Do you ever feel like you are going insane trying to run your remodeling business? Stuck? Chained? A prisoner? You are certainly not alone as most business owners tend to feel more alone, isolated, and stuck then those that feel liberated.
Being an entrepreneur is freaking hard! There are typically NO short cuts to getting it right. You have to work through some (a lot) stuff before you find your way and if you make it, it typically takes at least 5 years to really figure things out. If you want some freedom in your business, you need to start developing some systems to accomplish this to take the complexity out of what you are doing.
Ask Yourself Some Important Questions About Your Business
1) Do you work more than 40 hours per week?
2) Are you doing the jobs of more than 3 people?
3) Do you have all the prospects you need to grow and thrive?
4) Are you able to turn those prospects into new clients?
5) Are you able to weed out the "problem" prospects before you take on the job?
6) Do you have any idea what your numbers are weekly, monthly, quarterly?
7) Are you able to keep up with the changes and regulations and stay in front of it? And communicate this with the people doing the work?
8) Do you have a trusted group of advisors you can turn to for answers?
9) Do you find yourself repeating yourself over and over again and you and your staff make the same mistakes?
10) Do you feel that no one else on your team wants to succeed anywhere near as much as you do?
11) Do you have trouble remembering exactly how you did something the last time and you or your team ends up doing something slightly different each project?
Odds are, if you can relate to most of these questions, you are running into some business model complexity issues. It shouldn't be this draining and this hard at this stage in the game.
Complicated Businesses Fail. Simple Ones Thrive.
I firmly believe that complicated business fail where simple ones thrive for most entrepreneurs. If you want complicated, be prepared to raise a lot of capital getting your business going and that is not easy to do in the remodeling world. I am not against complicated, but you really need some special things to make complicated work. Complicated businesses with lots of services have lots of issues that need attention.
Everything you do needs a system behind it if you stand any chance of getting a break and getting some freedom from your business. If you offer too many services, with too many different products, it's very difficult to create systems for all of this. It can be done, but it takes a lot of effort and extreme organization to get it right. If you can simplify and weed out those services you aren't the best in the world at and focus in on 1 or 2 core services, you stand a much better chance of systemizing and getting a break.
Stop right now and build a checklist/system for something in your business. Develop a process for how you would strip a roof, or frame a deck, or remove a window. It's not easy to communicate very specific knowledge like this in a way that others can replicate and follow. But it is 100% necessary if you have any desire to stop repeating yourself, reduce mistakes, systemize, and scale.
The problem with most entrepreneurs is that we make it way harder than it needs to be. We think that by trying to be everything to everyone we will make more money. That couldn't be farther from the truth and it took me a long time to figure this out even though I was given the same "keep it simple" advice early on in my career.
My advice is to look at your business as if the ultimate goal is to sell it to someone who has NO clue about your business. If you can create a remodeling business that can be sold to a business person with desire, not specific knowledge about remodeling, that's a business that has value.
Or, look at your business as if the ultimate goal is to "franchise" it. This doesn't have to be the actual goal but it should be how you start looking at everything you are doing. Could you package your business today or 5 years from now and sell the opportunity to 100 other entrepreneurs. My guess is that most of you probably can't right now, but with some simplifications, systems, and focus you probably could. Or at the very least, sell your business 1x and cash out.
Your business can't be a job disguised as a business. You can't be the technician (person doing the work) and have a real business. If you love doing the work that is one thing and you should keep doing it, but you probably won't ever get free of your role/job in your business. Freedom in your business will only come when you have something that runs without you. That is the ultimate goal for every remodeler and is very possible if you can simplify and streamline.
Systems, Systems, Systems. Build one every day and soon enough you will have one for everything you do.
Need more help growing your remodeling business? Take advantage of all the FREE resources I have on www.RyanPaulAdams.com and download my "3 Killer Ways to Grow Your Remodeling Business" today.
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