Equipment World Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/565622
EquipmentWorld.com | September 2015 31 P roject referrals are like gold to a contractor. Who better than a satisfied customer to sell your capabilities to a new client? While no one can argue the benefit of word-of-mouth business, a paving company can only increase sales so far using this method before growth tapers off. "Businesses stop growing because contractors don't master the business activities they need to master at their current level, and they don't prepare for the new challenges they're going to meet at the next level," says Bill Silverman, owner of Springboard Business Coaching in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Silverman specializes in business coaching for contrac- tors and has advised several paving companies. Long-range planning Silverman focuses on creating basic five-year plans, in which he reviews several facets of a business and charts projected growth patterns. As he says, the exercise isn't an effort to try to become a "fortune teller" but rather the first step in figuring out how to plan for growth. These plans account for staff, management changes, equipment, and marketing plans. Then Sil- verman calculates the number of customers it would take to reach the forecast sales, saying it forces companies to look at, for example, their current marketing systems, then determine what they need to reach the target growth. "They then can turn the vision of today into a moving picture of the future," Silverman explains. "So they can say, 'Wow, when I'm a $2 million business I'm going to have 25 people and five crews. That's more than I can handle on my own. By the time I'm there, I'm going to need an operations head.'" Working off a five-year plan may seem daunting to someone who's never looked beyond the next six highway contractor | by Chris Hill | ChrisHill@randallreilly.com Long-term strategies and delegating responsibility lead to small paving company growth HOW TO GROW YOUR PAVING BUSINESS Growth for a paving company is all about a quality product, and Robert Smith Incorporated's Andrew Smith says the best way to do that is effective communication from top management all the way to employees in the field.