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If You Don’t Know Where You’re Going You’re Probably Not Going to Get There
This simple ancient Chinese proverb says enough. Unless a contractor knows where he or she is trying to take their business, they probably won't get it there. Unfortunately, many of the contractors I am familiar with are not strategic thinkers or planners who have...
Dominoes
A successful contractor recently told me: "I find that running a contracting company is like playing with Dominoes. In this business, one thing just leads to another. Oh, we try to plan for the future but then reality rears its ugly head, and we start reacting rather...
Growing Out of “Closely Held”
The U. S. construction industry is made up of over a million closely held or family-owned businesses. Only 24 or .000024 % of them are owned by the public and traded on an exchange. That is an astonishing but revealing statistic. Only 24 construction companies match...
Warren Buffett’s Beliefs
The simplest definition of conglomerate is - a number of different things or parts that are put or grouped together to form a whole but remain distinct entities. What a perfect description of a construction company! As I have said so often in the past, each time a...
Span of Control
Growth and success are almost synonymous in the construction lexicon. There are a couple of reasons for this: Ongoing business for construction contractors is, in fact, new business. As soon as we sign one contract, we begin to look for the next. Contractors must...
Corporate Darwinism
The term "Corporate Darwinism" was the title of a business book published in 1966 that tracked the stages of birth, growth, and death of the typical American industrial corporation. According to the research, all start-ups that survive pass through these five...
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