The Hidden Chaos Holding Back Your Contracting Business (And How to Stop It)

You know that dashboard in front of you when you get in a car and start driving it around? One of the things you're looking at, obviously, is the speedometer, odometer, the fuel gauge—those sorts of things. But it’s also those lights, those warning lights that can come up and let you know what the performance of the car is doing.

And so in business, we have a dashboard. We operate via dashboard. And with that dashboard, there are also some warning lights—some yellow lights, some red lights—that we can look for.

Hey, it’s Scott Beebe with Business On Purpose. I wanted to walk you, as a business owner, through just a couple of red flags that you can begin to look for. Not to be obsessed about, but to simply understand as warning signs.

Now, we do something in our business that we actually took from a book I read years ago called American Icon. It was the story of Alan Mulally, the guy who came from Boeing and descended into Ford and essentially helped Ford resurrect what they were in—about a $12 billion hole—back near the 2007–2008 time frame. One of the things he did was incorporate this idea of green, yellow, and reds into their system.

So I want to talk about some of the reds that I think could be helpful for you as a business owner as you begin to sort of audit where you’re at as a business.

You often feel like your week is a constant whirlwind of just putting out fires. You’re putting on the fire suit, putting out these little fires, and they always seem to pop up. You feel like you’re drowning in emails, spending hours every day just trying to keep up and spinning. (I actually outsourced my email about three months ago, by the way.) Those are telltale signs that your business might be running on very thin ice, on low fuel—and you’re running on chaos rather than a well-oiled system.

Too many of our businesses are actually leveraging the wrong fuel. Instead of leveraging the fuel of vision, mission, values, repetition, predictability, and meaning—we’re leveraging the fuel of chaos.

So I want you to consider your team’s performance and morale. If your team members seem confused or you’re receiving poor performance reviews and negative feedback, it’s time to start evaluating your process. We actually do a healthy owner assessment and a healthy team member assessment every year for each of our clients. This sort of gives these yellow or red flags—or in some cases, green flags—so you can understand what’s working.

Even if you’re conducting surveys, the results might be pointing to some underlying issues in your organizational structure that you need to be aware of. Those are red flags to be looking for.

Another red flag to watch out for is the absence of regular, agenda-driven leadership meetings or team meetings. These are essential for keeping everyone aligned and focused on your company’s goals. If you find your production meetings are starting to drag on for two and three hours, that is a clear red flag. You’ve got to be looking at that.

So, if you’re not having meetings on a regular basis—Scott, what do you mean by regular? Let’s start with weekly. If you’re not having meetings weekly, that could be a red flag. If those meetings are going beyond one hour, that could be a red flag. And in many cases, it is a red flag. Those meetings need an overhaul.

“Scott, we need more than an hour.” No, you don’t. If you can’t get it done in an hour, what about those decisions we have to make? Well, usually those decisions are between two or three people in the meeting. So identify the situation, have them write it down, and let them go on a one-off. That should not take more than five, ten, fifteen minutes. If they need longer than that, that’s a workshop to begin to work on separately.

Another red flag: missing schedules and falling behind on bill payments. These are serious symptoms of a disorganized business. If you find yourself in a position of robbing Peter to pay Paul—in other words, shuffling money around to cover immediate expenses—you are treading on very thin ice.

In fact, you are running on pure chaos at that point. That practice of robbing Peter to pay Paul, while sometimes necessary in very dire circumstances, is quite unsustainable, risky, and sometimes illegal in the long run. All of those are signs pointing to a chaotic system. You’re running on chaos fuel, and that system is really holding your business back. You’re going to start lurching just like a car that’s got bad gas in it.

Without a solid framework in place, you’re going to continue to struggle with efficiency, productivity, and growth—all the things you want. So it’s time to step back, assess your current process, and implement systems that will bring order to chaos. Remember: a well-structured business is not just more profitable, it’s also far less stressful to run and far more satisfying for everyone involved.

Hey, we can help you with all of this. If you go to businessonpurpose.com/contact, we actually have metrics, systems, and tools that identify the green, the yellow, and the red. We can help refine those systems in your business. We’ve got it all templated out, ready to be customized for your business—so you can be liberated from chaos and make time for the things that matter most.

Visit https://businessonpurpose.com to learn more and take the Healthy Business Assessment today.

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