Many contractors have a fatalistic attitude about a strategic plan OR they don't believe in building a strategic plan because "it's going to change anyway." In this session, we'll explain how to build a strategic plan that sticks and how to shift the plan when changes occur.
As leaders, we sometimes forget about the most important part of our organization: our people. Sometimes, we don’t spend the time to personally or professionally develop our people and we forget to train them. In this session, learn why developing your people is so important and how you can implement different training programs to continually develop your employees.
Think of those people in your organization who are a pain to communicate with. Do you feel like you’re on different wavelengths when you talk to certain employees? Did you ever think that maybe you can do something to fix it? Learn how to communicate effectively with your people in this 1-hour session!
In today's commercial building industry, employees and customers will choose companies who stand for something and who act accordingly. At the heart of the most successful organizations in every industry are clear and documented core values. Those actionable guiding principles, chosen intentionally to enable employees of all experience levels and tenure with the company, will perpetuate a culture aimed at achieving the organization's vision. This session will teach you how to develop core values that work for your organization, and that truly stick.
What does your mentality do to the rest of your organization? What happens if you have a bad mentality, will your team members have that same mentality? The answer is: yes! Don’t let your fits of frustration get out of hand. Learn how to change your beliefs and scripts to build and organization with a lasting attitude and vision in this 1-hour session.
Not all work is good for your business. Much like all the foods you put in your body are not created equal, the projects you feed to your business are not all equally good for your company. In a desire to "keep the team busy," you may be pursuing and accepting projects that range from being as bad as downright losers to at best, distractions from your core business. Symptoms of this condition include: hitting revenue targets while missing profit goals, overly stressed teams who complain about the scope of work and complaining clients who don't feel you're doing a good job. In this 1-hour training session, we will help you to define what projects are healthiest for your business and outline a plan for you to pursue the work that will help your company to succeed.
The health of your business depends on the numbers and data you can report on. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are essential to any organization’s lasting well-being, but many organizations aren’t focused on the right things, don’t track or review their KPIs enough or don’t commit to using KPIs. Learn how to establish and commit to a set of KPIs that will test the health of your organization in this 1-hour session.
Change can be one of the most terrifying things for leaders to deal with. Maybe you find yourself failing to identify your need for change, maybe you’re fostering a culture of complacency or maybe you’re always imagining the worst case scenario which then prevents you from actually making any decisions. Sounds scary, right? Learn how to deal with and embrace change in this session. Perfect for owners, leaders and managers in your organization.
Thinking about retirement can be terrifying… especially for business owners. Because of this fear, business owners don't take action to groom their next generation of leaders. This lack of preparedness means employees are getting promoted into key positions that they aren’t trained for, succession planning isn’t happening and the business owner becomes central to the organization, unable to function without them. Figure out how to start developing your future leaders in this session.
Conflict is unavoidable. No question. But, do you find you let problems go unresolved fester and turn into deeper issues? Or, maybe you just don’t have the appropriate tools or time to deal with conflict until it becomes an even bigger issue? Dealing with conflict is uncomfortable and frustrating, but learn how to make dealing with conflict a little less painful.
Negotiation is not only necessary in sales situations, but also with your employees. As a leader, you must be equipped with the tools to properly negotiate with your employees in certain situations. In this session, we’ll review the 8 steps of negotiation and how you can implement those into conversations with your employees.
For leaders, goal setting can be one of the most rewarding, but most difficult things to do. Have you only ever made goals that are only focused on financial goals? Have you ever made goals and not stuck to them? In this session, learn the important components of goal setting and what you can do to ensure you and your people make them stick.
The construction industry like every other industry is a rapidly changing environment and humans are naturally conditioned to resist change. In this session, we’ll train strategies for you to navigate your organization through important and necessary changes to keep your competitive edge.
Everyone hates being trapped in meetings when they wish they could be getting their work done and an effective meeting should streamline work and higher levels of productivity. In this session, we’ll train a methodology for avoiding the traps that waste your people’s time.
Regardless of your leadership role inside your organization, to be effective with people, you must be viewed as trustworthy. In this session, we will show the most common ways that leaders lose trust and what you can do about it.
Most organizational charts exist as they are because they have always existed that way. How many companies have people in management positions because they are the most competent employees and they want to keep them for the long-haul? That is not intentional organizational design. In this session, we will help executives design their organizational structures to match their company goals.
Every critical function in your business should have a documented and teachable process designed to create optimal results. How your team estimates, turns over a project to operations, kicks off a project with a customer, and more are all great examples of critical functions that need critical processes. In this session, we will illustrate how to design and improve processes to create a more consistently positive result in your business.
