Four Steps to Sustainable Growth (10+10=0)

All contractors go through different stages of growth.

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Leadership Tools: 10 + 10 = 0

Growing contractors face an overwhelming amount of problems and opportunities as they move through the different stages of growth. There will never be enough resources to work on all of them, especially with the shortage of talent facing the construction industry.  

"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."

Abraham Lincoln

The equivalent for the leadership teams of growing contractors is to spend a significant amount of time truly identifying the #1 bottleneck or opportunity in their entire value stream.  Then breaking it down into an actionable objective with key results that everyone can align around rather than a broad vision.   

This seems simple but in reality is VERY challenging, especially as a business grows. This is an area where experienced 3rd parties can add significant value because they don’t have all the biases that are inevitable with management teams who are looking at the myriad of problems and opportunities every day.  

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Connecting Metrics to Activities and Outcomes
Outcomes are created through doing the right activities. Data is only a proxy for that activity and a metric is a synthesis of lots of data points. Metrics are valuable, but always have a skeptical view of proxies for performance, especially with growth.
Percent Planned Complete (PPC) - Calculation Example
Yoda would be the perfect coach for managing schedules on projects: “Do or do not. There is no try.” This is the heart of Percent Planned Complete (PPC) and the weekly cycle of continuous production improvement.
Impacted Productivity - Highly variable Labor Scheduling (Level Your Schedule)
The biggest risk for a specialty contractor is the performance of on-site labor. One of the biggest impacts to labor productivity is having a schedule that requires large variations in labor.