I work for my fathers general remodeling contracting company and will inherit it in a few years time...

i work for my fathers general remodeling contracting company and will inherit it in a few years time. im 19 and not going to school, is there someone i should be meeting with occasionally to create a solid business plan in the 4-5 years i have until i become the sole owner of this company?

he runs it all himself and also does the labor with me as his only employee. thats not going to fly for me, I am turning it into a large firm at any cost.

>tl;dr is there someone who gets paid to meet with current / future business owners to assist in creating a business plan and if so what is that called

I did this.
I bought a two-person cleaning company and turned it into a little janitorial empire.

going from self-employment to business owner is a pretty easy step.

the problem you're going to have is competition though. For example, my local phone book lists 5 janitorial companies and close to 100 general contractors. It's not an easy biz to make it big in, mostly because of people like your dad.

if you have any specific questions about growing companies I'll be back in about 10 hours.

but all I did was drop my rates 20%, aggressively bid on large contracts, and took on a lot more work than one person can do alone. Mostly commercial and government jobs.

then when I had my big contracts in hand I started hiring people to do the work and looking for more big jobs to bid on.

it's a mentor.

a lot of business owners will coach you for free.

no such thing as free meal.
when the price is not set in advance it's called a favor which will be collected upon in the future.

my plan was to "aggressively accept" all work that comes my way. I also plan on getting my commercial license (my dad only has residential and to my understand that will be grandfathered to me) and accepting lots of drywall installing / finishing type commercial jobs i can put a few guys on for a week.

my end goal is to be the leader in residential remodeling in my area and a serious contender in contracting commercial construction

any advice on finding a mentor that would understand this trade and not be my competition?

think what you like.
most millionaires don't care for anything you could pay them.

if i could email you now and then that would be absolutely outstanding.

[email protected]

your competition is often the best place to look.

I'm friends with most of my competitors. We hire each other when we need to. Or more often we just help each other out for free.

Your competitors are also the people that will sell you business or buy you out one day. It doesn't hurt to be on their good side. Just don't discuss pricing or what you plan to bid on with them, that's illegal.

this company will forever be my goose egg, its something that i will hand down to my children and their children and so on. so, i will never sell, but i will venture into other industries when i am content with where my construction company is at.

that being said, is someone holding a high position in one of my local construction companies really going to offer their time and advice to a 19 year old who will without a doubt be a future competitor and entirely aim to put them out of business?

my local state college offers small business classes that include business plan writing but im just not sure if my goals are on par with the skills a class like that would provide me. im sure it would be a great start for a 2-5 year plan but i can hardly imagine that a public class will teach me to write a solid 10-15 year plan to turn my company into a multi million dollar commercial contracting firm

please feel free to correct me if im wrong because i am hoping that i am.

bumperini

Look to see if any nearby schools have a Construction Management degree program. That's what I have and what you seem to be looking for.

i could do a class or two, but im way too busy of a person to be a full time student. is this something I would need to take gen-eds for?

I love this. Such big ideas. "Just get more work then hire people to do it". Building a business is a hard road and you are already at a disadvantage because you didn't start the business yourself. You weren't there for the struggle.

I've had people crash trucks, wreck equipment, botch jobs and cost me customers, do drugs, the list goes on. The hardest part about building a business is managing employees.

You would need to do gen ed for the full degree.
The school I went to also offered a certificate program. I think it was mainly night classes aimed at people who already had experience in project management.

in what part of my post did i come off as being that simple minded? It doesn't matter if I haven't been there since the start because my father never had crews of men. His goals were always far too reserved and he is the farthest thing from a people person. I love the old fuck to death but he is a grade A asshole and cant handle people when he has authority over them. I fully expect, especially in the vigorous manual labor industries, that there will be some less than decent people come my way. One local construction company in my town had an employee go back to a past customers house, break in, and murder them. But none the less the company still does a whole lot of business in the city.

Which skills do you need to master to have the means of achieving what you want? Start your reasearches there.

I think he was quoting me.

he's right, there's thousands of little problems that come up when running a business.

but basically all you're doing is getting more work and then hiring people to do it.

also his complaints about managing a business are moot, your goal is to hire a manager too.

you won't be putting anyone out of business.

you might get into a bidding war, but that hurts you as much as the other guy. Even if you take all their work from them it doesn't cost them anything to spend the next 10 years bidding against you and making sure you never relax or raise your prices.

but the reality it the sorts of people you could put out of business are ones like your dad. And it really isn't worth the bother to take work from self-employed individuals. You'll need to think bigger.

and once you're doing bigger jobs you're going to be bidding against people from all over the country, possibly the globe. Are you going to put them all out of business?

doesn't matter if you do, for every head you chop off ten more pop up. If you want to grow your biz you need to start by thinking bigger. You're a tiny fish in fuckhuge ocean. You're not going to be eating anyone.

sound advice, thankyou user

you're welcome.

anyways, there's hundreds of mentoring programs out there. I've never tried any of them so I don't know what you'd get out of it, but that's probably where you want to start. There's a shitload of people that have done exactly what you want to do.

Where do you stand on the issue of hiring undocumented workers because they're cheaper?

ive contacted a business consultant to assist me in building my 1, 5, 10 and 20+ year business plan. that being said i do believe i could still benefit from a mentor, but would like it to be someone i can meet with in person.

hiring, no thanks. however, subcontracting, if i found myself the 'right type' of adviser and they suggested it could be navigated without me getting in trouble, then sure.

yeah, someone familiar with local markets is going to be more help.

personally I bought my biz so I had the former owner to rely on for info. She never grew the thing though, so I had to figure that out on my own. It's not really difficult though. It's a lot of work, but it's not complicated.

Sub contracting illegals (paying them on 1099's) is called misclassification of employees and your business will get steamrolled for it.

so is it generally practice to verify a company's authenticity and their legal right to work in the us before contracting them?

You can hire sub contractors, you run into trouble when you are telling your "sub contractors" what time to be at work and where to go, in that case they are employees not contractors.

the situation i was picturing was i get the contract for drywalling an entire apartment building, and i subcontract it to a company in which their legal status in the US is probably questionable and their prices are fitting for that case