It is critical to your business that your team is effective with communication amongst themselves and between departments. How many meetings should you have? Who should be involved? What should the agendas look like? We will answer these questions and more through our experience with general and subtractors alike. In this session, we will help you strike the right balance between holding too many meetings and too few which causes interruptions and inefficiencies in your business.
What has the COVID-19 crisis taught you about yourself and your leadership team? Everyone reacts differently under pressure, and while there is no single acceptable way to react, there are some universal characteristics that lead to a better result. Regardless of the market conditions, leadership teams should strive to possess strong internal and external communication, well-thought-out strategy, innovative problem solving, a positive and supportive atmosphere, and the resilience to push through rough patches as a team. During a crisis, however, these characteristics take on a heightened level of importance and the stakes are high. This session will help you to assess your response and that of your leadership team to this most recent crisis, giving you insight into the root causes of both your positive and negative outcomes. You can use what you learn to create a personal development plan, as well as to consider your team makeup and the right roles for each person to play when the pressure is on.
Contractors fall into two camps, those who build strategic plans and those who believe things change too often to merit building a plan in the first place. We believe, and statistics show, that the best performing contractors do, in fact, build strategic plans. But, every plan is subject to change in light of new circumstances. Our most recent crisis has changed the business landscape to varying degrees for everyone, uncovering weaknesses and opportunities along the way. This session will help you to reset, re-think, and revise your business plan to keep it relevant for the present and future.
Contractors tend to get so caught up in doing and running their business that they end up lacking focus on working on the business. Or, they have clear initiatives they want to pursue, but they’re not sure those initiatives are the right ones. In this session, you will learn to identify where you need to work on your business, and to ensure that your energy is well-aimed to gain the support and commitment from your people within the organization.
This is a session about making wise investments in your business designed to give you an upper hand in the market. Having the discipline to reinvest strategically will increase revenues and profits in the future. In this session, we will talk about the mindset and habits of top performing contractors in the market.
Missing the mark on a bid and losing the job can all be because of one vital misstep in the bidding process: the decision step. Many people don’t know the real decision maker, don’t know the customer’s decision process or don’t know the profiles of their prospective\ clients. Learn how to uncover a decision process and develop an account map in this 1-Hour session!
In the absence of value, price is all there is, but does that mean YOU don’t have value? No! It means you haven’t developed your value proposition to your current customers. Learn how to bid jobs without ever having to be the lowest in this 1-hour session where we’ll focus on how to develop your value to the customer.
When asked, 90% of GCs said they would want to know AND it would weigh into their decision if a subcontractor believed strongly that they were a good fit for a particular project. If you told your GC what made you different, what would you say? Learn the specific strategies to pursue more projects and enhance your win rate in this 1-hour training session.
Do you feel like even though you are doing business with the same people over and over again they still act like they don’t know you? Do you feel like your bids end up only being about the numbers and not about your company? In this 1-hour session, learn how to evaluate your clients throughout a project so you can win more work without having to do more work.
In this highly competitive industry, your ability to negotiate well can mean the difference between breaking even or making a profit. With so many entities involved in a construction project, you face decisions every day where you can negotiate well and create profit, or negotiate poorly and give it away. Meanwhile, we must balance the need for profitability with the need to create goodwill and maintain healthy relationships. This 1-hour training session will help you and your team to understand the science and art of negotiation strategies that have been proven to capture 2-6% in Gross Margin for General Contractors and Subcontractors alike.
During the last recession, contractors who were too reliant on a small number of companies for all or most of their business felt the most pain. Even with the relative recency of this experience, many contractors are likely to repeat it\ the next time the economy slows. You might feel like you're too busy to take on more customers, but expanding your options through proactive creation of new customer relationships will actually lead to your company making better choices on which projects to pursue. If you are a growing contractor, business development is crucial to your lasting growth, but even if you're looking to stay around the same size you are today, business development will give you the tools to expand your customer-base, reduce your risk, and improve profits by focusing on the right projects for your company. Learn how to launch or refine your business development effort by joining us for this 1-hour session.
Have you ever thought that networking events are a waste of time or completely ineffective? Maybe you’re finding that you are just “winging it” when you show up to events. If you think that networking is ineffective and you want to know how to turn networking events into meetings, join us for Effective Networking!
Most people undervalue referrals because they know they’ll get invited to bid. But, what if you didn’t have to bid on everything that comes your way? What if you could win projects based on your relationships? Referrals are the strategy that will get you there. Learn how to get more and better referrals in this session.
How much do you sacrifice to make your clients happy? In money? In time? Do you think if your customer is happy, then you’ve probably given them too much? Learn how to make sure your clients are happy without having to sacrifice anything. Join us for Ensuring Client Satisfaction without Sacrifice.
