Masonry Magazine April 2009 Page. 27
If the Work Isn't There, it Just Isn't There
Are you seeing contractors pricing work so low that you are tempted to drop your drawers and prove you can do it just as cheap and still make money? Or, maybe you have thought to yourself, "Maybe these guys are not making any money, just robbing Peter to pay Paul." There comes a time when we have to face the fact that "If the work isn't there, it just isn't there."
From the time I was 9 years old until I was 18, I spent my summers working on a truck farm. After discovering there was very little money in crop farming, Mike Story, who was my boss at the time, went to work at a local plant. He put me in charge of the farm at age 14. One morning, he gave me a job, "Take three other helpers to pick the third picking of green beans." Now, if you have picked green beans before, you know that the first picking is pretty good, the second is worse, but the third is not even worth going after. As I recall, that was a bad year for crops, and Mike just wanted to get any harvest he could to make it better. So he said, "Go pick green beans." Although I knew there were no beans left to pick, I took my crew and went to the field. I worked as hard as I could all day with my crew of three and, amazingly, we picked eight bushels of beans. If this had been the first picking of good green beans, we could have picked 24 to 32 bushels. Anyway, when Mike came home and found we only picked 8 bushels of green beans, he jumped all over me about only having eight bushels picked. Being exhausted, and instead of telling him there just weren't any beans out there to pick, I told him to "Pick your own blanking beans," which was not the right thing for a 14-year-old kid to tell his boss. He fired me right on the spot. The next day, before I got in trouble from Dad, Mike called me back to work. When I got back, he sat me down and gave me a heart-to-heart talk. He said, "I better never tell him to pick his own 'blanking beans again. And, if there aren't any beans in the field, don't waste the whole crew's day trying to pick them. Find something else to do, or just go home so it doesn't cost us more for labor than we will yield out of the beans." He explained that we had $42 worth of beans picked, and he paid $60 to get them picked.
This experience early on in life has stuck with me for the last 30 years, and contracting is no different in this instance. I have contractors tell me daily that there isn't enough work out there. My advice to them is, "If there aren't any beans to pick, go home so you don't have more labor in picking the beans than you will get out of them." You may have 100 people working, but if there's no work, scale back to 50 until things pick up. Keep the top 50 producers, as it should be easier to make a profit with them, and cut 50 of the worst temporarily. This will relieve the pressure to find so much work, and you should get better money out of the jobs you do pick up. When the work isn't there, work smarter, and focus on earning a profit with the best producers you still have.
Damian Lang is a mason contractor in southeast Ohio who has three companies that do combined sales of $20 million. He is also the author of the book "Rewarding and Challenging Employees for Profits in Masonry." To order a copy of his book or to attend one of his seminars held specifically for mason contractors, call 800-344-7688.
Provided by Damian Lang, President of Lang Masonry Contractors, Inc., and EZ Great Corp.
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