1961 – Building a Better Construction Business with Well Built Construction Consulting’s Chad Prinkey

0:05Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, influencers, influencers, and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt-in required where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments.

0:51Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for great guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. I'd love to have you.

1:05With us right now is Chad Prinke. Chad, you are the founder and CEO of Well-Built Construction Consulting. You're found on the web at wellbuiltconsulting.com. You are also the host of the Morning Huddle Construction Show. And congratulations, author of the new book, Well-Built, How the Top 2 % of Construction Contractors Create Superior Value Profits and Excellence. Chad, thank you so much for joining us. Josh, thank you so much. You just nailed all that stuff. There's a lot of words I'm realizing associated with introducing me. Well, listen, I'd love for you to kind of take it from there and give us a little bit more context about the work you do and the impact that you have in the world today.

1:48So I've been working with commercial construction companies for about 16 years now to I help them mostly to be great places to work that also can make a lot of money. Right. So the company that I started is really named after our clients. That's kind of the way I think about it. These are companies that the best way I can think to describe them is, you know, I've been so fortunate to work with some construction companies and not just not just construction contractors, but also service contractors, both of them. but that are just extraordinarily well-built companies. And they inspired me to, you know, that's the name of the company, it's the name of the book.

2:34And, you know, they are driving superior value in their business. They are generating well above average profits. And people are happy there, both their customers and their employees. Wow. We'll share a little bit more about the connection between having a great workplace culture where people feel valued, rewarded, and how that then translates into the bottom line and greater profits. So, I mean, you know, there's there's been a lot of hard data on this pulled from sources like Gallup and studies that they've been able to put on among many, many others. But actively engaged employees, those employees that truly love what they're doing and they feel like what they're doing matters.

3:24They give way more to the organization. And that, yeah, translates into into time, but it's also passion. It's energy. And it's the way they show up for each other. the way they show up for their customers. And in the construction industry in particular, Josh, it's a really, really tough space. There's a lot of contention. There's a lot of arguing with customers. There's a lot of high stress, high demand, low margin. It's a tough environment for people to find that spark and to be happy. And it has, unfortunately, extremely high turnover rates and a heck of a time attracting new talent. to the industry.

4:06Meanwhile, it doesn't have to be that way. It just doesn't have to be that way. And so what I've found is that the companies who've made the decision to be a great place to work, to be a positive atmosphere, they are able to pull that off. Now, there's some other things you have to do because all that takes money, but it can all be done. And really, it turns into a self-perpetuating cycle. Happy employees, happy customers, higher profits. Well, I'm really curious to get your take on, you know, kind of the big areas where, you know, if we're a leader within the construction space, what can we do that maybe our competition is not doing in terms of providing or creating a great place to work?

4:58I think, well, man, there's a lot of initiatives that I hear about. That's a big question. Yeah, well, I hear about them every day. And some of the initiatives that I hear about get me really excited. Like, man, I wonder. So like, but I rather than just mention like the latest one that got me excited, I'll go with some tried and true standards because, you know, the stuff that I know really does make an impact. You have to seek feedback from your employees. One of the simple tweaks that makes a huge difference is when companies implement an employee review process, right, which is a must. Now, how you do it and how you structure that.

5:35Some people do coaching rather than reviews. Some people do, you know, sort of these one-to-ones and it's exchange. All that stuff is viable. But when you roll out employee reviews, which is a must, you should also roll out the opportunity for the employee to review the organization and to review their supervisor and to give feedback about the company and their experience. And then you have to actually demonstrate that you're listening and, you know, share what initiatives you're undertaking as a company to be a better place for the employees to work by, you know, sharing out perhaps in a newsletter or perhaps in a quarterly company meeting or a town hall and sharing, you know, hey, this is some of the stuff that we're doing that we're listening to you.

6:17We've heard you loud and clear and we're going to enact this stuff. And these initiatives can range all over the place. Some companies are like, should we go to a flexible work schedule in the construction industry? And my answer is like, I don't know. It all depends on your culture. It depends on your location. I have clients that are in some geographic regions where nobody's asking for that. I have clients in other geographic regions that are pounding on the table and they all want to work from home. Everybody's different. But the key is listen and demonstrate that you're listening to employees.

