June 04th, 2018

The Eye
​Short Writing Series
By Curtis-Christopher Wragg Twitter @ccwraggii

“It’s basic human nature to focus on immediate, “in-your face” problems, and the average contractor sure gets lots of practice. Most are very good at crisis management and making important technical and project-management decisions on the spot – it just comes with the territory. The problem is that far too many owners spend years doing nothing but putting out fires and keeping projects on track, while ignoring issues related to the firm’s long-term viability. The result is a business that’s dangerously out of balance.”
— As Featured in Construction Today

Word to the adjective grammatically related to the term, ‘long-term viability’. Retirement and succession planning are two good examples. Nevertheless, it seems the only way to offset the chore of fighting fires is to expand and delegate the task to an employee. Honestly, growth is paramount. Of course creating an index to measure the matrix of task and services is nothing new. It was a genius idea, over a decade ago—nevertheless, it too, requires the expansion of your force.

Let’s think, what could you do? Randomly call your customers and have them rate your service? Umm, that would produce qualitative as well as quantitative data to serve as the basis for recognition as well as a handy tool to minimize potential fires. Could you pull that off? Nah, let’s move on.

In good and bad times note, that healthy individuals recover more quickly from illness, so, too, do healthy businesses recover from a few bumps in the road, such as an economic downturn. Among the retrospective measures that reflect a company’s health are items on the balance sheet and income statement, including cash flow, net profit, growth rate, productivity and return on investment rates. Unfortunately, by the time such historical data indicate symptoms of trouble, it may already be too late to reverse the condition. What owners really need is real-time information that lets them exert control and steer the company, according to a business plan, toward a predetermined profit. Owners who only look at historical numbers may be in the eye of a hurricane, unaware that it is tearing the business apart around them. Consequently, many times the larger, wealthier enterprises win (didn’t say do the best jobs on projects).