Why should anyone add a business coach to their team? For the same reason that you would have a sports coach.

- Improve the skills and knowledge to create the business edge.

- Strengthen your business through repeating exercises in areas of management reports, tracking and analyzing job costing and benchmarking your business to the Best of your industry.

- Focus on areas such as new services and products that will leave the competition in the dust.

- Create a play book with the strategic plan of your business.

- Train your team to become Lean using the techniques of Lean Manufacturing and Lean Construction and stay that way through rough and smooth times.

A good coach will keep you on track mastering your plan of attack and strengthening your business edge.

Job Costing Basics

Job costing starts with creating an accurate estimate regarding the labor, material, equipment costs and other job related costs. The more accurate the estimate, the higher percentage that the bid will be awarded and the job will be profitable. The way the job is executed and the conditions of the job can also all have a positive or an adverse affect on the outcome of the job.

By tracking job cost actual against the estimate of costs, principals can see what areas of the jobs came in ahead and what parts of the job had cost overruns. Only by analyzing these issues can we decide what were the details and the factors that contributed to the outcome of the job. Ideally a company wants to duplicate the victories and avoid the setbacks. Finding the real root cause of variances in a job by looking deeper into the process will help us. Top soil and sod installation could have looked bad on paper, the clay soil, the slope and the hard rains could that part of the job back, not the estimate nor the smart and hard work of everyone in the field.

Drilling down into Job Costing will help a company ask why. Analyzing and interpreting the discoveries and turning them into actionable steps, will be a tool that will help a company prosper.

Hint: Drill deeper into equipment, medical, fuel, small tools and paid time off.

The Profit and Loss statement is the most important navigational tool of the business. It is often not checked enough to keep the business on course for success. We plan to change that using the ProFound Impact Process to create a deeper understanding of the parts for everyone and reviewing the Profit and Loss statements on a regular monthly basis.

Consider the elements of a Profit and Loss for Contractors broken down into five elements, just like a human being:

Head = Sales Estimates and Client Selling
Upper Body =Cost of Goods for Heavy Lifting & Doing the Job
Waist = Gross Profit
Legs = Expenses Supporting the upper business portion.
Net Profit = Feet- The more we make the faster we can move.

Gross Profit = Sales   -   Cost of Goods

Net Profit = Gross Profit  -  Expenses