you know that teams outperform other teams by a factor of 100 or more - sounds ridiculous and extraordinary but there is evidence for this. Projects get shut down and restarted every day because that team was not going to get it done in 100 years. Facilitate the team, have regular check ins, find out what’s not working, what’s in their way, how to help them move forward.
4.Improve your knowledge, Read Books and learn from others
If you haven’t read business books here are 2 I would start with - Good to Great by Jim Collins and 4 Disciplines of Execution by Sean Covey et al. If you don’t read listen to audiobooks which are now widely available on Spotify and listen while driving, walking or gardening - whatever it is that you do. Here's the Buttress 10 Book MBA.
5.Get on top of your financials
Your most important hire is someone to help you manage the business finances. For any business cashflow is Oxygen. Businesses don’t fail when they miss out on a project, have defaulting client, make strategic mistakes - businesses fail when they run out of cash - plain and simple. You need someone to keep the oxygen pumping. You need someone that will tell you when you’re going to run out of cash. This needs to be the most competent, well paid, organised person within the business.
6.Find better customers locally
People love dealing with local businesses. If you do nothing else for marketing then improve your Google business profile and put some signs up locally. It helps to get customer reviews on google and you can’t get staff to post reviews but my understanding is that the people you trade with; your supplier and subcontractors can give positive reviews.
7.Look after yourself
So the most important person in your business is you. You need to be rested, you need to eat well and you need to exercise. You need to have functional tools including a laptop, a phone that works well, a headset, whatever it is, get the best available (within reason). The way you feel changes how your business functions. This is probably the hardest one but you can’t improve your business without being in a good headspace.
Buttress buildOS is launching in April 2024 and will provide small building companies with all the critical tools and resources a small business needs. buildOS is built from scratch around the needs of a small business and takes an agile and pragmatic approach to business management. Sign up here for waitlist.
As always we welcome your feedback. :)
Comments