Construction Marketing

Seven Deadly Sins of Running a Roofing Business

To avert a crisis as a roofing business owner, it’s only wise to conduct intense danger or risk assessment regularly in your business. The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics says about 20%…

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To avert a crisis as a roofing business owner, it’s only wise to conduct intense danger or risk assessment regularly in your business.

The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics says about 20% of new enterprises die out within the first two years of launch. Only 25% make it to 15 years or more. 

For roofers, the risks generated by market instability could be dangerous. How about those initiated from within your company? They can be even more deadly!!!

We refer to these risks as the “Seven Deadly Sins”. To help you can avoid them, we’ll discuss each one of these sins. Sit back and learn!!!

1. Inaccurate Knowledge of Your Employees

You might wonder how not knowing your employees true capabilities is deadly for your company?” It’s simple; not knowing your employees’ well enough means either underestimating or overestimating their talents and misjudging their personalities. 

To rectify this problem, you can employ personality assessment tools in your recruitment process. However, it’s really about having a comprehensive outlook of your employees and knowing where they would best fit inside your company. 

If you do not truly know your employees, you’re basically taking guesses about who they say they are; this can be detrimental to your business. As a result, personality assessments are critical, to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your employees and colleagues.

2. Unfitting Matching of Employees to Positions

As a roofing business owner, it’s not the best for your employees to be in a position where they can’t make maximum use of their knowledge and expertise. 

In many roofing companies today, folks need help understanding where they’re supposed to be operating inside their company. 

You need to understand people being in the right seats; this means assigning them a very clearly defined role because there’ll always be many distractions and problems. 

Typically, all employees have job descriptions; a detailed list of each employee’s responsibilities. This might not make sense for companies with about three employees. However, as your company expands, you begin to see the necessity.

3 . Too Many Distractions and a Lack of Priority

As roofers, we have a lot of tasks to complete on a day-to-day basis. So it’s easy to get yourself in a tight spot, if you don’t prioritize carefully. 

Let’s say you were supposed to attend several weekly meetings with your clients. If you didn’t attend to them by order of importance (because you didn’t prioritize), or assign some of your employees (because you were too distracted), it’s possible miss out on high-value business deals. 

To make things easier, you can niche in a specific space and hire a certain number of people to handle other tasks. Generally, there are a lot of questions around prioritization like:

  • When to hire?
  • Who to hire?
  • How to hire? Etc.

Identify and iron out about five to seven of these questions to make matters more manageable.

Anything Wrong With Running With a New Business Priority?

Indeed, there are times when new priorities set in, sometimes as emergencies. For situations like this, there’s nothing wrong with making quick changes to your priorities.

As you become a more seasoned auditor in your own business, you’ll develop the ability to judge whether or not something is actually your top priority.

4. Not Knowing Your Numbers!!!

For roofers or other businesses, not keeping a detailed record of your financial information is like shooting a bullet in a dark hallway; you don’t know what you’re aiming at!

Business Consultant and Author Peter Drucker once said,You cannot manage what you cannot measure”. Most people need help understanding how to evaluate data and look at the numbers in their business. 

It’s not just about the APAR, and it’s not just about you and understanding your cash on hand. We refer to the whole set of data lists as the “Fundamentals of your data”.

Primarily, it would be best if you were tracking inside of your company nonstop; and that ties into sales, marketing, production, finance, etc.

Six Core Numbers You Should Focus On

As a roofing business owner, keeping track of your numbers is challenging. However, you can boil down the immense workload to six core numbers. They are;

  • Cash on hand 
  • Deposit on hand
  • Accounts Receivable(AR)
  • Accounts Payable(AP)
  • Growth profit margins 
  • Gross burn rate 

Book-related agendas and anything CPA related always become the afterthought for many start-up entrepreneurs; but it needs to be your forethought!

Your business numbers must be the first thing you’re thinking about. This is because if your balance sheet starts incorrectly, it’ll remain incorrect until you get manual entries done. However, you must be careful of the people you bring to help with your books.

5. Lack of Problem Solving Skills

For roofing business owners, If you do not make time to work on your business, and more specifically, take the time to have consistent standing meetings, you’ll find it hard to solve your business problems.

You can attempt other formats instead only focusing on the EOS model. Many roofers don’t have the time to get in a room and rearrange their daily routine. For them, the day-to-day activities suck up all the time for meetings. 

By ensuring you have all those different systems and meetings in place, you’re setting stepping stones to help you succeed. Think of meetings as a time to reset, not always to put out fires. 

You’re hurting yourself and your business if you don’t do standing meetings at least once a week. You can create quarterly and annual time frames to sit down and recalibrate; it’s a breath of fresh air.

6 . Lack of Time/Task Management Strategies 

Making maximum use of the technology available to you as a roofing business owner is critical, especially when it comes to time management. You must know how to set up your Google calendar or any other related tools. 

Ultimately, this will help you keep track of your task management. By not having a detailed daily routine or good time management skills, you and your employees will end up carrying out your respective tasks so randomly. 

Without good time management structures in place, your employees won’t be able to tell when they’re supposed to be in the office or out in the field. Even you won’t be able to tell who’s doing what and when. Simply put, your task and time management should not be handled with levity.

7. No Clearly Defined Vision

The first thing folks should know is that not everyone can pull off a 100 million-dollar roofing company; still, most people launch a full-court press as if they’re going to shoot for that.

Having a clear vision is an issue related to the EOS world; it’s understanding your company’s short-term, mid-term or long-term goals. 

If you don’t have a clear vision, not only do you not know where you’re going as the owner or the entrepreneur, but you also give your team nothing to lean on. They must know what they’re doing or the company’s endgame.

Ultimately, many of the questions revolving around your goals can be boiled down to tasks like:

  • identifying your revenue and profit targets, 
  • understanding how many roofs you’re trying to build this year, 
  • trying to get into a new market, etc. 

Instead of just doing things randomly, you should have a clear plan of what you’re trying to create.

How Do You Achieve That Clear Vision?

Identifying a clear vision for your company requires taking your time to answer the questions that revolve around your goal. You can ask yourself;

  • What are we trying to do with our company?
  • What are our profit targets?
  • What can I do for myself?
  • What can I do for my company?

When you finally answer these questions, you can start there and reverse engineer your revenue target. At this point, you’ll be able to state your immediate goals and then decide what you want those goals to look like in the coming years. 

Final Thoughts 

Every business idea has advantages and disadvantages; opportunities and risks. However, when running a roofing business, those risks should only exist as stepping stones to help you become a better roofer. 

Likewise, identify the opportunities around you. They might appear in the form of tools put in place for you to use. In other words, find these tools and make the most of them. Because of those daring heights you plan to reach, your clear goals must be in place early!

Interestingly, we have the expertise and skills to help your company produce stellar results. Contact us at Hookagency.com

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