The Construction Business Blueprint #024 - Busy Season Is Where Construction Businesses Break

You’ve got the mission. You know what you want. So why do you still drift?

It’s March. Busy season is back.

Quotes are flying out, old clients are reappearing, projects are stacking up… and this is exactly when most construction businesses start losing control.

In this episode, we break down why standards collapse when workload increases, and why busy season doesn’t build strong businesses, it exposes weak systems.

Because here’s the reality:

Most construction business owners don’t struggle when it’s quiet.

 They struggle when it’s busy.

When pressure hits, you don’t rise to your goals, you fall back to your defaults.

That looks like:

• Rushed quotes and shaved margins
• Variations not documented properly
• Job costing slipping behind
• Avoiding hard conversations
• Jumping back on the tools instead of leading
• Managing from memory instead of data

From the outside, both chaotic businesses and controlled businesses look “flat out.”

 But only one is building profit, control, and long-term growth.

We also break down:

• The illusion that busy equals success
• Why panic pricing in quiet months destroys profit later
• The difference between chaotic busy vs controlled busy
• Why real standards don’t flex under pressure
• The identity shift from tradesman to founder

March doesn’t create chaos, it exposes it.

The question is simple:
 Did you prepare for busy season… or are you about to survive it again?

In the next episode, we’ll break down exactly how to lock your standards in when workload doubles.

 If this already feels familiar, don’t wait until June to regret March.

