New Year’s Resolutions That Work For You And Your Construction Business

As the year-end approaches, you get a little stressed-out over all the commitments you have. This added stress and responsibility brings out the worst in how you handle your personal life and business pressures. Plus, you know you need to make a list of resolutions to improve your life and better manage your business or career.Why should you make New Year’s resolutions? Because you can do a better job and become a better person. Right? I am sure you admire another business owner who seems to have it together and generates more business than you. Or a competitor who seems to get all the good jobs. Or a peer who makes more money than you. Or a family who looks like they live the perfect life.

How do they do it? Where do they find the time to fit in: family, business, customers, employees, technology, exercise, personal development, charity work, church activities, investments and vacations? The answer is simple! They aren’t satisfied with being average. They want more and aren’t afraid of doing something about their future. These successful people actually do something about improving their business, building a balanced life and living their dreams.

A few simple New Year’s resolutions will help you and your business become better at whatever you want to work on. In other words, deciding to do something about your situation will help you improve and take you to a better place! I know what you’re thinking: “George, I would like to improve, but New Year’s resolutions never work.” I have been procrastinating for twenty years to get fit as soon as I get my business running perfectly. I always justify I have too much work to do and put business ahead of working out and living a healthy lifestyle. What’s your excuse? When will you get it together? Successful business owners and managers know that growing and thriving businesses are never stationary. Don’t feel discouraged. Most people have trouble sticking to their resolutions. In January of 2000, I did a study of 500 small business owners and managers. I monitored their New Year’s resolutions and discovered after one week, 90 percent of them had forgotten what their resolutions were. And the 10 percent remaining remembered their resolutions but were waiting to start once they had more time! People are surprisingly good at making excuses and rationalizing almost anything. It’s okay to slip up once in a while, but don’t make it a habit. Don’t stop trying just because you get busy or stressed out.

Could you imagine a professional football coach starting the season without a written plan and specific goals to win more games than they did last year? Of course not! A great coach always takes a look at everyone’s strengths and weaknesses after the season ends to determine what it will take to do better next year. As a business owner, manager or employee, this process of assessment and improvement is a necessary factor in achieving goals. You also need to take a look at how your live your life to determine what needs adjusting. A year-end review and goal-setting session will get you focused toward new targets with a renewed spirit of excitement.

If you’re like most people, you don’t make New Year’s resolutions. You figure, why waste your time committing to something you’ll never do? But I bet you really want to change something in your business or personal life. Maybe you want to get more organized, spend more time with your loved ones, start living healthier, take more time off from work, delegate more tasks to your employees, find someone to help you at the office, get rid of a bad customer or troublesome employee, seek new business opportunities or start looking for ways to build some wealth. Whatever you want, you’ll never get it without taking the first step.

The majority of people tend to postpone going for what they want their entire life. They let circumstances keep them stuck in the same place. Ask yourself:

• What do I want?
• What do I want to change?
• What do I want to do differently?
• What can I do now to make a difference?

People who write down their goals and desires achieve them. Those who don’t never make their dreams a priority and go through life searching for success. What you see yourself achieving is what you will achieve.  Every time I have a target or goal written down, I stay focused on doing what it takes to make it become a reality. Take a look at these “ANTI-Resolutions,” and decide what you want to resolve to do in the coming year:

1. Spend Less Time with Family and Friends

I know it’s easier to do what you’ve always done and hope things get better. So continue to spend less time with your family and friends and more time at the office.  Continue to try to do everything yourself at work, stop delegating, make every decision and stay at work late so you miss your son’s football game. Continue to operate without a strong management team that’s empowered to make decisions without your approval. This guarantees you don’t have time to buy your spouse flowers on your anniversary. I know you have a legitimate excuse for spending less time with your family and friends. You are waiting for your workload to slow down, or you are waiting until you pick up more work-then you promise to spend more time with your family and friends.

