The right coach can turn a so-so team into a champion. But not just any coach. A football team, for example, needs a coach who knows the ins and outs of football specifically in order to provide the kind of direction that really makes a difference.
The same is true when it comes to providing financial management advice to members of the of the trenchless excavation industry. Companies in this sector need financial management support from people who know what the industry is all about.
This is where Business Development Resources can help. BDR specializes in providing financial management advice, education and support for contractors involved in trenchless excavation, pipe bursting and pipe lining. Given that many such companies are mom-and-pop operations that have built themselves from the ground up, BDR’s advisers have the expertise and knowhow to help them go from getting by to getting ahead.
FIRSTHAND EXPERIENCE
“BDR is a business coaching program,” says Jay Crowe, a BDR coach. “We’re here to help our clients learn the rules of the financial management game and execute it to their advantage. We work with our clients to scale in a profitable manner.”
Crowe has the right industry experience. He started a residential HVAC business in 2001 as a 50/50 owner with his father until selling the company to his brother in 2022.
“We bring a very unique and personal touch to our clients by knowing their business firsthand,” Crowe says. “You take me, for example. Not only was I an owner, but I very much came up through the field. I was a technician, an installer and a salesperson. This kind of personal know-how brings a lot of value to our clients.”
From the time that Crowe Heating & Air joined BDR’s Profit Coach program in 2014 until the 2022 sale, the business achieved 284% revenue growth under Crowe’s leadership. Given results such as these, it’s not surprising that Crowe is a strong believer in the BDR approach and decided to join the BDR team as a coach.
CREATING A ROADMAP
No matter what industry you work in, effective financial management is the backbone of any thriving business. It keeps the lights on and employees paid. But effective financial management doesn’t just happen. It requires the creation of a realistic and achievable financial plan to guide a business’ day-to-day activities, revenue and expense management as well as long-term direction.
Think of a financial plan as a road map. When a business has a road map, its managers and staff know where they’re going day to day. Such a plan provides a framework for making management and economic decisions because all can be aligned with the final destination of achieving stable, reliable profitability and cash flow.
A financial plan can also help a business set aside cash to get through shoulder and slow seasons, identify growth potential and investment opportunities and help maximize revenue opportunities through improved pricing strategies.
This is where a BDR coach like Crowe can make a difference.
“At BDR, we have a fantastic program we call Profit Launch where we go in and we take into account past records such as call counts and sales stats,” he says. “We take in personnel, we take in all the last two or three years’ information and then we look at what the future could hold, what improvements we can make and what it looks like that the business will do next year.”
So how does this work? According to BDR’s website, “Profit Launch is a three-day workshop that encompasses all departments of your company. Each day features main sessions focused on key areas of your business plan — from front-office and back-office operations to marketing, advertising, sales, service and leadership development. Throughout each day of business planning, after every major main session topic, you and your team will break out to start building the elements of your plan and goals for the following year. You won’t be going it alone though. BDR coaches will be with you every step of the way to help you stay on track with the plan and resolve roadblocks as they arise.”
THE ELEMENTS OF SUCCESS
As someone with years of experience in the contracting industry, Crowe says he knows a lot about the critical elements for deep business success.
Key among these is “being aware of your finances,” he says. “This is why bookkeeping is incredibly important. First and foremost, you need to know accurate numbers about your company — when you can grow and are you profitable? Second, the more you can measure your success financially through accurate bookkeeping, the bigger the opportunity is to identify areas to make improvements in. So for example in HVAC, if I’m departmentalizing my service and my installations, I can track my departments specifically to see where the problems are. Third, by being aware of how the business is financing equipment and handling it responsibly, you can manage the business so that services are affordable to clients and provide them using newer, better, more improved equipment.”
With this data in hand, a business has the information it needs to achieve the next critical element for business success — namely being able to balance revenues and expenses in a realistic manner so that consistent growth can be achieved over time.
“We can’t really grow unless we can afford to, right?” Crowe says. “If we’re more or less breaking even and not focusing on sustainable profitability, we won’t have the working capital to actually grow. And customers want you to be profitable so that your company will be around in five or 10 years to honor warranties you’ve agreed to on equipment and services.”
BDR coaches can help businesses achieve these goals. They can also help them look at existing expenses to find ways to bring them under control and make them more predictable.
“When a BDR coach works with a company, we review financial reporting, benchmarks and KPIs [key performance indicators],” Crowe says. “We know industry standards, so we can look at certain categories in your financials and your day-to-day operations to detect problems. We can also identify labor issues such as pay costs that are higher than industry averages. The coach can help the owner or manager find out what is causing that labor cost to be high. We then take all of this data along with the company’s other overheads and apply that to a pricing strategy. That’s how we come up with the rates they need to be charging to succeed.”
As for finding ways to make more money?
“What we do is we go in and take a valuation of your current revenue producers and see what we can do to get them to perform even better,” Crowe says. “Then we look at the market: What parts of the market do you already serve? Is there an untapped area of opportunity that you can take into consideration and expand into? All of this can help with growth.”
A final critical element of success is proper and adequate staffing.
“A lot of owners are wearing too many hats and they get exhausted and burned out,” Crowe says. “We identify positions that need to be filled by the right people, so that the owners don’t try to do more than they can to the detriment of the business.”
To learn more, go to bdrco.com.
