Of course, it would, how could it not?

Your business would probably be more profitable, less stressful, would run more smoothly and you’d be less tired and more able to have time for yourself, wouldn’t you?

But it’s not that easy. You didn’t learn business when you learned your trade. You only started learning business when you started your business and you’ve been more-or-less winging it ever since.

Nobody showed you how to price jobs properly, making sure your costs are all covered and you make money on every job – you sort of picked it up as you went along.

• Marketing was a mystery (maybe it still is) – you found work by word of mouth, mostly or some good relationships.
  Sales is, perhaps, mostly providing a quote when your customer asks you to – and sending it over by email (and that’s kind of it)
• Maybe your profitability is mostly something you stay on top of by looking in your bank account and your P&L report is useful more at tax time than it is as a tool for running your business.
• People management is hard – good tradespeople are hard to find and keep and harder still to motivate.=
  

And you don’t have time to learn all this business stuff because you’re busy running around like a mad thing keeping it all together (making sure jobs run smoothly, quality stays high and all that other necessary stuff).

Business IS hard if you don’t know how to do it (like anything) and it’s difficult to know what you don’t know.

Pricing jobs really is an inexact science – you’re basically guessing how long it will take and how much stuff you’ll use based on scant information. Too expensive and you won’t win the job, too cheap and you’ll wish you hadn’t. And when your customer says “You’re too expensive” it’s hard to know if they are being honest or not, if the other quote includes the same stuff or if you’ve got something wrong in yours, isn’t it?

Your estimating system isn’t working properly.

When you submit your quote and all you get back is silence, you know you’ve wasted the time you spent on the quote and you’re left wondering what you could have done better.

Your sales machine isn’t working like it should.

Sometimes leads dry up and you find yourself saying “it’s quiet at the moment” or you miss out on a big job you thought you were sure to win and you’re left with your team twiddling their thumbs (on full pay).

Your marketing isn’t doing its job properly.

If your margins are not big enough to pay for everything and sustain your business and cover the risks and your (growing) overheads, then you’ll find cash getting tighter and profits shrinking as you try to grow. (Skinny margins are the biggest killer of a growing trade business).

Not knowing how to do this stuff properly or not having the time to learn it and implement it into your business is holding you back, stopping your business from being where it could be. It’s making it hard to grow and it’s costing you opportunities for success (sorry).

It’s not all bad news though – the good news is that you CAN learn this stuff, there aren’t really any secrets to business. Those successful tradies you see around the place learned how to do it and focused on doing the work that grew their business and you can too. And most of those big names started out like you – small and with no business training. (In fact, you’re probably better at business than you think you are – you’ve got this far, after all).

The growth path of most trade businesses and building businesses is similar. At first, you grow by doing good work and your primary focus is on finding work and making sure you do it well, keep your customers happy, and build your reputation (and rightly so).

As your business grows, though, your focus needs to shift. It’s still important to find work but your focus moves from doing it yourself to building systems so other people can do it to the same standard. As you hire people, you need to look after them, now you start to grow infrastructure and overheads so money starts to become more important. All this extra work takes time and effort and most tradies deal with it by working harder and doing more hours as their business grows.

Fair enough, it works – to an extent. But there comes a point where it stops working and your growth stalls or you start to drop balls and the feeling of “why isn’t it working” creeps up on you.

Keeping your head down and working hard, on the tools or in the guts of your business is not going to help you build the business you want – you need systems and the knowledge of business so you can build them right and so they work.

Surprise! I can help (no shit, I’ve paid for this ad). I’ve built a coaching program for trades and builders with TRAINING so you learn business and COACHING so you put what you learn into practice in your business. It’s specifically for trades and building businesses, not general advice that you have to adapt to your business.

• You’ll learn how to do business better AND make your business better – you’ll get more confident as a business person (as you learn business and gain the confidence from realising you know this stuff now).
• You’ll learn how to do marketing properly so you’ll always have work – leads will come in in a steady flow
  You’ll learn how to turn your natural sales ability into an asset so you win more jobs at better margins (without being a douche or ripping people off, that’s not what this is about).
• You’ll build systems so the work gets done to standard and on-time and on-budget by your people and without you having to be there so much of the time.
• You’ll understand your money, profitability and your P&L report and you’ll make decent margins – enough to run your business sustainably and leave you a profit at the end of the day.
• You’ll know what’s fair to charge and how to defend your prices when challenged.
• You’ll hire good people and you’ll keep them because they like working with you and they want to help build your business.

This stuff works. It’s easy to understand and simple to implement (note: I didn’t say it’s easy to implement – there’s work involved, I’m not pretending there isn’t. But it’s absolutely do-able).

Big businesses send their managers to business schools and on training courses so they learn this stuff (in my corporate career I was sent on numerous courses to learn marketing, sales, strategy, leadership and coaching). Small businesses like yours don’t and this is why I built the Tradies Toolbox Coaching Program – I saw my tradie mates winging it in business and I figured I could build a business helping them build theirs (and stop being a suit – I didn’t much like being a suit).

This is business training built for tradies and builders. It’s simplified, it’s in bite-sized chunks and it focuses on what’s important for businesses like yours. I don’t have secrets to reveal or a 12-step exact blueprint or anything like that (because why would I?) but I do have training and coaching that will make you a better business person – more confident, wealthier and with more time for yourself and your family.

If this is resonating with you – if you want to get better at business and feel confident as a business person – why don’t you look into it further?

Click the link at the end of this post. It goes to a simple form where you can tell me a bit about your business and what’s going on for you. When you’ve completed it, I’ll send you a link to a short video that explains a bit more about my program and how it works. We’ll set up a quick call and decide if we both want to invest more time in this and, if we do, we’ll spend an hour on a Zoom call where we’ll discuss what I would be helping you do in your business if I was your business coach.

At the end of that call, we’re going to decide if we’re working together.

If this doesn’t sound like it’s for you, no worries. Please feel free to watch our training videos, attend our free webinars and download our guides – these are all designed to give you a kick along in your business so you can grow enough to consider investing in our program.

Get the survey now.