A builder friend and I were talking about this line from one of my posts; “If you want to be a tradesmen work for someone else, if you want to grow your business learn the office skills required and put your tool belt aside as soon as it is practical.” He said he knew a guy who was successfully working at his trade and running his business and, as he said it, I realized that over my forty-odd years as a tradesman/contractor, I had known a few people who had done both successfully. But the vast majority of the tradesmen/contractors I’ve known who were working forty-plus hour weeks in the field and doing office work evenings and weekends, went out of business (some several times) or existed on the edge of failure for years because they neglected their office work.
The guy my friend was talking about was strictly dividing field and office work: in the field four days per week and religiously taking Friday and part of Saturday to do his office work. My issue with this idea—and my personal experience—is that because field work is so immediate and demanding, because most of us shy away from learning office skills, and because the payoff from marketing, sales, management, bidding, accounting, and so on, is not as obvious, it takes uncommon discipline to consistently stop, week after week, to give office work its due.
Despite the outliers, most of those who
begin in a trade and open a business are better off learning the business
skills while working in the field, and then, when their office skills are good
and the business large enough to need them to come out of the field, that they are more likely to succeed long term if they put their tool belt down and focus on business. The Elements of Building and BUILDER
were written to help you do just that.
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The Elements of Building & BUILDER are available at Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, Ingram/Spark, Garrett Wade, and the National Building Museum Shop.
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