To scale your Construction Consulting business you want to focus on the following:
Eliminating, Automating and Delegating.
Eliminate what doesn't provide value to your customers,
Automate whatever might be done by a tool,
and Delegate whatever is left.
As for how to do that? keep reading!
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So you’re in the position where you want to grow your construction consulting business.
You want to create a lot more leverage. More freedom. More flexibility.
So much so that your business may run without your direct day-to-day involvement.
Construction Consultants might hold on to the stuff that they don’t need to for far too long as they think that they can do it better than anyone else -
And they might be right.
But if your goal is to scale your business and earn *more money*, then you have to let go of trying to be the best consultant in the world, and focus instead on EMPLOYING the best consultants in the world.
This is where you might start to enjoy a much more significant income - and in a way where you don’t have to spend as much time to gain that income.
So here are some best practices we want to share with you and hope you are granted the success to act upon what you learn!
- Step 1: List Out What YOU Don’t Need to Do
The first thing that you want to do here is to look at what *you* don’t need to do.
You want to go and list out everything that you do, from start to finish, in all aspects of your business.
Especially in project delivery, but also marketing, administration - everything.
Once you’ve listed it out, you want to identify the areas that you don’t need to be directly involved in.
You want to go through this list and be honest with yourself and ask: what areas do I really need to be involved in?
What are the highest value areas that require my knowledge and my expertise?
What are all the other areas that somebody else could assist with?
What you might well find is that you can actually identify people who are just as good as you are — who bring just as much to the table and get stuff done for you a lot faster — and it doesn’t cost that much to do it.
Step 2: Find Contractors for Your Consulting Business
Now what you want to do is look for those people. You want to find contractors.
No, not construction contractors - your own contractors!
Don’t go out and hire full-time people. You don’t need to.
You may well have found a whole bunch of different things that you don’t need to be doing, start to give these tasks to contractors.
Bring these people in to do specific tasks. Just focus on your one area of expertise, everything else around you want to get off your plate.
As an example, it might be formatting presentations.
It might be doing some direct outreach to people. It might be administration, or bookkeeping, research - so many things that you don’t need to be doing yourself that don't need you.
Get them over to somebody else.
Step 3: Build Your Consulting Team
The third thing that you then want to start to implement is building your bench before you need it.
And that’s the point here: do this before you need it.
A lot of consultants experience that they hesitate to go after larger projects and engagements because they feel they can’t handle them.
But it’s a catch 22: they can’t handle it because they don’t have the resources to be able to deliver or to successfully complete that project.
Seek a way around this is by building your bench now.
Find people who are able to help you to take on these different aspects, especially when it comes to project delivery.
And then when you have them, you might feel much more confident to go out and win those larger projects.
You want to know that you have the ability to deliver them now you have the bench.
The other thing too is that you don’t want to wait because people that can help you might not be available when you need them on a pinch.
You want to start to cultivate relationships with multiple people who could help you in different areas.
If one isn’t available when you need them, have two or three others that may also help you. Work on building your bench before you need it.
Step 4: Productize Your Consulting Offers
Number four is to start to productize your offers.
Identify all the different elements within your business and within your service delivery where you might create better processes and systems around them - where you might remove things that really don’t need to be there that might take time.
Then, hone in and package the elements that provide the greatest result and outcome for the buyer.
The more that you can work towards productizing your offerings, the greater leverage that you’ll be able to create.
You’ll be able to create more systems and processes around them.
You’ll be able to bring people in. They will know exactly what they need to do.
The opposite of productizing your offerings is customization.
If you’re doing a lot of customization, then it means you’re always recreating new stuff. This means it’s harder to train people, which means there are fewer processes and fewer systems.
Think about this as you having to start from the bottom of the S-Curve, over and over again.
Continually having to overcome hours of customizing and tailoring, instead of focusing on expanding your clientele to benefit more people in total.
It is much more difficult to scale a business around that because the only way to handle more customization is to bring in more people, more resources, and more infrastructure.
This is not the type of model you want to be building if you care about growing your business.
Think about it like this, focus on the 20% of your work which provides your clients which 80% of the results.
Then do this for more people.
When you are spending time on customization and providing that 20% benefit to one business... you should be providing the 80% to other businesses.
In doing this we are looking to provide as much value as possible to our clients and in doing this expecting more value to come to use in return (*money*).
Scale Your Construction Consulting Business The Right Way
To recap, the four steps for you to go through to scale your consulting business:
#1 - Find out what you don’t need to be doing.
#2 - Eliminate, Automate, Delegate.
#3 - Build your team ("delegates") before you need them.
#4 - Compact and focus on scaling the 80% of the value that comes from the least effort.
Thanks a lot for reading, everyone and take care,
Niall
The Project Cracker Team
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