Transcript

Busy Season Exposes Weakness

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So, welcome back to the construction business blueprint YouTube channel. The only channel where construction business owners can get more time, more profit, more control from the free advice on the exact frameworks that I give to my private clients every single day. It's March, it's busy season. The season is where standards die essentially. We've come off the back of Christmas there, where it was hectic right up to December. January and February, this year especially, maybe has seen a bit of a dip in pressure. It's got we've been comfortable, we'd be quiet, but March is generally where things really pick back up again and really start to build momentum, and we're right back again where we started. In this video, I'm going to answer why do construction businesses lose control the minute things pick up, when things get busy, even after promising yourself that this year will be different. During this video and on this episode, I want you to go away with the understanding of exactly what this busy season exposes and why standards that you try to set collapse under pressure or when things get really busy, but also how to stop repeating that. Okay, so we're not just going to talk at you here and tell you all the things you already know. We're going to actually talk about the systems, the processes, the framework to actually get you to avoid that position again. So let's just talk about this time of year, okay? March hits, the weather's starting to shift, inquiries are coming back in again, or maybe projects that were due to start because of the weather, and different things have maybe been pushed back. Whatever your scenario is, whatever position you are in business, old clients are reappearing, more quotes are starting to fly out the door, sites are starting to stack up, trying to chase subbies again to start works and whatever else. Okay, so whether you've been busy already or not, the point is that this time of year generally in our industry becomes kind of the busy season again. And the feeling is either one of two things relief where it's been quiet, and you're thinking, Fangly, this is us, we're busy again, or you're thinking to yourself, Oh my god, here we go again, things are gonna get busy again. Alright, so here's the truth busy season does not build strong businesses. Okay, so being busy does not build a business, busy actually exposes weak ones. And what I want you to really hear is this next part. Most construction business business owners and most construction businesses don't struggle when it's quiet. That may seem obvious. They struggle when it's busy, and again, that may seem obvious, but we're gonna get into the reason why. Quiet gives you space to plan, and often as well, I find the clients and other people I speak to, when they're in a position of a quiet period or a bit of calm period, their memory is sort of shortened or or calms down in terms of the pressure that they did face. You quickly forget how difficult things were when things were busy. When you're in the farm, when you're in the thick of it, it's easy to remember all the things that are causing you all the grief. But when it's quiet, you kind of forget about those things. It's not actually that bad, you know. It's not that's not really a big issue. We don't really need to invest in this or invest in that. Busy tests whether he actually did make those plans, whether you did put those things in place, because everything's crazy in the busy period, everything's a lot of pressure, everything's falling apart, then it gets calm, you quickly forget about those things, and you go, This isn't actually as bad as I thought, things are actually okay. Then the busy season starts again and all hell breaks loose. So the quiet period is the time, as we spoke about in the earlier videos, to put the plans in place. That is the time to take the time to work on the business and all those things, not take a holiday and take a rest period, although that's important, but take the time to actually work on the business. So this period of March and the seasons coming forward here are when I expose whether you did do that work during the quieter period or of maybe January or February. Let's actually talk about the illusion. I touched on it in the beginning, the illusion of being busy and be busy equal in success. Okay, because I always say this people were in this industry, people were being busy as a badge of honour. It's an often a conversation, the most frequent conversation that happens in our game how are you getting on? Oh, we're flat out, we're flat out. Okay, but what does that mean? Flat out, but busy fool or flat out making loads of profit, you know, really organized, we're growing month on month. You know, what is what does busy mean? The dangerous belief in this industry is that if we're busy, we're winning. Okay, we're busy, we're doing well. But being busy is not a metric. I've said it a thousand times. You've probably heard if you're a regular attendee to these these videos and these programs and my content, you'll hear me saying that all the time. Busy does not equal profit, busy does not equal control, busy does not equal structure, busy does not equal freedom or a quality of life. Busy can mean that you underpriced and now you need loads of volume to try and make up the cash flow or make up the finances in the bank because you said yes to everything that maybe you know you shouldn't have, you didn't protect your margins, you didn't know your true overhead, you didn't take the time to actually work those things out, and maybe you fill those gaps out of panic in a quiet period uh out of stress. So, like you you panic, you panic hard, you panic took on jobs because you've seen there was a quiet period. That's generally what happens, and that's that's being fuelled by emotion. So often when we do have a quiet period, we we jump to grab things quickly in a mode of panic. We need work, we need work, we need work, and you grab the things you know you shouldn't. And I've watched this for years. This this is coming from me and on the outside, looking in for a long, long time, me being in the thick of it as well, and noticing these