This popular resolution is made by 50 percent of people every year. But most never achieve it. Why? They don’t make their dreams specific and write them down. To achieve your goal of spending more time with loved ones, you must make an actual commitment, and write it in your calendar six months in advance with permanent ink. A specific action to ensure success is to buy tickets. Buy tickets to your local professional football or baseball team for the season and commit to take your family and friends to the games. Join a private golf or tennis club and commit to play every week with your spouse, children or friends. Get tickets to the symphony and commit to take your spouse to dinner and the concert.

2. Stop Your Fitness Program

After all, too much exercise can be bad for your health. Plus, if you don’t workout today, you’ll be more rested tomorrow and then can workout even harder. Working out also reduces your ability to be at work more hours, take on more responsibilities and make more money! So, when you finally make enough money, then you can afford to buy some workout clothes, join a gym and get on a program.

I belong to a country club that has a great health club and workout facility. When I go there early, I always see several very successful business owners working out. How do they make time to exercise? They have determined that fitness benefits their performance at work and home. After their workouts, they go to the office around 8 am or 9 am. You could never do that, right? Why? Commitment to your health is second to being the first to arrive at the office to get everyone scheduled for the day. Is the health of your company dependent on you getting to work first and leaving last? I guarantee your company could live without you for an hour or two every morning while you exercise.

Regular exercise has been associated with more health and lifestyle benefits than anything else, except air! It reduces the risk of cancer, increases longevity, helps achieve and maintain weight loss, enhances mood, lowers blood pressure and even improves arthritis. In short, exercise keeps you healthy, gives you a positive attitude and makes you feel better so you can be more productive. Even Presidents Obama has enough time to workout every day. What’s your excuse? Is your daily life busier and are your business commitments more intense than the President of the United States?

What about the fitness of your company as well? Look at your business fitness goals for the next twelve months. Think about your future, and imagine what you want to be different or better one year from now. Consider these areas you may want to improve:

• Customers
• Personnel
• Management Team
• Training
• Quality Workmanship        
• Service
• Scheduling                    
• Sales
• Marketing                    
• Estimating
• Engineering              
• Technology
• Subcontractors              
• Suppliers
• Job Profit                      
• Productivity
• Company Profit          
• Company Equity
• Reduce Company Debt      
• Financial Systems
• Operational Systems          
• Field Systems
• Project Management            
• Equipment
• Banking                      
• Bonding
• Insurance                          
• Your Paycheck
• Investments                      
• Time Off
• Fun                                  
• Other

As you consider each business fitness area above, think about what is working well and what needs improvement. For example:

• – Do you have a customer you want to fire?
• – Where are you wasting money?
• – How can you be more efficient?
• – What improvement areas are needed with your staff?
• – Do you have a void in your management team?
• – Do you need to develop a better banking relationship?
• – Is there a faster way to complete your projects?
• – What can you delegate?
• – How many hours do you want to work?
• – How much money do you want to make?
• – Do you want to seek investment opportunities?
• – What should you stop doing?
• – What should you start doing differently?

3. Gain 175 Pounds

After all, skinny kids look worse than heavy ones. Over 66 percent of adult Americans are considered overweight by various studies. So it’s not surprising to find that weight loss is one of the most popular New Year’s resolutions. Setting reasonable goals and staying focused are important factors in sticking with a weight loss program. My problem is that I keep forgetting I gave up sweets for 2009. So when I’m out to dinner with friends and they order dessert, I don’t want to make them feel bad by turning down dessert as well.

In your business, where should you add some weight to lessen your load? Perhaps you need to add a professional office manager, accounting manager, project manager, estimator or field superintendent. When you add a real professional who can help take some of your workload, you’ll be able to focus on the priorities that will increase your sales and improve your bottom line. Bite the bullet, and find the best manager available to help you.

4. Spend More Than You Make

Living way beyond your means is the new norm in business and personal life. The younger generation is entitled to have it all before they earn it. Who could imagine living without the latest iPhone, laptop or new car. The point is to have enough income so you can buy a bigger house, drive a faster car and own a bigger boat or motor home. You also must eat out every night and rent a cool apartment in the hippest part of town. After all, a dollar borrowed spends the same as a dollar earned!

