Strategy and Fighting the Fewest Battles

Nothing will have a bigger impact on a contractors business over the next decade than putting in a very rigorous process for strategy development and execution.

D. Brown Management Profile Picture
Share

The industry is changing rapidly due to technology, a massive shortage of management talent as well as major trends in project delivery and geographic expansion.  

Leadership Tools: Strategic Planning. A General does not plan how to win every battle; they plan how few battles they need to fight to win the war.

Strategic decisions along with the operating rhythms and the feedback mechanisms that ensure execution are the most highly leveraged decisions in the business. 

This is an area where an experienced 3rd party can add significant value.  Find someone that resonates with your team and has experience relevant to your company.  Change the facilitator every few years for fresh ideas. Unless they are really bad don’t change them every year so you have some continuity.  You might consider overlapping facilitators having the outgoing facilitator sit in on your side of the table providing additional continuity.  

Consider bringing in some of your key customers, vendors and subcontractors as part of your strategic planning process.  Whatever you do; don’t underestimate the value of this process.   

Learn More




Balancing Training and Coaching Effectively
Every contracting business is made up of many jobs that need to be done, ranging from relatively simple and short-term tasks to complex, ambiguous, and long-term objectives.
Contractor Scoreboard: Key Results and Leading Activities (Disciplined Execution)
Defining what you want in quantifiable outcomes is extremely difficult. It's 10X harder to define those outcomes throughout the whole company from field to CEO. Defining the leading activities that create those outcomes is another 10X more difficult.
Project Delivery - Lease Leaseback
Project Owners typically manage the financing of the project. In certain circumstances this does not always make sense, which is where Lease-Leaseback or Build-to-Suit project delivery methods come in.