traits myself, doing them myself, watching other people do it. What's frustrating is that January and January and February can be quiet periods, not for everybody, but for most, even this year, especially. I've noticed even a lot of the commercial guys saying things are quiet, you know, after Christmas, but here in March, projects are picking up again, things are happening. Whether that may, whether why that's the case or whatever else is a different story. But January and February are usually more quiet, either a soft start in the new year. We talked about that, we want to avoid those things, but that's generally what happens, and everybody will say during that time or in the new year, like I say, comes back into the new year in January. This is the year I'm gonna build the systems, this is the year I'm gonna raise the standards, this is the year I'm gonna stop firefighting. Then a period like now lands in March, and instead of executing the plan, you abandon it because it gets busy, pressure builds, and everything just falls apart. The reason for that is because pressure actually reveals the identity of you as a business owner and the business. So pressure actually reveals who you really are as a business owner and as a business. Like I always say, you do not rise to the level of your goals or your targets or ambitions, you follow the level of your systems or the pressure that you come under. So you follow your defaults essentially. So, what are your defaults? Your defaults are what's comfortable. So jumping back in and helping the lads on the tools, saying yes too quickly when a client calls and you go, you know, this year I'm not doing that, I'm not jumping to his tune, I'm not gonna jump in and change things just to suit him. But then you do. You know, sending quotes throughout the full cost breakdown, maybe you're busy again, you're sitting in the evening, and you're firing quotes out, and you're going, I just need to get the code out, I'll work it out after, I'll get it back in the long grass or whatever else. Avoiding hard conversations with staff could be another default. So a guy who keeps turning up late is maybe a bit toxic to the work environment. You're saying to yourself, I'm gonna have this conversation with him. This year this isn't happening, but here you're on March already, the conversation hasn't happened. Now you're busy, now you're screwed to lose him because you really need him, and there you go. That's falling back to a default. Delaying variations. So you said this year that, right, okay, I'm gonna be really strict on variations, I'm gonna get my variation template, I'm gonna record all the changes, I'm gonna speak to all the lads, make sure that doesn't happen because I'm losing money left, right, and centre on changes, variations, you know, maybe claiming stuff late as well, and just even reviewing your numbers, tracking and reviewing your numbers. That that's all well and good when when the pressure's not on, but when the pressure's on, those things that you may seem to be a nice to have, but they're not, they're absolutely essential, often fall away first. So you're telling yourself you review the numbers next week, but then next week never happens because it just gets busier and busier and busier. When the work increases, your brain goes into survival mode back to default mode, and that's where your standards again start to slip, not dramatically, but quietly, and that is the danger. These things don't just happen straight away, these things happen slowly but surely over time. Let's talk about where those standards die first. Okay, we've already touched on it there, but let's really break it down properly so that you can actually think about this in terms of your own business. Because again, that's always the goal here for you guys to be thinking about this in terms of your business in real life so you can go away and implement these things and think about these things personally and in terms of your business, not just on a general basis. So let's talk about, for example, pricing. When busy hits, quotes go out faster. If you're doing the quoting, you fire through them, you get them out the door, you stick a quick 20-30% markup on them, and you send them out and hope for the best. If you've got a team, maybe you're not taking the time to review that. Say you've got an estimating department there, somebody pricing the work, it's coming in and you're firing out. You're doing a quick scan and found it out. You'll tell yourself, I know roughly what this costs. You'll stop checking supplier fluctuations, you'll stop recalculating your labour properly. Maybe you've given guys a pay increase, maybe there's longer hours, maybe there's you know additional hours weekend work on it or something. You'll round up random numbers, their round number just to just to make it easier for yourself. Or sometimes again, what you can do because you've been quieter is you'll maybe shave margins off slightly just to secure work. So you maybe have a percentage, you'll know what it all costs, and you've maybe took a wee bit off out of fear of losing out on the job. That's a very common thing in this game, and you'll justify it with we'll make it up on the next job, or you know, this has got a good long contract, we'll make it back, or we'll get it back in the variations or stuff. There's money in it, and don't worry about it, it's fine. But that's how profit leaks. That's exactly how it happens. Not in big, big mistakes, you know, not in massively pricing a job, forgetting a whole floor out of something, or forgetting a you know, a subcontractor's quote altogether. It's in small compromises, repeated, compounding, like not you know, not calculating the overheads correctly, not checking the margins, not checking the pricing fluctuations on materials. Busy makes you reactive, all right. Being busy makes you just react to things, knee-jerk reactions, knee-jerk, you know, decisions, but that reactive that knee-jerk you know mode actually kills margins. That's what destroys the margins, that's what destroys cash flow and leaves you in a really sticky situation. Okay, so that's price. And what about say communication? Communication standards dropping. So we all know that communication is key