Grow Sustainably with Great Talent

The contractors who want to attract and retain the best talent must provide opportunities for their career growth and that comes from having a strategic growth plan.

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This means a tough and scary strategic leap of faith for many contractors who are already suffering from labor shortages at the craft and management levels.  

Leadership Tools: Which came first? Chicken or Egg compared to Talent or Growth. You can't grow sustainably without great talent.
  1. Design your future state 2X org chart for where you need to be 5 years out.  Look at it with the assumption that you will be able to find internal and external candidates to fill key roles as well as to build your field workforce if applicable.   
  2. Identify those who will likely be leaving on their own or with some help in the next 1-3 years and 4-7 years.  If you are a self-performing contractor include a percentage of your field workforce that you know will or needs to be turned over.
  3. Review your internal team for accelerated development opportunities to fill larger roles on the organizational structure while providing them the scaffolding of training, coaching and mentoring from both inside and outside the company.  
  4. Clearly identify your talent gaps that need to be filled roughly by year - both recruiting and training requirements.  
  5. Invest more aggressively than you ever have before in building your capabilities around the 9 Talent Processes.  You will close those gaps if you develop a plan and execute relentlessly towards your goal.



Executive Toughness and Focusing on Process
When leading any team to victory, you can’t underestimate the value of strategy or that burning desire to win built deeply within yourself and everyone else on the team. They only represent a small part of what it takes to win consistently.
Planning is Useless
Planning how to build a project and planning how to build a contracting business are VERY different and must be approached with a different mindset. When planning ‘how’ to build a project the ‘what’ is mostly known.
Cash Flow Myth 1 - Profitability Does Not Equal Cash Flow
Cash flow does not equal profitability. While in theory these two critical scoreboard metrics are disconnected in reality cash flow is a pretty reliable predictor of profitability both good and bad.