Running a small business is tough, even after years of development, even when you’ve got great people on your team. There are a lot of variables, and it seems like the work never ends. No matter the size of the company, I’ve heard many business leaders refer to their company as “a house of cards.” Essentially what they are saying is that their business is more fragile than most would think, and if a strong gust of wind came by it might come crashing down. It doesn’t take much to cause the owner a lot of stress. A truck breaks down. A key employee quits. A customer doesn’t pay their invoice. Any one of these on its own is manageable. Two or three at once, and you’re wondering if you’re going to make it through the month.
That feeling doesn’t go away when business picks up. In some ways, it gets worse.
We’ve just come through several major storms here in Manitoba, and the phones haven’t stopped ringing since. That seems like good news, on the surface. Busy is what we all want. But I’ve talked to enough contractors over the past few weeks to know that “busy” and “healthy” are not the same thing. A lot of businesses right now are busy in a way that’s pushing them past their actual capacity, and it doesn’t feel like opportunity. It feels like chaos.
Why Busy Doesn’t Mean Stable
A house of cards doesn’t fall over on a calm day. It falls over because something changes — more weight gets added, or the wind picks up — and the structure that was fine a moment ago suddenly isn’t.
Storm work does exactly that. It adds weight fast. Suddenly you need more crews than you have, more estimators to get through the leads, more admin hours to process the insurance claims. You need more days in the week, more hours in the day. Every part of the business that was just barely balanced before now has real load on it, and the cracks that were hidden start to show.
Managing Load and Capacity is one of the most difficulties things to do in any business, but when the demand skyrockets no one can keep up. You might be great at what you do when things are normal but no trade business I’ve ever seen has the systems in place to handle triple the leads, triple the crews, and triple the admin work all landing on your desk in the same month.
The Real Risk of a Storm Season
When it gets busy, we feel a huge pressure not to turn away work. We work longer hours, we pay out a lot of overtime, we try to handle as much as we can because we know what it is like to not have enough work coming in, and as professionals, we don’t like to disappoint people. Those aren’t the real risks. The real risk is that you take on more than your business can structurally support, and then something breaks that’s hard to put back together — a crew that burns out and quits, a cash flow gap because you’re paying for material and labour on jobs that haven’t been invoiced yet, reputation damage because you overpromise and can’t meet obligations, and mistakes that get made because everyone is stretched too thin to catch them.
None of that shows up on a slow day. It only shows up when the wind picks up. And right now, the wind is blowing hard on our industry.
The Key to it All
Respect the fact that you, your people, and your business have limits. So many businesses put themselves in danger because they try and take on more than they can handle. Business systems take time to develop, people take time to train, and growth costs cash. Yes, this is a time to test yourself and go hard. It is an opportunity to get a lot of work done, but be careful not to take on too much risk and create a threat. Risk is high when we push past our capability.
You Don’t Have to Figure This Out Alone
Here’s the thing about a house of cards — it’s a structure you built by yourself, card by card, and it’s understandable that you’d feel like you have to hold it up by yourself too. But that’s not actually true, and it’s one of the more damaging assumptions in this trade.
Most of the contractors who’ve been through a storm season before have run into the exact same problems you’re running into right now. These are common challenges, and there are ways other contractors have found to manage them.
This is a big part of why MECA exists. To help you run a better business and to connect you with people in this trade who have lived through exactly what you’re living through right now, and who are willing to tell you honestly what worked and what didn’t.
When contractors are connected to each other, the industry gets a lot more stable, and we have a better chance of handling the storms.
If this storm season has your business feeling more like chaos than opportunity, you’re not alone, and you don’t have to manage it alone either. There is a community available to you here at MECA. Let us help you find some stability while the wind is blowing.
– David Ehlers, MECA Executive Director