Business Hard? Choose Your Hard

Is business feeling hard right now?

Maybe you’re seeing leads dry up.

Maybe you’re having a hard time building a good team.

It’s not your imagination, these things are hard.

Not to make light of these for real hard situations and challenges.

But have you ever considered that it’s a privilege to have these hard challenges?

If you have these challenges, it means that you…

• have a business doing something you love!
• are working to execute your dream and vision of your future.
• are providing a service that people need, want, and appreciate from you.
• are providing for not only yourself, but also your family, your employees and their families.

That is more than many folks can claim.

Navigating these challenges is actually a blessing.

Albeit, yes, sometimes there’s pain and stress involved.

It’s hard.

But you know what else is hard?

• working a 9-5 where you don’t get to prioritize your own schedule
• not getting to do something you love every day.
• no satisfaction in providing for others.

Which “hard” would you rather have?

I interact with a lot of contractors and business owners in my day-to-day life at SynkedUP.

This gives me a unique perspective from the outside looking in on the challenges that contractors run into.

A couple that are especially pernicious and create tripping points for contractors are:

• actually figuring out how much you need to charge to recover overhead and earn a net profit.
• building templates to standardize and speed up estimating.
• figuring out your own production rates. (Hint, it’s much easier than you think)
• getting job costing part of your daily life (instead of only when you have enough of willpower to get it done)

But unless you get these figured out, you will only ever own a job, not a business.

I have zero intent to throw shade.

As business owners, we all need this outside perspective to kick us into gear.

Name it and overcome it.

I seek out this perspective in my own role as CEO of SynkedUP.

I wanna know what issues software founders run into, so I can identify and overcome these tripping points.

So I go looking for people that can provide that perspective for me.

Yes, identifying and overcoming these tripping points is hard.

But so is letting these tripping points keep crippling you in perpetuity.

Choose your hard.

So, the next time the moment presents itself, are you going to:

• Keep guessing at your labor rates and markups? Or… actually take a minute to sit down and do the math to produce the truth?
• Take the time it takes to build an estimate, and instead of building that one estimate… build a template that will cut the time it takes to produce that estimate by 90% forever from this day on? Or… are you going to continue taking the long hard way, and manually crafting each and every estimate again and again?
• Keep on manually calculating quantities of labor and material for each estimate? Or… build a production rate and automate that calculation forever?
• Keep on letting the act of job costing every job fall off the edge of your plate? Or… Get it ingrained into your daily process forever. Automate it.

Both ways are hard….

Choose your hard.

Everything you want is on the other side of the work you are avoiding.

Choose wisely.

Weston Zimmerman

SynkedUP CEO and co-founder