Definition of Sustainability

How sustainable is your construction business?

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Leadership Tools: Definition of Sustainability: The ability to be maintained at a certain rate or level.

Not your ability to build sustainable buildings, but the true sustainability of your business.

  • Are the market(s) that you are in stable or at least counter-cyclical to each other throughout various economic cycles?

  • Are those market(s) growing, stacking the cards in your favor that your company will continue growing?

  • Do your customers love you to the point where they keep coming back to you for projects?

  • Do you have good business development capabilities that will create predictable revenue growth?

  • Do you have good talent development systems, ensuring that your revenue growth does not exceed your ability to grow and retain leadership talent?  

  • Are you generating enough free cash flow to support your growth?

Sometimes, an outside perspective can be invaluable for helping assess and improve your sustainability. 

What does your scoreboard say?  




Definition - Normalization of Deviance
Normalization of deviance happens when shortcuts become the standard. At best, it slows capability growth. At worst, it creates catastrophic safety risks. In between is wasted money, time, and people.
Asking Good Questions
The ability to ask good questions will improve your learning, teaching, hiring, selling projects, building projects, and growing your contracting business. The discipline of formulating good questions often answers the original question and many more.
Collections and Retention Trend Metric
Assuming that a contractor’s project team has done an effective job of aggressively billing the project, the biggest variable that remains for cash flow is the effectiveness of collections.