Building More: Finding Your Golf Ball in the Rough

Words: Corey Adams

It’s Saturday at first light, and the dew is still clinging to the blades when you set your Titleist on the tee. One swing, a clean-sounding thwack, and the ball arcs into that lavender dawn where all good shots go. Except this one starts to tail. Not a banana slice, just enough drift to flirt with the waist-high fescue skirting the fairway. You watch it land, disappear, and you feel the tiny pinch every golfer knows: that ball costs four bucks and a penalty stroke if you can’t find it. Now you’re knee-deep in wet grass, waving a seven iron like a machete, burning minutes and momentum while the group behind you sighs into their glove. One errant yard, one innocent distraction, and the round’s math changes.

Most construction businesses misplace profit in the same way. Somewhere in the weeds sits the thing that makes real money: commercial masonry packages, retrofit tuck-pointing, extended warranties, whatever your equivalent of a polished Pro V1 might be. At the launch of the company, it was clear, shiny, and easy to track. Then the grass got high. You added a service “because the GC asked.” Hired a niche crew “just in case.” Quoted a job five counties over because “it’d be cool to break into that market.” None of those moves is evil; they’re just rough. The ball vanishes, and now every swing after that is a search party.

The aggressive golfer inside every owner whispers that distance is king. Swing harder, open new lines, chase any client who answers the phone. It feels heroic until you realize each bold slash widens dispersion. Ten irons later, you’re chipping sideways just to get back where a conservative player already stands, middle of the short grass, never once having to ask, “Anybody see where that landed?” The scoreboard rarely shows style points, just strokes, or, in our world, profit.

Dial the metaphor tighter. The fairway is the tight corridor of work you execute better and faster than anyone else. The scope the crews can perform in their sleep, repeatable processes, and tolerances you can hit blindfolded. Whenever you’re in that space, margins behave. Material price pops? You know exactly how many cents per block you can absorb before the job tilts. Labor runs hot? Historic hours per thousand brick are tattooed on your bids; overruns flash red while there’s still time to correct. The customer experience hums, callbacks shrink, referrals pile up like tap-ins.

Step into the rough: an unfamiliar service, a customer segment you’ve never properly scoped, a geography that doubles drive time, and the lie changes. The brush hides rocks that chip blades and steals daylight while you figure out how to swing through the chaos. Costs drift north, and revenue sticks south. The penalty stroke is baked in before you send the next invoice.

So how do you stay in that ribbon of short grass? First, name the ball. Sounds obvious, but plenty of owners grow vague when pressed. Ask yourself, What line of work buys the trucks, pays the tuition, funds the winter carry? Not the job you talk about at holiday parties because it had a crane and a drone shot. The one that, if deleted from your books, vaporizes net income. That’s the ball. Everything else is either an accessory or a weed.

Next, mow the rough. Distractions thrive in tall grass: the “maybe someday” equipment lease, the estimating project that hijacks your A-team for a bid you’ll probably lose, the side hustle clogging your bonding capacity. Trim them back. A client who haggles over every invoice and never signs change orders on time? Rough. A supplier with a cheaper price but chronic late deliveries? Rough. When you prune that turf, two things happen. Crews track the ball with less effort, and the ball stops rolling into trouble in the first place.

Steady doesn’t mean timid; it means repeatable. Track your fairway percentage. In business terms, that’s the ratio of revenue from core services to total revenue. If the number slides below a benchmark you set, yellow flags go up. You’re flirting with tall grass. It doesn’t require a finance degree; a simple pie chart in the monthly review shows where dollars sprout and where they tangle. The visual keeps everyone honest. When a team lead pushes to add a “small drywall scope” because “we’re already mobilized,” the pie reminds them that drywall is that hay patch where balls vanish.

None of this argues against innovation. Golf has evolved enormously over the years. Graphite shafts, perimeter-weighted heads, and range-finding apps. The trick is testing innovations on the range, not during the club championship. Pilot a new service inside a tight beta: one foreman, one customer, one tiny quadrant of the schedule. Measure until the margins mimic your sweet-spot work. Only then bring it into the main bag. Innovation that sneaks straight into full production is a breakfast ball you never bothered to declare.

Now revisit that early-morning tee shot. Imagine choosing a three-wood instead of the driver. Still plenty of yardage, but controlled. The swing feels less heroic, yet the ball rewards you with a gentle hop down the middle, and there it sits, gleaming against the trimmed turf, waiting for wedge and putter. No search party, no penalty stroke. Translate the feeling to the next bid meeting. You pass on a flashy scope stuffed with unknowns, double down on the bread-and-butter package everyone in the room can price from muscle memory, and you watch as the project finishes exactly where the estimator plotted, on time, on margin, and visible from every vantage point. That’s what winning looks like: a ball in plain sight, a company in the fairway, and a scorecard that keeps getting lower round after round.

Are you playing a winning game, or just swinging for the fences and yelling FORE!!!

Building More: Finding Your Golf Ball in the Rough

About: Building More

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