Moving Forward
Creating new growth areas is an ongoing milestone, and the areas you choose to focus on will depend on whether a company is in its infancy, its adolescent years, or has reached maturity.
Surpassing some of the earlier milestones and having objectivity helps in the planning of growth milestones such as moving in the direction of design/build, getting a showroom, or becoming a distributor of products.
“For a firm this size that’s been in business this long, [the design/build process] was a naked spot for us,” says Bryan Absher of Pritchett Brothers. The more than 40-year-old Bloomington, Ind., company did $4 million in volume last year.
Until recently, the company outsourced its resources — draftspeople, subcontractors, product selection — but they’re now moving them in-house. They hired a sales/ draftsperson to head the design/build department and are in the process of building a 1,000-square-foot showroom so clients can “touch, smell, and feel the things you need in the remodeling process,” Absher says.
Several conditions came together to prompt Pritchett Brothers to make this move. “Before the decision,” says Absher, “we would assist and monitor the process,” but it wasn’t formalized. Because client follow-through was so high —90% of the people they walked through the process used the company’s services — they realized “we’ve got to do this in-house and make it structured.”
Plus, he adds, they learned from others: Many of the firms in Pritchett’s Remodelers Advantage peer review group had found success in design/build. “You can’t lose clients because you can’t do the services in-house,” Absher says. “It’s move and take the lead or go the way of the dodo.”
Life Gets In The Way While planning is important and makes change easier, not all changes can be planned for. Sometimes personal events can set up conditions for and change the direction of milestones.
Kerry Miller, who moved his 20-year-old business from one state to another, says he did so in part because it was time for a change, but mostly because his wife wanted to move back to where her family was.
It was scary starting over, he says, “but with 20 years of experience, I wasn’t really starting from scratch.”
For Rochester’s Floramo, it was his wife’s death that made him change course. Floramo and his wife, who was company bookkeeper, had built a business that included two large showrooms, when they learned that she had cancer.
Three years after her diagnosis, she became too ill to work and Floramo says he couldn’t “manage the office, the field, the sales. It was overwhelming at that point because she couldn’t help out.”
He closed the showrooms and went to work for another remodeler. His wife died in 2000, and Floramo waited two more years to go back out on his own.
Despite the changes, both Miller and Floramo were able to take previous experience and start somewhere in the middle of the process. They’d learned to recognize the conditions for change and were able to prepare to meet new goals.
Floramo is now general manager of Capstone Remodeling and Construction, which has a kitchen and bath division with $750,000 in gross sales and a general construction and remodeling division with gross sales that are nearly double that.
Reactions to personal life events force everyone to question their motivations and think about what they want to pursue in both life and business.
Consultant Judith Miller imagines a graph with three columns: business mile-stones, personal life milestones, and what one would need to succeed in making the jump from one column to another.
Doing this could be a good planning tool because it tells you what needs to be in place for you to be able to take the next step with minimal risk.