February 2008: What They Didn’t Teach You at Trade School

Dear Jayme:

I’m a great electrician, and I’ve built a solid business. But now there are management situations I don’t know if I’m handling right, and I’m really uncomfortable just guessing. Am I just not getting the “ownership” thing? Shouldn’t I have learned how to run the place as I went along?

Tyson


Dear Tyson:

Once upon a time, I lived in Silicon Valley, where you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting an engineer with breathtaking technical skills (you’re not an engineer, but stay with me).
The brilliant engineers come up with equally brilliant ideas for computer products. Often, they take their ideas and engineering skills and start their own business. They design, build and ship everything themselves, all in somebody’s garage.

But as the company grows, it gets more complex, and the engineer must handle more and more non-engineering tasks: marketing, sales, finance, materials, production, etc. And he needs to plan, coordinate and track the activities of all these functions. He starts to stray out of his skill set.

Just as there are highly trained and skilled engineers, there are highly trained and skilled CEOs who spend years honing management and leadership skills: planning, coordination, organization, manpower management, systems development, communication, policy-making, role-modeling and leadership. CEOs aren’t born with these skills—they’re developed through formal schooling, training under mentors and rotation through the company functions at increasing levels of authority and responsibility.

Suppose the engineer needed someone to perform cutting-edge engineering feats. Would he hire a CEO for the job? Sound ridiculous? Sure it is. The CEO is totally unqualified to be an engineer.

But guess who the engineer often thinks is qualified to run the company: himself! Someone who knows as little about management and leadership as the CEO knows about designing computer chips. Brilliant!

“But hey, I’m a smart guy and a great engineer. I’ll figure it out. How hard can it be?”

How hard? Really hard. It’s a fatal trap to think that just because he’s a great engineer, he can automatically manage an engineering-based business.  It’s simply not true, and it’s why dozens of Silicon Valley companies with great ideas and products flounder and (here’s the segue, finally) why thousands of contracting businesses get stuck (or fail entirely) while their owners are frustrated and working too hard.

Trade school, union training and/or years on the job have made you a skilled and respected electrician, plumber, mason, framer or tile-setter, but as your business grows, those technical skills become less and less important. Meanwhile, your management and leadership skills become more and more critical. But (oops) where were you supposed to learn those?

You probably wouldn’t have your best electrician or plumber do the payroll or negotiate the company medical plan. Right?

But if you have no solid management skill training and are trying to run a million-plus dollar business, you’ve done the same thing: placed a skilled, bright but unqualified person in the most critical position. You wouldn’t trust an untrained pilot with your life, but you’re inadvertently trusting an untrained manager with your livelihood.

Please understand: I’m not saying that you’ve done anything wrong or ignored your responsibilities. I’m saying that the natural career path for most contractors just doesn’t include developing the management skills that a bigger business requires.

Nor am I saying that trade schools are deficient; they exist to teach technical skills, not high-level business management. How could they know you’d be running a million dollar business ten years later?

But not to worry. Management and leadership are just a set of well-understood skills that can be learned and mastered like any others. Find a good coach with a solid training program, and sign yourself up. It’s way easier than you think and way more fun to run the place when you have the confidence of really knowing what you’re doing.
 

Cheers,
Jayme

Construction Business Owner, February 2008