6:50And again, I could keep going on that. But in the construction industry in particular, there is a, you know, most businesses are relatively small. Most construction companies are, you know, in the United States, the average construction company is like 15 people in the United States, right? Now, most of our clients are closer to 50 plus, right? But still in that range where they're these very small businesses and owners and leaders, you know, quote unquote, don't have time, that type of stuff. And that's a huge mistake. Can you give me an example? And if you want to name them, that's great. If you don't, that's great.

7:27But maybe an example of someone that you've seen or maybe that you've worked with that is doing really great things in regards to people leadership within their organization. And that is absolutely translated into lots of benefits. Yeah, yeah. There are. So I'm very proud to say that a lot of our clients are doing that right now, and they range from the 50-employee general contractor that is ready to take that leap to becoming 150-employee general contractor someday to the 2 ,500-employee sub that's a national specialty contractor that I think do a great job of it. The real world examples are, so I'll share one with you specifically.

8:22There's a company general contractor in Texas and Louisiana called Block. And we've been working with Block for the past three years. And they went from having nobody in the HR capacity in their business. And they're about 100-employee company. They had nobody in an HR capacity in their business. They've added an amazing HR professional to their business. They had no real ongoing training and development. Now they've got an amazing onboarding program and professional development program. and a leadership development program and high potential program coaching and all kinds of stuff that they've, uh, set up.

9:12They listened to their employees and they changed their 401k. They changed their benefits plan. They, you know, just, they're, they're just really, um, all within reason, right? Like none of the stuff that they've done has been, um, you know, just whatever the employees are asking for, they just give it right. Like they're, they're listening, they're, they're considering it in the business plan. And they're, they're doing a wonderful job of communicating to the employees. They've rolled out a quarterly town hall. They, they have a newsletter that goes out. They have all kinds of awards and appreciation they've started, just all kinds of great stuff just in the past three years that I've been working with them.

9:50And they've, they, they, you know, over the course of that time have dramatically increased their employee engagement scores as evidence through internal surveys, surveys as well as Glassdoor surveys where their scores were quite low. And over the past three years, their scores have just gotten to be much higher than the industry average. And I think it's a direct reflection of the types of efforts that they're undertaking. And so that's one example of very many that I think we're, again, very proud to be a part of. I cannot imagine, this might be raw for someone listening. But I cannot imagine what you likely know around the cost of turnover.

10:35That's got to be a real sore spot, I think, for some companies. Yeah. Well, so I talk about it a lot in the book where when it comes to your people, in the construction industry, we have a really, really hard time attracting new people. And because there aren't these people coming in who are ready to go with amazing resumes in roles like estimating and project management, when you have a vacancy in those positions, the likelihood that you've got to go out and find somebody, the likelihood that in finding somebody will take weeks or months and longer to fill those positions. And then when you do fill those positions, do so kind of unsatisfactorily, it's pretty high.

11:23So you try to make it work. You really try to make it work. I think there's a really deep, so everybody talks about as a project manager, the cost to replace a project manager is probably 3x that person's salary. salary. I would argue that it's probably closer to five or six X. And I think the reason is that you have an amazing amount of retraining time for most of the people that you're going to be hiring. Really, really good project managers. They're gainfully employed. Really, really good estimators. They're gainfully employed. They're not looking for jobs. You're going to be hiring a recruiter.

11:59You're going to pay a recruiter 30,$40 ,000 to bring these people in. In addition to all of that, once you bring them in, the failure rate is extremely high. You're going to end up having to replace them again. It's, you really want to try to make it work with your existing team, which is, which is a case in point for becoming a training company, a company that grows our own as opposed to relies on the outside for sourcing candidates. Tell me about the book, Well Built. Congratulations on the launch this summer. How the top 2 % of construction contractors create superior value profits and excellence.

12:35Who needs to read this book? And what is the transformation that will take place if they take what you are advising here and teaching seriously? So I think anybody in the commercial construction industry would get value from reading the book, but the book is really written for the owners and executives of commercial construction companies. It's size agnostic. I think, depending on your organization, you may read the book and sort of, as you go through all of the different points that we lay out in the book, maybe kind of saying, hey, we're in control here. We totally have this covered. We're good here.

