Grow Sustainably with Great Talent

The contractors who want to attract and retain the best talent must provide opportunities for their career growth and that comes from having a strategic growth plan.

D. Brown Management Profile Picture
Share

This means a tough and scary strategic leap of faith for many contractors who are already suffering from labor shortages at the craft and management levels.  

Leadership Tools: Which came first? Chicken or Egg compared to Talent or Growth. You can't grow sustainably without great talent.
  1. Design your future state 2X org chart for where you need to be 5 years out.  Look at it with the assumption that you will be able to find internal and external candidates to fill key roles as well as to build your field workforce if applicable.   
  2. Identify those who will likely be leaving on their own or with some help in the next 1-3 years and 4-7 years.  If you are a self-performing contractor include a percentage of your field workforce that you know will or needs to be turned over.
  3. Review your internal team for accelerated development opportunities to fill larger roles on the organizational structure while providing them the scaffolding of training, coaching and mentoring from both inside and outside the company.  
  4. Clearly identify your talent gaps that need to be filled roughly by year - both recruiting and training requirements.  
  5. Invest more aggressively than you ever have before in building your capabilities around the 9 Talent Processes.  You will close those gaps if you develop a plan and execute relentlessly towards your goal.



Competition - What Do You Really Know?
Contractors typically pay too much or too little attention to their competition. The best contractors strike the right balance spending most of their time focused on customers while being deliberate in knowing their competition.
Cash Flow Tip 16 - 5/10/15 Collection Process
Use the 5/10/15 Collection Process to ensure faster payments. Don’t let the marginal gains achieved so far with Cash Flow Tips 1-15 get squandered by poor collection practices.
Project Cash Metric and Cash vs. Margin Variance
Contracting is a very capital-intensive business and it is critical to constantly be watching cash flow performance. This metric is the highest level of an “OUTCOME” for cash flow at the project level, summarizing the performance of ops and accounting.