In your business, if you can’t afford a new backhoe, you lease one or two or a whole fleet. And this will force you to hire a mechanic, buy a service vehicle and rent a bigger yard to house all of your equipment. This way you’ll have to work harder to make the payments and cover your monthly overhead if work doesn’t come in as expected. And the new economic stimulus will hopefully provide enough opportunities for you to keep your fleet working at least some of the time! Investments, getting out of debt and a savings account-who needs them? You instead wait until you can afford to save and invest.

One positive New Year’s resolution is to get a handle on your personal and business finances. As you have heard me say many times, you must know your numbers to grow your business and make a profit. Many years ago, I made a resolution to live the GOOD life (Get Out Of Debt) When your debt is shrinking, your savings is growing and your investments pay the bills every month, you can make good decisions about your future. When you are strapped for money, you make desperate decisions and often poor choices to keep afloat.

5. Get Completely Stressed and Out of Control

Stress is a good thing to have. When you’re stressed, you wake up at night and make those valuable lists that help your business and personal life become better. Stress helps you multitask and never be in control. Besides, if you get in control, you can’t get enough things done in a day. Instead you sweat the small things, take care of every detail yourself and worry about all those little things you don’t have control over.

In business, only a few things are worth stressing over. What are your top three priorities for your company? I suggest the only things business owners need to stress about are sales, revenue and customers. When you have enough sales and customers, the rest can sort itself out with good systems and people. How many hours will you dedicate to your top three priorities over the next year instead of spending your time being stressed?

6. Keep Doing What You’ve Always Done!

When you learn new ideas, you don’t have enough time to do all the things you’ve learned. So not learning is a great way to get by in life. Read fewer books and stop trying to improve. Besides, too much learning can really wreck your head. I suggest you watch more television as an alternative solution to your predicament.

While many people use the New Year as an incentive to start new initiatives, most are not equipped to actually make them happen. People who don’t commit to written resolutions or goals, continue doing things the same way. They get trapped in what I call the “uncomfortable” zone. They live with continuous dull pain, stress and discomfort rather than doing something new, exciting or different.  People get used to their situation and stop trying to better themselves. They make excuses like: “I don’t have time right now to make changes;” “I’ll start in a few months;” “I’ll wait until after the elections;” “I’d better not do anything different now until the economy gets better” or “I don’t have enough resources to try new things.” You can find the time to achieve your goals. What do you want, dull pain or positive results?

Rate each area you identified as your resolution on a priority scale. Rank the top priorities an “A,” the next level priorities a “B” and the least priority items a “C.” Now, rank each category from the most important priority to the least important in descending order. Your ultimate challenge is to identify three or four areas you want to focus your energy on over the next year. Any more targets or goals are what I call “goal overload!”

Write It Down Now!

Now for the fun part. Write down your New Year’s resolutions for the next year. First, write down the one HUGE thing you want to accomplish this coming year. Next, write down three goals you want to achieve in the next twelve months and how to achieve them. Be sure to be specific and make your targets measurable. For example, a target to add more customers is not a goal. A goal to add five new customers averaging $100,000 per year each in contracts is a clear target. Next, give each goal a deadline. For example, “We will add one new customer every two months for the next ten months starting in January.

• My Huge Target:_____________________________________

• Goal No. 1:_____________________________________

• Goal No. 2:_____________________________________

• Goal No. 3:_____________________________________

Keep your goals in front of you so you can refer to them often. Post them on your office wall for all to see. Also, put them in your planner and another copy in your wallet where you can look at them daily. When you see targets in writing, you stay focused and constantly think of action plans and steps to achieve what you want. When you don’t have written targets, you tend to go with the flow and let non-important activities become your priority and fill your day. By using the year-end as a trigger to write out your goals and identify New Year’s resolutions, your future will become what you want it to be. Don’t wait another year to identify what you want. The clock is ticking!

Construction Business Owner, December 2009