13:08But man, we found five or six things in the book that we really do need to improve. and some of you may open the book and be like, well, let's start at page one because we got a lot of work to do. Everybody should start at page one, by the way, just to double check. But yeah, so that's who the book is really written for. And the vision that I have for the book is to provide people with, the reason I say the top 2 % is I've had the opportunity to work with over 200 contractors in the past 16 years. At any point in time, we're working with about 50 to 70 as an organization. And I love all of them.

13:49They are lovely, lovely companies, lovely people. There are a small handful of them, however, that are teaching us more than we're teaching them. And I always kind of make a joke about that. They all know who they are, where I'm like, hey, can I write you a check for everything that you've taught me that I'm now able to, you know, put into play? And I think my experience is out of out of 50, it's usually about, you know, one out of those 50 contractors that is just playing the game. It's such a high level that I'm sitting there taking notes. And what this book does is it puts into words what I've been watching those companies do for the past 16 years.

14:36Would you share, Chad, what you do with Well-Built Consulting? What does engagement look like with you and your clients? Yeah, sure. So every engagement that we have, one of our formal engagements, there's a bunch of different ways to start with us, but I'll describe the way that our most successful clients engage with us, which is that they'll start by saying, will you come in and do a diagnostic and spend a couple of months getting to know our company? We get to know the company through the employees, through the customers, through market research and analysis, through our own observations. So some of this we're getting third party.

15:17Some of it we're actually immersing ourselves and watching what they're doing, right? Watching them have their internal meetings, watching them meet with their customers, watching them actually do work in their systems and using the tools that they do to do work. From that couple of months of immersion, we're able to kind of come out and say, okay, based on where you're trying to go, based on where ownership is trying to take the business, here's your biggest immediate problems. the things that are actually keeping you from being successful. Here's the next list, which is like the stuff that if we can work on, we're going to take you from where you are to where you're trying to go.

15:56And, uh, and we put that on a roadmap and we're their partner in execution. There are, there are different kinds of consulting firms. There, there are strategy firms and there are implementation firms. And, uh, and then there are the rare firm, which is both. And we, we really are a strategy and implementation firm, which as a side note, I'll tell you, is not easy to run. It makes it kind of complicated to run, but we're not just a strategy firm that says, here's your playbook. Good luck. We're not just an implementation firm that does coaching and training. And we're doing both at a very intense level.

16:34Your website, wellbuiltconsulting.com, to a friend that's listening and they're like, you know what? Maybe we could use some help. I'd love to have a conversation. What would they do? So we have an awesome team. They could reach out to just the contact page there and somebody amazing will get in touch with them. If they want to talk to me specifically as a starting point, I would welcome that as well. You could do that easily by just connecting with me on LinkedIn and sending me a direct message there. I'm pretty involved on LinkedIn. and you know I think engage with our stuff you know what I find Josh is that there's a lot of people who may be not ready to say let's have a meeting but maybe they should be signing up for our newsletter and checking out our philosophy on things which they can do on our website we have three every week we pump out three awesome articles and every month we do a roundup from the coolest stuff that we're seeing around the industry, including economic news and forecasting and things like that, that we, we kind of wrap up into a simple email.

17:39It is, uh, our open rates are ridiculous. Our open rates are like 45, 50 % on, on our newsletter because people like it, which, which does beg into question, like what's wrong with those 50 to 55 % of other people that aren't opening it. But, um, you know, the, uh, so the newsletters are great, great place. follow us on LinkedIn, follow me on LinkedIn, follow Matt Vertorama or John Livingston on LinkedIn. We have just really, really cool people who have a lot of good in their heart that they're trying to bring to the industry. And I would encourage you to connect with us and in some way participate, whether you want to hire us or not, we want to be your friend.

18:17To our friend that's listening, also, you can search for the Morning Huddle Construction Show in your podcast app and you can find it. But listen, Chad Brinke, founder, CEO of WellBuild Construction Consulting. Your new book is Well-Built, How the Top 2 % of Construction Contractors Create Superior Value, Profits, and Excellence. And your website is wellbuiltconsulting.com. Chad, thank you for joining us. Josh, thanks so much for having me.

18:48Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from.

19:29I've got a free video that you can watch right now with no opt-in or email required where I'm going to share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. Make sure to hit subscribe so that tomorrow morning, that's right, seven days a week, you are going to be inspired and motivated to succeed.

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