How Your Great Performance is Hurting You – Part 1

Your great performance culture may actually be preventing you from differentiating your roofing business in the marketplace.

By Greg Hayne

In today’s marketplace, contractors are looking for ways for differentiating themselves. Everybody says they want better quality work: work which has higher margins, lower hassle factor, or even better, both.

Have you heard the phrase: “When the only tool you have in your toolbox is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail?”

Before we begin, let’s make two assumptions: 1. Let’s assume you are a commercial roofing contractor who generates a good bit of your sales in a “bid centric” market.  By that I mean that most of your work comes from “bidding” work and getting it because you were the low bidder.  And, I am assuming you want that to change.

Great, but here is the thing.  If you are a competitive bidder and successful, you have had to learn how to take a low bid and turn it into an acceptable profit.  Which means you have had to learn how to run a project to be highly efficient, and probably pretty aggressive in how you go about running your projects.  You have to deal with incompetent GCs or building owners and if you let them, they will run all over you.

There is a part of this type of work which can easily become adversarial.  You have to learn to stand your ground to protect your margins.  You become highly efficient at doing what you need to do in order to maximize your profits on a job.  There is nothing wrong with any of this.  Indeed, most of it is essential for “great performance.”  As you get good at this and perfect it over time, you may build a culture to support all these behaviors.  That is also a good thing.

But this culture is often the thing that can become a massive impediment or road block to differentiating yourself in the marketplace.

In Part 2 we will explain how and why and what you can do about it.

The Hayne Coaching Group has an innovative and proven training, implementation and support program called “Creating Great Service” where we teach the best practices of the best service contractors in the country and then help our client roofers implement those best practices into their organization.  Click here for more on Creating Great Service.

We also offer facilitated peer groups for non-competing roofing contractors, including one with a focus on developing and growing commercial service departments.  Click here for more on our facilitated peer groups.