As a building business owner, you juggle everything from the quality of work, relationships with subcontractors, dealing with clients, working with suppliers and building your business amongst other multitudes of jobs that need to be done every week.
Yet one of the unspoken issues that tend to creep into businesses is how the lack of excellence and clarity within the culture of your business may be crippling you as a business owner and hurting your bottom line.
Tradies running late?
Suppliers don’t pick up the phone?
Do clients have no boundaries?
The work site is left a mess?
Staff members aren’t giving the level of detail required for the job?
These are all aspects of a business that can hurt the bottom line of your business and create unnecessary headaches throughout the week.
We wanted to share 4 tips to help you get the most out of our your team and build a healthy culture within your business.
1. Owning the problem
As the business owner, you are directly responsible for a lot of the issues that arise from a subpar culture within your business. You are the boss. You set the standard of excellence and clarity, so the first thing that needs to be fixed is you.
The standard you expect will always be lower than the standard you receive.
Your staff don’t and won't carry the same passion for your business as you do. Your suppliers and subcontractors don’t carry the same energy as you do for your projects. This is normal, expected, and acceptable.
This simply means that the standard I want for my business and my worksite needs to be excellent, clear and understandable. This will allow those who work for you to rise higher and come close to meeting the level you want them to be.
2. Don’t shy away from excellence.
Your clients demand the best quality service. In order to give them the best, you need to bring the best out of the people who work for you to reach the standard that is worth creating happy clients.
Bringing out the best in your staff and setting a tone of excellence is not an easy task. Those who run the best building businesses know that setting a tone of excellence requires:
a. Consistency in language and tone
b. Having hard conversations
c. Giving praise where it is due
d. Rewarding high-quality work.
A good question to ask yourself and your staff is “what is one thing we can do better this week than we did last week?” and involve your staff in the process of helping raise the level of excellence in your business.
3. Don’t shy away from clarity
Clarity is important when it comes to understanding the culture and expectations of your business.
There might be questions asked on the job site on what, how when or why to do a particular job, but never questions around the standard. This should be communicated early when onboarding new staff and repeated regularly in staff meetings.
Anytime the waters are muddy, you end up having to walk someone through a situation. A lot of business owners get flustered when having to deal with the same situation creating issues over and over again yet won't take the time to “clear the waters” and bring clarity.
It is important for standards, culture and roles to be clear and understandable. This will speed up time, reduce repeatable issues and hopefully reduce headaches of dealing with staff who, in your mind, should know better.
This may take some tough conversations yet we can't encourage this enough as the results will bring positive effects to your business and in turn influence your bottom line.
4. A business with a healthy culture is attractive
Are you wanting to attract new home clients?
Are you wanting the best in tradies and subcontractors to work for your business?
The power behind having an excellent and clear culture is that it is obvious to those outside the business.
Culture affects the atmosphere of the job site, the body language of the owner and the passion of everyone involved.
It is businesses like these that attract customers and new hires. This is the type of business that people want to be involved with.
We can’t stress enough how important it is to have an excellent business culture as this plays as part of the foundation on which everything is done. Take time to build your business, to increase your standards (not just with your product and build, but in communication, support and structure) and ensure that those in your business work with clarity. These things influence everything in your business and in turn affect your bottom line.
If this is something you struggle with as a building business owner we would love to have a chat with you to see how our business coaching may be able to assist in helping you build your business, create a quality culture and help influence your bottom line for the greater.
Click here to get in contact with us today to start the conversation
