Let Someone Else Do It
THE PROBLEM:
You simply do not have bandwidth to do all you need to do.
Business owners, project leaders, procurement managers, etc. do not have the time to manage their projects/be on site/keep an eye on the bottom line/negotiate/quality assure/inspect as they would like. They have a million and one things to do but no time to do it.
Here is a quick to do list of the average leader in his or her company:
Quality assurance
Negotiations
Budgetary planning
Manage projects
Follow up with stakeholders
Forward thinking and planning your next job
Internal meetings
Vendor management
Pipeline management
THE CAUSE:
Businesses is faster than ever; customers are more empowered than ever; and competition is more fierce than ever.
How does one person empower himself or herself with the tools needed to not only keep up, but to get ahead of the competition? The answer? Get someone else in your corner; truly “Let someone else do it.”
The challenge has never been greater. With the dawn of the information age, sales cycles lengthened significantly, especially with e-commerce world transforming how business is done. Now the customer is fully empowered with multiple options among which to choose, business reviews posted publicly, eternally on the web for all to see, research tools at their fingertips, entire courses on negotiation downloadable in podcast form, books giving away trade secrets, financial margins thinning, intellectual property shared on social media, and a dog-eat-dog world to contend with. Truly, management of your contract, construction job, whatever else is more challenging than ever and the customer more picky than ever.
How is a business manager to keep up? Below are three challenges paired with actionable tips to empower you, add tools to your tool belt, and gain an ally in your corner.
Challenge 1: Business is faster than ever.
Loyalty to proven business relationships is over. Gone are the days of being able to count on your business contacts to be loyal to you when quoting, procuring, assigning jobs. Relationships no longer matter; it is the quickness at which a business can move that counts today. Not only do we have to consider price, but speed of work is key. Many businesses are only too happy to pay a premium to simply get boots on the ground working. It’s all about opportunity cost; and business owners can feel time and money quickly slipping away without concrete action.
Pair the quickness of of the business world, the unbeatable prices and the control that major players assert over the supply chain, and you are in definite need of someone in your corner.
Consider this statistic: 90% of small businesses fail.
Yes, that’s right: 90% of small businesses fail in the United Stats, according to zenbusiness.com (Source HERE).
This is a prime example of needing someone else to do it, someone in your corner. Without help, business is almost certain to fail.
Even if you are a part of one of those “major players” mentioned above, you still need someone in your corner, as competition can get so fierce there that you almost need a team within a team to propel you forward. “Let someone else do it,” should be your marching order.
Challenge 2: The customer is more empowered than ever.
Customers have a host of resources, tools, and decision-influencers, all at their fingertips. This generation of customer is the most powerful ever.
While far from a bad thing, an empowered customer is simply more challenging to gain trust and to keep it. Customers should be able to make informed decisions, compare prices and reviews, shop around a bit, and make the best choice for themselves. However, unless that choice is you, it does not seem like a good thing. Unless you have an amazing online presence and a unique selling proposition and top-notch deliverables and focused strategy, and a firm grasp of your deliverables, and capital to float, and good enough reviews to convince, and …. and … and …. Well… you get the idea. Managers, owners, and employers simply do not have the time they need to match up with the most informed of customers. Yet, how do you become the one awarded the project at the end of the day? How do you keep up with such a well-equipped customer base?
You could focus on trying to get great at everything mentioned above. Or you could let an expert take over the process and find that happy middle ground of selling great products to highly-empowered customers. In this case, you become the highly-empowered customer. You get the joys of being taken care of, communicated with, being catered to, and creative input simply because you now have an expert in your corner. Now you have a partner who has been down this road before to guide you along the way. You have begun taking steps to match so powerful a person as the modern customer.
Challenge 3: Competition is more fierce than ever.
Customers have lost their loyalty as a way of procuring new business. Leadership internal to companies has also lost the concept of “pension”, as an example. As a worker, this should startle you. No one has a pension any more except for government workers and the military. With the loss of loyalty of the customer, the loyalty to our employees went out the window.
It is now incumbent upon each worker to “skill up” in order to avoid obsolescence. In many of the fastest-growing, ever-changing industries your skills will be obsolete within 4 years. That means the “wet-behind-the-ears” twenty-something straight out of college and working in his mom’s basement can surpass your skills from day 1 because of technological change. Not even experience can trump new and better technology advances. And people like this–with constant new skills and technological shortcuts are growing by the minute.
This phenomenon is called “occupational half-life”: the time it takes for half your acquired job skills to become no longer useful. What is one to do with such news?
THE SOLUTION:
Let someone else do it for you.
No one can do it all. And if you try, nothing will be done right. Not to mention that you, likely, will overwork yourself into an early retirement, dismissal, or heart attack. No one can be the end-all, know-all for every project. Thus enters an expert in his or her field to make you the empowered one, not just your informed customers.
“‘Let someone else do it’ is music to our ears.”
–Jared Hellums, Principal, Constructable
Don’t have time to manage the sourcing and procurement of your job? Let someone else do it.
Don’t have time for ensuring the quality of work on your project? Let someone else do it.
Don’t want to deal with negotiations with sub contractors and vendors? Let someone else do it.
Budgetary planning give you headaches? Let someone else do it.
Not skilled in the lingo of construction to manage projects? Let someone else do it.
No strong suit in procurement? No capability in communication and follow up? Simply don’t want to talk with strategic stakeholders?
You get the idea…
With an expert in your corner–someone else doing it for you–you now have a powerful teammate keeping you steps ahead of the others and keeping you on the top of your game. You can focus on what you do best and leave the rest to the experts.
“‘If you want to do something right, you have to do it yourself’ is no longer true. Let the experts do it for you to save yourself time, budget, and headaches.”
–Jared Hellums, Principal, Constructable
Letting someone else do it is especially helpful in the construction/project management space because–through a special project management type called “design build”–literally all you have to focus on is the ideation up front, being involved as much or as little as you want, and enjoying the final product at its successful completion. With design build you get to choose the end-to-end contractor and how much you want to participate in all other phases.
Practically, this means the design build contractor will be in charge of your procurement, sourcing, architecture, and project management. We get the team to work each day. We get things moving according to your deadlines. We do all those things that you have no time for. It is we who are the “someone else” in “let someone else do it.” Now that you’ve gained someone in your corner, you can leave the details to us and focus on advancing your career by delivering projects on budget, on time, and on point.
The entire goal is that we’ll take the load off of you and enable you to be great at what you do.
At Constructable, we want to be that “somebody” else to do it for you. We are experts in design build and all phases of the construction process. Let’s build something together because at Constructable, we’re building your dreams into reality. https://constructable.pro
ACTION POINT: (With each article we will present one action point as a measurable takeaway for any owner or executive sponsor.)
“Bucket” your ideas to keep the best of what you know in the forefront.
But this “bucket” has to be retrievable. There are myriad ways of taking notes and apps that can do this for you. You just have to get the practice down by not editing yourself (because of turning down your own ideas for whatever reason) and preserving your best thoughts when you have them.
- Make buckets for each idea set that you can return to.
- Set 10 minutes each day to think ahead.
- Set 1 hour each week to recap and plan ahead.
- Set 1 day a month to strategically implement.
You need to appear the expert in your field. Collating, organizing, and being able to return to your thoughts is the key to both presenting and preserving this image. And bucketing your thoughts in measurable, “capturable”, and “returnable” lists is key to really making this happen.