We tend to allow our clients to treat us poorly, and we then believe they are bad people because of their poor behavior. But, what do you do to fix their behavior? Or, do you just let it fester to the point where you resent your clients? In this session, we will review what “bad client behavior" looks like and what you can do to remedy their behavior.
Many contractors find themselves frustrated that they discover they aren’t dealing with the right person if project pursuit or mid-stream negotiations. Different decisions are handled by different contacts inside your client’s organizations. In this session, you will learn questions to ask to help you uncover the right decision maker every step along the way.
With all of the various stakeholders involved in any given construction project there are forces at work that affect procurement structures on every project. Whether you are a general or a subcontractor, the more you understand what’s happening behind the scenes with your customer the better equipped you will be to navigate procurement in every situation. In this session, we’ll talk about those hidden forces
Things are bound to go wrong on the project. Circumstances along with company culture and individual character will determine how a company handles things when they do go wrong. What vendor of yours could complain about you, as well? In this session, learn about the power of empathy and how it can affect your partnerships.
With mountains of emails piling up in your inbox, for every project you are a part of, it can feel nearly impossible to keep up. It looks as if this trend is here to stay, so we better get used to it. We need to figure out how to manage our projects and manage the noise. In this session, we will provide techniques you can use to stay focused on what is essential leading to better project outcomes and happier customers with less stress.
In an environment with downward pricing pressure and qualified competition, knowing what makes your company different and better will determine your success rate in competitive bids. It is not enough to talk about what makes you different and better, you must actually be different and better than your competition and we will provide you with a process for evaluating your business through a customer’s lens.
Whether you made the mistake or not, it is inevitable that you will have some angry customers. With all of the contentious behavior in the building industry, many contractors chalk this up as normal and have gotten numb. Top performing companies however, use these moments as opportunities to strengthen relationships and build their brand. In this session, we will uncover how this is done.
In good times, contractors tend to do a lot of work with a few select companies. Working with people you know allows you to have better win rates, margins and a more predictable experience. However, when the economy tightens, your select customer list may prove to be too small for you to sustain your business. In this session, learn how to strategically grow your select customer list to ensure that even as the economy tightens, your business continues to thrive.
With the construction industry being as competitive as it is, it’s necessary to continually ensure you are creating as much stability in your customer base as possible. To ensure you are positioned correctly against your competitors, you have to be constantly evaluating the marketplace. In this session, we’ll talk about ways you can create more stability in your customer base by considering innovative ways to expand and do your work at the highest level possible.
Most contractors find out where their next opportunity is coming from when they are invited to bid a project. When future opportunities become more sparse, contractors start looking for opportunities to bid. This reactive behavior translates to low win rates and insufficient margins, trapping many in a negative cycle that takes years to reverse. In this session, we’ll teach a method for proactively controlling your future prospects to prevent over-bidding and under-pricing to maintain revenues.
All projects have a start and completion date that makes project revenue finite. Contractors who build their businesses solely around project pursuits will experience more extreme fluctuations in their businesses based on economic circumstances. This session is all about finding your niche for recurring revenue and the difference in pursuing that work versus projects.
Recruiting is something everyone dreads. It takes too much time. Some people are reactive recruiters, some are passive recruiters and some just don’t sell the position or the company! Maybe it’s all three for you. Learn how to build a recruiting process that fits your organization in this 1-hour session.
Interviewing is the shortest time to evaluate a life-long fit. That’s terrifying, so instead of working on how and who we interview, we under interview, we drag out the interviewing process and we hire based on liking the person. Any of that sound familiar? If so, join us for the 1-hour training and learn best practices for interviewing!
Hiring can be a headache. Some organizations have a hiring process where they make hires and they wait, or maybe they assume that the new hires know what they are doing because they were qualified when we interviewed them, or we don’t collaborate on compensation and lose out on what could have been an awesome team member. Learn how to avoid these hiring mistakes in this 1-hour session on building an effective and lasting hiring process.
What happens once we decide to hire someone? The onboarding plan! Some people think onboarding plans are unnecessary because people should come ready-made for the job, or we think we have a successful onboarding plan, or maybe we think we don’t have to train people as part of the onboarding plan. Whatever it may be, learn how to correct these onboarding faults in this 1-hour session!
Perhaps you and your team struggle to hit the deadline for getting all of your reviews finished, and as a result, the practice can turn into "checking the box" and getting the paperwork finished. Everyone, employees included, wonders why we even waste the time. In this 1- hour training, we will help to get to the root of your need for improvement with employee reviews and share best practices for creating an environment of constant feedback and turning the employee review process into something that people look forward to as an opportunity for personal growth and recognition.
