Wadlington moved into an office for a while and recently bought a building to house his business. He hired an outside consultant and an accountant to help him get back on track with his bills. Eventually, he got an office manager who has helped with organization. This year he invested in UDA Construction Suite project management software. When he decided to hire lead carpenters, he worked with his accountant to figure out what he’d need to earn in order to pay an employee. “Having an employee will lead to better project management, and I can drive schedules a little more rather than being at the mercy of others’ schedules,” Wadlington says. He’s also rewriting his business plan and creating an organizational chart. He’s asking subs and his office manager to write down exactly what they do and is using online resources to create job descriptions.
Though these steps may seem basic, Wadlington knows he couldn’t have done this when he first started out. He had to go through the learning process to reach the level of understanding he has now.
It’s still important to him to continue networking and taking industry classes. “Professional athletes don’t go to the local playground to play pickup games to train,” he says. “They train with other professional athletes and trainers. You line up to run next to the guy who’s faster than you to try to build your skills. That’s how I think of all this. I’m putting myself in with a group of professionals who see the way and can help me grow, instead of hanging around at the playground.”
GETTING SERIOUS Paul Zachman, owner, Boardwalk Design
Pittsford, N.Y.
Owner’s domain: sales, design, estimating
Office: 1; field: 5
Volume: $800,000
How simple it would be to go from designing and building high-end decks and outdoor living spaces to doing high-end design/build remodeling work. That’s what Paul Zachman, owner of Boardwalk Design in Pittsford, N.Y., thought when he decided to expand his then 10-year-old business. Boardwalk Design’s outdoor projects were successful and profitable, but with the remodeling division, which was about 30% of his business, he struggled with profitability. “In my mind I had been doing design/build for years. I wanted to take it to the next level. I was sick of marginally bumping along, and I decided I was going to make something of it or get out of it,” he says. “I way underestimated the difficulty.”
Zachman, who has a degree in ornamental horticulture, says he didn’t understand the complexities of what he was attempting. He’d gone along for years trusting that employees would care as much as he did about the business. “My general personality is to be hands-off and let my people do what they do,” he says. But he realized that if he didn’t offer feedback “it was like they were bowling from behind a curtain. You hear all the noise and action but you have no idea what the score is.”
His positive nature won’t let him dwell on it, but he says he wasted a lot of years just “mucking along” without expectations for himself or his employees. “I resisted systematizing and implementing controls,” Zachman says. “I thought things would get better if I just had some better meetings. I was profoundly wrong in that assumption.”
Boardwalk Design is located outside of Rochester, N.Y. Although the economy in that part of the state has gone from bad to worse over the years with large local corporations downsizing or outsourcing, Zachman says that after 17 years he had gotten the hang of it and was able to sustain himself. But severe weather caused him to lay off two or three workers each winter. Getting serious, to him, meant creating a business that engages and supports its employees. He doesn’t have a “romantic notion of getting into high-end remodeling,” he says. “It’s a matter of growth for my company and my employees to make this a year-round model. If you want to provide benefits and training and opportunities for employees, you need to take on things that a 10-month business can’t support.”
He began by hiring a production manager, but admits that he had no game plan other than a vague notion that by hiring someone he’d be free to grow sales.
Although that person helped him develop an Excel-based comprehensive estimating program for deck building, Zachman feels that the position was an overhead burden. “We increased overhead and developed a framework for a company almost twice what we are volume-wise for overhead. I elected to cut overhead because I didn’t have a real plan,” he says.
Eventually, and by mutual agreement, the production manager left to follow a different career path. “I felt like I had this machine rolling along. I wanted to do better but didn’t know how.” With the money he wasn’t spending on a production manager’s salary, Zachman began to educate himself.