L
et's say I gave you $100,000 to grow your business. You go to dinner to celebrate your great windfall; the next morning, you're at your desk, admiring the check (yes, it's not coming by wire transfer or PayPal). Here's my question: Would you know what to do with it - first, second and third - for the greatest impact? It sounds like a lot of money, especially if you're the typical contracting company at $2 million a year or less - sometimes way less. However, it's also an amount that can disappear remarkably quickly unless you have a plan and use the money to execute that plan. Also, I know that some problems aren't money problems. I've had some clients who, when I began working with them, were already deep in debt because they needed money and resorted to maxing out their credit cards and extending their suppliers' offers to finance equipment and materials. The problem is, they would only have fallen deeper down the hole if they had gotten a check for $100,000. Why? They lacked Planning Power, which means a plan on which projects to work on. It should be the right project, at the right time, in the right way. They didn't possess systems such as Operating Power (today, it's my Signature Operating Manuals System program), so they threw people at the problem, hoping they'd magically make everything work right. I understand this. After all, I had done the same thing at my family-owned plumbing, heating, cooling and electrical business. Hey, we were lucky. We had some money, so I used it. The problem is, I used it all wrong. I threw money at problems, hoping to make them go away - not only did it not work, but sometimes it actually made things worse. An example of this is all the years we ran without operating manuals. It led staff to ask the same questions over and over again. We had no organizational chart, so no one knew who was handling what. Either multiple people did the same thing or no one did it; both were bad. I had no structured pay for how the technicians could make more money. They would end up at my door at 5 p.m., asking for a raise and knowing they would typically get it because we had so much work; we needed them to stay. Think about how easy it is to load up your credit card. It feels like free money until the statement shows up at the end of the month and you have to pay the bill. Do you even remember what you bought? In general, unless you have a plan for using money, it's easy to fritter it away with zero impact on growth. That's spending money. A better idea is to formulate a plan for investing your money in a way that will generate a return on that investment. Simply spending money with no plan behind it makes no such promise. The plan I'm referring to is based on a written goal for
THE 7-POWER CONTRACTOR
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phc June 2022 www.phcppros.com
BY AL LEVI
If I Gave You a $100,000, What Should You Do?
Money can disappear quickly unless you have a plan and use the money to execute the right plan at the right time.
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