Do you feel like you’re constantly putting out fires that others create? Do you feel like your employees don’t know how to do their jobs or that you're picking up too much slack? Many managers in the construction industry run into these issues because they become too focused on supervising instead of coaching and developing their people. While coaching may be the answer, many people simply don’t know how. Learn how to coach like a professional in this 1-hour session, so you can actually do your job instead of always being the “company firefighter."
With the pile of responsibilities on our plates, sometimes we forget about the most important thing in our organizations: our people. Employee satisfaction and happiness are directly correlated to productivity. The happier the employee, the more productive! Maybe you find yourself only focusing on financial goals and not employee satisfaction, maybe you have no way of understanding if your employees are satisfied or not or maybe you just lack a clear understanding of who you are as an organization. We’ll cover how to be a great place to work in this session.
Organizations still believe that candidates need the job more than the organization needs their help. As tight as the job market is today, the candidate has more opportunity to choose a job instead of settling with the position you are offering. Instead, you need to be focused on building a great organization that you are able to talk about and sell so that the employee wants to work at your organization! Need to figure out how to do this? We’ll cover exactly that in this session.
Underperformers in our organizations can be difficult to deal with, but most of the time, underperformers don’t even know they’re underperforming! Or we allow underperformers to suffer for way too long without having a solid plan to improve their performance. If you want to learn how to develop your underperforming people, join us for this session.
What happens when we let someone go or they quit? While we don’t want to think about that, we have to. What systems do you have in place to properly off-board your employees? Off-boarding is just as important to you as it is the employee. In this session, we will cover how to install an off-boarding process and the importance of off-boarding in general.
Do your employees feel appreciated and recognized for their achievements, or do they feel like just another number? Do you find you have high turnover, but your employees were fairly compensated? Maybe, it’s time to take a look at how you treat your employees. In this session, we’ll review the importance of showing your employees appreciation in a structured way.
Project Management and people management are two very different things, meanwhile, in the construction industry, people are almost tasked with both but ill equipped for the important and challenging tasks of managing people.
According to Monster.com, two-thirds of the American population dream about another job every day. In the construction industry, we all know how difficult it is to even find good people, let alone keep them. Don’t let your good talent slip by learning proven tactics and techniques that will keep your people from leaving you from the competition. In this session, we’ll talk about a few systems to install to ensure your people stay.
Session coming soon!
Do you dread conversations with your people about money? Do you have a clear compensation plan for all of your employees? In this session, we will review the issues and solutions around designing a good compensation plan so you don’t get fired as the employer.
Contractors know that to expand their workforce, they must rely less on institutions to train the skills they need and more on themselves to build effective training programs. But where do you start? In this session, we will provide a manageable plan for building your internal training programs to support your company’s skill development needs.
Many contractors have a naturally competitive team environment. Sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. When your employees forget that they are on the same team everyone loses. In this session, we will help to uncover the blindspots that are causing a lack of teamwork at your company, and provide an action plan for getting everyone pulling in the same interaction.
People are wired very differently, there are some trends in personality styles in employee groups. For example, the office versus the field, estimating versus sales, but even among those groups you’ll find personality differences. Healthy teams appreciate those differences and have learned to understand one another which leads to greater collaboration and a more positive atmosphere.
Times of crisis put all options on the table. In good times, certain employee policies can be difficult to change in fear of upsetting your team members. During a crisis, companies have more leeway to make long overdue changes or implement some innovative ideas. You’ve been waiting for the “right time” to get buy-in for these policies and procedures because they are for the health and stability of the business. In a crisis, your employees may be more likely to buy into these policy changes. In this session, we'll explore how you can use times of crisis to rethink your internal policies.
Often, during challenging and uncertain times, the people responsible for navigating the situation are also responsible for company-wide communication. While perfectly competent talent management resources are underutilized, the employee base wonders nervously about the direction of the company. This session will help you to uncover and create new lines of communication to increase the confidence and stability of your workforce, keeping your talent from looking elsewhere for stability.
While the overall hiring market remains tight in the construction industry, some top talent is hitting the job market because of their own company’s mismanagement. There are some who have been disenfranchised by their companies, disappointed because their companies refused to create new policies to protect their employees, or frustrated because their previous organization didn’t communicate with their people properly. There is some top labor that are looking for companies like yours. How do you project that you’re a healthy, stable company that is selectively recruiting those people who have become disappointed with their company? In this session we will review processes you can implement to find and selectively recruit that top talent.
The age-old question that plagues every contractor: hire enough people then grow revenues to support your staff or grow revenues sufficient to justify hiring more people? Every contractor has to grapple with the realities facing their business, but there is absolutely the right and wrong way to do this. In this session, we’ll walk through the ideal balance between staffing up and selling work.
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