Starfish Coaching · The Plan
For design and construction business owners, anywhere
Most advice on a construction business plan is written for someone about to open the doors and needs a document for the bank. If you have been trading for years, that is not your problem. Your problem is that the urgent keeps beating the important, and twelve months later the plan is exactly where it was. This guide is about a plan you can run the company on, and grow it with.
A start-up plan answers one question for one reader: should we lend this person money? A plan for an established construction company has a different job. It tells you and your managers what the company is doing this year, who owns each piece of it, and how you will know whether it is working.
That changes what goes in it. You do not need a market-size chapter or a five-year forecast built on guesses. You need an honest read of where the business stands, a small number of goals, a named owner for each, and a rhythm that keeps the plan in front of people. The rest of this page walks through what that looks like, whether you call yourself a general contractor, a builder, a specialty trade or a design and construction firm.
Before you write a goal, work out which stage the business is in, because the plan is different at each one.
Lots of time, no work. The owner is a good technician and a beginner at running a business, and is often not getting paid.
Lots of work, no time. Quality depends entirely on the owner, who wears every hat and is last to get paid.
A team has been built to keep up. The owner is learning to manage and develop people, is stressed by the overhead, and is torn between doing the work to protect quality and leaning on staff.
The team runs well on its own. The hats are delegated, systems and process hold the quality, the value of the business grows, and the owner is paid as a shareholder, not an employee.
If you already have a firm, you are most likely in Stressed or Steady. The plan below is built to move you from there toward the fourth stage, which almost nobody reaches by accident.
Every business runs on the same eight components. Most owners are strong in two or three, adequate in a few more, and quietly avoiding the rest, usually the ones that matter most for getting out of the day-to-day. A real plan has something to say about each of them. Here is what to put down for each one.
Decide whether this is an asset or a job. Write down what it would take for the company to exist without you, because every other part of the plan depends on that answer.
Put in writing why you are doing this, what you value, and where the company is going. It should be clear enough that you can make real decisions against it, such as which jobs to turn down.
Name who you serve, what makes you different, and the proven process you use to win the work. Add a ten-year target, a five-year picture and a one-year plan, so the year ahead points somewhere.
Hire against your vision and values, put the right people in the right seats, and draw an accountability chart for today and for where you are heading. The aim is to get hats off your head.
Run the business on numbers instead of emotion and instinct: margin by job, the cash cycle, working capital, and a scorecard where every person owns a number. If you are not sure what you keep from each job, start with the overhead and profit calculator.
Agree how problems get solved quickly and for good, with a weekly list of to-dos that actually close rather than a problem that comes back every month.
Document the core process for every department, along with the policies that let you step away. It does not need to be elegant. It needs to be written down so a new person can follow it.
Turn all of the above into yearly, quarterly and weekly goals. This is the component that produces the results, because it is where the other seven become things people do on Monday.
The free scorecard scores you on all eight, which is the quickest way to decide which part of your plan to write first.
You do not have to write all eight parts in one go. A sequence that suits an owner with a business to run at the same time looks like this.
Use the scorecard to score the eight parts, and find the stage you are in. If you want an outside reading rather than your own, that is what a Business Health Check is for.
A growth goal set without knowing your real margin is a guess. Work out what you keep from a job, what your overhead costs, and what you need to turn over to break even. The overhead and profit page shows how.
Write the plan for those first. For an owner stuck in the middle of the business, that is often People or Process, and sometimes Finances & Metrics. Fixing the right one first is worth more than a complete plan that nobody follows.
Set direction for the year, choose a small set of priorities for the next ninety days, and give every priority one owner and one date. Fewer goals, each with a name next to it, beat a long list.
Meet weekly to look at the numbers and solve the issues that came up. Review the quarter honestly every ninety days, and reset the year once a year. The rhythm matters more than the document.
The same pieces, applied to growth, are in our guide to how to grow a construction business.
Most owners do not fail because they do not know what to do. They fail because the urgent keeps beating the important. The Master Plan Program exists for that gap. Eric takes the high-level Roadmap from a Business Health Check and develops it into your Master Plan, owns it, and then runs it alongside you: a weekly management meeting he teaches and stays in, a monthly review of your numbers, quarterly ninety-day and annual planning, and a line to him between meetings. It is not a set number of sessions. If you do not call, things still happen.
It suits established owners with a team, who have a plan they cannot execute alone. Fees and terms are on the Master Plan page, and you can see how all the options compare on what a business coach costs. If you are not sure it is the right step, a free consultation is the place to find out, and Eric will tell you if it is not.
For a firm that is already running, it should cover eight things: why the business exists and where it is going, who you serve and how you win the work, who is on the team and who owns what, the numbers that show how you are doing, a way to deal with problems as they come up, the written process for how work gets done, and yearly, quarterly and weekly goals. A plan that stops at a mission statement and a budget usually sits in a drawer.
A start-up plan is written to persuade a lender or an investor, so it leans on market size and forecasts. A plan for a firm that is already trading is written to be used. It starts from what the company actually earns and keeps, names the bottleneck, and sets goals for the next year, the next ninety days and this week.
Short enough that you and your managers will re-read it. For a working firm, a plan that fits on a few pages and is reviewed every week and every quarter will do more than a long document that is read once. What matters is that every goal has an owner and a date.
Set the direction once a year, reset your priorities every ninety days, and check progress every week. Plans rarely fail when they are written. They fail a few months later, when everyone is busy and nobody has looked at them since.
The eight parts stay the same. What changes is the detail: a general contractor leans on subtrade management and job costing, a home builder on pipeline and sales, and a firm working project to project on how it keeps its best people between jobs. A project plan covers one job. A business plan covers the company that delivers every job.
Start by finding out where the business stands today. The free scorecard scores the eight parts in a few minutes and shows which ones are weakest. Then work on the weakest one first, rather than trying to write the whole plan in one sitting.
A coach can build it with you, but the plan only works if you own it. In the Master Plan Program, Eric takes the high-level Roadmap from a Business Health Check and develops it into the Master Plan, then stays involved through a weekly management meeting, a monthly review of the numbers and a quarterly planning session, so the plan keeps moving between conversations.
Score your business on the eight parts with the free scorecard, or talk it through with Eric first.
Eric Lee · Starfish Coaching · 1937 Triumph St, Vancouver BC V5L 1K6
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