in business, okay. Not just in the construction industry, but in general. When workload increases, naturally, communication drops. You know, you stop confirming changes and writing to clients, you'll rely on verbal agreements, you're taking phone calls, making decisions, maybe not following through on stuff, skip documenting changes on site because you're busy, you're maybe having to jump in so you're not doing the site audit report and send it to the client. You maybe have to go to another job or whatever else, you're just going to site, talking to the client, running on, you're not documenting progress, you're not checking for changes, you're not reviewing drawings, and you'll assume instead of clarifying essentially again those knee-jerk reactions to things. Those communication standards are key, and again, they won't always present themselves. So while you've got a short-term relief of I don't have time to do the site auto report, I don't have time to check the changes, don't have time to talk about the variations with the client in real time or whatever it may be, that won't present itself. That'll be a short-term relief now, but in three months' time, that'll start to show. So that's where I say about those quiet creeps of compromises, come back to bite you in the ass down the line. Three months later, you'll end up in a dispute with the client, you'll be in delay on the project, cash will be tight, and your stress will be through the roof. And it's because of those short-term reliefs that you compromised on and your standards that then come back to bite you in the ass. So it wasn't the job that caused it, it was the standard that you try to uphold slipped under pressure. And we talked about it there as well, and like it's all kind of works into financial communication, but even the reporting standards that we touched on, it's worth talking about that in more detail. You know, timesheets get messy from the lads, you're maybe chasing up lads for hours. You're not reviewing timesheets, job cost trackers fall behind because again, you're you're you're you're seeing them as a nice to have, you just need to get the job done. You stop reviewing your overheads weekly, so your pricing then starts to fall apart. Because I always say to my guys, always checking your overhead percentage, so it's job cost plus your overheads plus your margin, and that's how you price a job. But then, if you're not reviewing that overhead, maybe you've taken on a new premises, you've added a new van, you've taken on more tools or whatever it may be, you've added in an admin or a member of staff, you haven't changed your overhead percentage, you work on another overhead, profit's just leaking out, you know. So you start managing from memory instead of data. So everything we talk about inside the blueprint is measured on data, not emotion. But when you're busy, when you're reactive, when your standards drop, you're managing from memory, and and that's not data. So data is factual. Busy founders stop measuring. Strong founders, strong business owners, they double down on that. So even when times are busy, that is a non-negotiable, they don't let those things go. So even in a time of chaos, at least they can fall back on we're flat out, things are crazy, but we know where we stand on numbers, our jobs are getting put out the door correctly, and all those things are not negotiable because we know it's going to bite us in the ass down the line. Another one is leadership standards. Okay, leadership standards, and this is the big one. When busy hits, most operators step back into operator mode. Okay, so there's an operator mode and there's a founder mode, the tradesman and the business owner. So instead of actually leading the business, they start doing inside it, you know, jumping back on the tools, jumping back onto the sites. More of I'll just sort that myself or it'll just not get done at all. More solving problems directly instead of through people, so less delegation or maybe things you've delegated to, you've sacked it off, you put that guy back into there, and you're jumping in. And it feels productive. Being busy, jumping back into things, taking a step back and moving back into the business, working in the business rather than on the business, it feels productive, especially in construction because you're physically actually doing work, okay? But it increases dependency again. So when you're constantly stepping in, you're constantly making managing, you're not leaving, you're panicking and jumping in to say you have a manager to deal with that, but you're jumping in and making decisions for them. It increases dependency again. So when you're constantly jumping in, if your workload doubles and your Rs double too, then you haven't scaled, you haven't made progress, you've just multiplied the pressure, you've just undone a lot of hard work of giving guys responsibility, delegating to people, and your leadership standards have then dropped. You're just going back to that operator mode and not the founder mode, not the business owner, not the business leader, just defaulting back and getting stuck in yourself out of fear, out of pressure, and all those things. So the real problem is this some of you secretly feel more comfortable when it's chaotic. So I've touched on this again. We're tradesmen by blood through and through, that's how we all started, and it's what we've known for a long time for most of us. So most of us feel secretly more comfortable when it's chaotic. I work well under pressures. Often a phrase that I hear all the time, I've said it myself a million times, because chaos keeps you needed, but structure forces you to lead differently. Okay, so you're still leading, you just go in the default, go back to the chaos, but leading with structure, leading with standards, forces you to lead in a different way, to be a different person. Busy season exposes where you whether you are a tradesman that owns a business or a founder building something, building a business and trying to grow a business and do it the right way. And that's not an insult, it's it's an identity shift because again, we've all been there, we've all done it ourselves, but it takes a different person to maintain your standards when