The Foundation Every Trades Business Needs – Business Systems in Edmonton

Cash flow that never quite works. A line of credit doing the job a bank balance should be doing. Days that are full of putting out fires and empty of anything that moves the business forward.

In this conversation with Trevor, Bruce Baker of The Business Builders by Workplaces explains why time and money are resources rather than problems, what a business system actually is, and how one Edmonton construction company went from stuck at $800,000 a year to scaling, starting with a to-do list of 265 items.

Who this is for

Grow, or rescue

Trevor: What types of businesses do you serve?

Bruce: We are focused on trades, and in Edmonton that is obvious. Trades is the thing here. These are the people who are the backbone of our economy.

It comes down to two groups. First, owners who want to grow. I am trying to get to the next level, and no matter how hard I try I can never reach that point where the pendulum swings in my favour. In their favour means they are not working as a slave to the business. The business system works by itself and returns the investment to them. They have hit a plateau and do not know how to take the next step.

Then there is the rescue side. I have been working at this, things are not getting better. I was excited when I started a couple of years ago and the business just is not moving forward. I have a lot of debt to deal with, and frankly I am not living any more. I am miserable in this. But I do not want to lose what I have created, and I know if I do not do something it will be the end of the business.

We have been business builders ourselves. We have owned businesses, started them, sold them. One common theme is that all of us work extremely hard to build what we have and we are proud of it. Sometimes that puts us in a mode of, no one can help me, I know what I am doing, nobody is going to make this better other than me. We are a proud bunch.

Where the work starts

Non-negotiable rules, and why every business at the same stage hits the same wall

Bruce: It depends on the growth stage they are in. Each stage demands certain things, and we call those the non-negotiable rules. Regardless of the industry, every phase of growth carries exactly the same challenges. I want to emphasise exactly.

That is counterintuitive, and it raises some blood pressure. Bruce, you do not know my business, you cannot tell me that. We are not saying your business is not unique. Every business is unique, because it is a by-product of the person, and all of us are unique. What we are saying is that after many years of research it is a fact that these things, the non-negotiables and the challenges owners experience, arrive like clockwork.

I have always said building a business is easy, and growing a business is easy, until you add a human. And what people do not realize is that the first human you add is yourself, as the owner. You are the first and the last employee.

So we start with the non-negotiables, the basic fundamentals. If you want to grow, or your business is in trouble and you want out of it, without those fundamentals we cannot move forward. I know it is tempting to want to fix this and fix that. I have a client who gets excited when I offer a solution and then jumps from one thing to another. We are a very distracted society. Everything starts with the foundation.

The stages of growth framework is the work of The ReWild Group, based on the original research of James Fischer. Bruce applies it as a Certified Organizational ReWilding Adviser (CORA).

What actually makes an owner pick up the phone

Time and money are symptoms, not problems

Bruce: It always starts with two things, time and money, and in our world that is profitability. When people hear profitability they picture a cushion of cash getting bigger. It is not really that.

The first pain points sound like this. My cash flow, or the timing of my cash flow. I am living on my line of credit. I do not know how I am dealing with payroll next week. I am maxed out on credit cards at nineteen percent, over and over again. That is half the equation.

The other half is time. I do not have time for anything any more. All I have time for is putting out fires. I cannot find time to think about my business or grow it.

What both have in common is that they are not the problems. They are the symptoms. There is a reason cash is a problem. There is a reason you have no time to think. Recently a client told me his marriage was in trouble and they were considering separating, because the business had taken everything from his family. That is a symptom too.

Time and money are resources. They are not the problems. But if you do not have the time and you do not have the money, you cannot build the business. So after we talk about time and money, we ask what makes a business predictable and consistent. The answer is systems and people. Then we go deeper into the people dynamic, starting with the owner, then employees, customers and vendors, and into what the systems look like.

Consistently we find money is an issue and time is an issue, but they are not the fix. Then we find the systems are not there. And you are saying on a regular basis that you cannot find good help these days, that this generation or that generation is not working out, that you cannot find the right customers, that people are making your life miserable. It all goes back to the symptom that is preventing you from identifying the actual problem.

What a business system actually is

Input, throughput, output, and why predictability is the point

Trevor: Can you give some examples of systems you help create or fix?

Bruce: First we should define what a system is, because a lot of people talk about systems without understanding what it means. What we want in a business is repeatability. A business is a system, and a system is input, throughput, output. You fill the tank with gas, the gas hits a spark plug, the engine works and produces torque. That is a system in theory.

A system in a business does exactly that without requiring you, the owner, to do it. You may delegate it to an employee, but the system exists to create consistency while you are not there.

Every business owner, every human being, wants one thing. As much control as they need. I cannot see round the corner, but I need an idea of what to expect so I can plan for it. My marketing is not working well right now. I need to understand the connection between what I do and what the outcome is, and whether I can measure it. Not because measuring guarantees better marketing, but because it tells you what needs doing to give yourself a far better chance.

A system is there to create predictability. Business is a practice. It is not a science and it is not an art, it is a practice. The more data you have, the more predictability you have, and the data comes from how your system is working and what it is telling you.

An Edmonton construction company, and 265 to-dos

Peeling the onion, one layer at a time

Trevor: Can you give an example of somebody you worked with locally?

Bruce: A construction company. About a year or two into it when we started, revenue around seven to eight hundred thousand a year, two or three employees. The owner had a great vision, he wanted to scale. And it had stayed exactly like that, going nowhere.

The first place we started was the owner’s time, and getting him to understand why time matters and why time can also be a complete illusion. The to-do list was what was bogging him down. I remember counting 265 to-dos on his list. What does that do to a person? It paralyzes them.

So the first work was on his mindset and on understanding what his business was actually demanding of him. We got the list down to thirty or forty, which was great. That opened his mind to what he could automate and what he could build a system for, so he did not have to do it and could focus elsewhere.

Once he could delegate those tasks, it opened another question. I do not have someone to do that. Which begs, maybe I need someone to do that. And like any good owner, well, how much will that cost me? Which leads to the financial system. Do you know how hiring someone will affect your cash reserve over the next six months? It will cost me six or seven thousand a month, and I do not know if I can accommodate that.

Fine. If that is what your business now demands, it means you have to scale up and bring in more volume. Well, how do I do that? Now we are talking about a marketing system. He had never marketed. He was in the neighbourhood association, he would put up a post, get a couple of basements, and off he went. Now we are asking what your marketing system looks like. Marketing takes time to come to fruition, so we plan for at least a six month burn. Then once it comes online and you scale to a certain number of new jobs, theoretically that puts a known amount on your top line.

You will notice the questions go in levels. It is like peeling an onion. We start with the person. What do your personal systems look like? Do you have any that get your mind into the game? Then, with your mind open and less stressed, what do you actually want for the business that you can achieve? Then what has to go in place to achieve it. Then, once you see a result, we measure it, so we know what to repeat and what not to do.

Who we work with inside the company

Bruce: It always starts with the founder, because the founder is the author of everything that happens in the business. When you look at business results, financial or systems or people, they are a by-product of the founder’s state and where they are at. So we start there. The founder then provides the bridge to the team, and we work with the team because that is the direct connection to everything else. If it is a smaller business without much of a team, it depends, but that is where we start.