pressure hits, and that's what I'm trying to say here, and you need to be aware of that. So here's a rule that we covered recently on one of the calls. If your standards change when it gets busy, they were never standards, they were just preferences or nice to haves or fluffy targets or goals, but they weren't standards because standards are non-negotiable. Standards are something that you live by no matter what, absolutely non-negotiable, like we talk about in the program or dealing non-negotiables and things that we do inside the blueprint. They do not flex under pressure, they not give way under pressure. Your standards are what you live by, what the business stands for, almost your ethos, your principles. They define your identity as a person, as a business owner, and as a business. So, for example, if your margin requirement drops because you're nervous because of you know you're you're you're you're quiet on work, that's not a pricing system. That's just a gain of motion. You're you're you're reacting to emotion, you're letting your standards drop based on emotion out of fear. If your documentation stops because you're tired and you're going, you know what, I've done enough today, that's not a process. That's just a a lack of effort or whatever it may be. Because effort works well when it's calm, so it's easy to put the effort in, it's easy to do these things when it's calm, when it's quiet. But systems and processes and standards are what stay when the pressure hits and when things are stressed. And busy season is the stress test. So this time of the year when things pick up are the real tests. So awareness is key here. That's what I'm trying to say. I want to try and make people aware of this. I'm trying to explain this so that people can identify this when it happens to them, and they can say to themselves, right, I'm doing exactly what what Mark spoke about there. I'm defaulting back, I'm catching myself on here. I can't let this slip because I know it's going to happen here down the line. So there's kind of two versions of March and of this busy season that can happen. And there's two types of business owners in construction right now. Version one is chaotic, busy, longer hours, shorter tempers, lower visibility on numbers and what's going on, higher maybe revenue, but unclear profit, unclear margins, constant reacting, and version two is controlled busy. So we had chaotic busy, now this is control busy. You've got clear margins, weekly reviews locked in, delegation structured, standards maintained, revenue is increasing, but profit margin is also steady and increasing. Your stress is stable, which is a massive one. You're able to actually sleep at night, you know, you don't feel the same sort of pressure. Both look busy from the outside. Version one and version two both are busy guys, but only one of those guys, version two, is actually building a business and running a business. The other guy is just reacting like a tradesman in his own business. So the question you need to ask yourself is this Did you prepare for this upturn in the busy period? Are you ready for it? Or are you about to just survive it again? Just trend, grill and burnt and get through it. Did you clarify your minimum margins that you require? Did you work out your overheads? Did you work out your margins? Did you tighten your quotation process so that you don't things don't slip through the net? Did you lock in weekly reporting rhythm with your with your team, with your staff, whoever it is you have on board, or even yourself? Because even when you're a one-man band, those meetings, those those check-ins with yourself, did we do this this week? Has this happened this week? That's important too, whether you're a one-man band or you're a team of 20. Did you define delegation boundaries? So did you, when you're trying to delegate, did you do that clearly? Did you tell the guys what their expectations are? Did you tell them what you know good looks like? Did you tell them what the standards are here, what what the feedback looks like, and did you raise your standards in general? Or did you just hope things did it were improved? Did you were you one of these people who just decided that this year is going to be different but didn't actually put things into place? Because hope is not a strategy. You can't hope and then expect things to happen. Busy season will reward preparation, will reward people who are prepared for it, and unfortunately it will expose people who weren't. So this is what the blueprint pillars are here for. This is exactly where time, profit, and control either strengthen or collapse. If the standard drops or you're not prepared for this season, profit will leak, control will disappear, and your time will vanish. You'll drown. If the standard holds, your profit will increase, your control will be maintained and stabilized, and your time will actually expand. Same workload, different structure. So what I want you to do over the next 30 days, there's going to be an obviously more episodes drop here every Monday. Over the next 30 days, your leadership, yourself, your personality, you as a business owner will be tested. Not when it's easy, but when you're tired, when jobs are clashing, when guys don't turn up, when clients dispute costs, when a split a supplier comes with you with delays, or when a subby doesn't show up, you name it, that's when your identity shows up. So you need to decide now who are you under pressure, who do you want to be in that position, what do you want that outcome to be? Because March does not create chaos, it just exposes it. So if you're heading into this busy season and you're already feeling stressed, if you're panicking, if you're listening to this going, shit, that's me, I'm version one, not version two. Again, that's not because of workload, that's because structure is missing. It's because you haven't got the processes, the systems, the support, the team, and the accountability, whatever it is. In the next video, I'm going to break down how exactly to lock in standards in place when workload doubles. But if this already feels like you, don't wait until June to regret March. Reach out. If you need help putting these things in place, let's install structure properly.