Most contractors check their numbers the way most people check the oil, which is after something starts making a noise. This episode is about what changes when you look before that.
Brent Oberlink sits down with Josh Alatis of 616 Solutions, who came out of industrial engineering and then business software, which means he thinks about contracting businesses as processes with data coming off them rather than as a pile of jobs.
Reactive is the default, and it is expensive
Alatis names the pattern directly. Contractors tend to be reactive about their systems and their numbers. They look when it is bad enough to be worth logging in for, which trains the habit further: the dashboard becomes a place associated with problems, so nobody opens it when things are fine.
His observation about what that costs is the sharp one. The owner who only checks a number when there is a problem ends up chained to that number, watching it for two weeks straight, because by then it is a crisis and there is no money in the meantime.
Brent's version of the same point is about catching a trend while it is still a trend. If you can see a ratio or a margin heading the wrong direction in real time, you can correct it. If you find out at the end of the quarter, you are just doing accounting on a decision that already happened.
The habit they both recommend
The practical takeaway from the episode is small enough that nobody has an excuse. Fifteen minutes, at the same time every day, looking at the same short list of numbers.
Alatis frames it as a checklist a leader runs: I check this KPI, I check this in the system, I check this performance number, and I tick them off. Most days nothing has moved and you close the laptop glad you looked. The value is in the days when something has.
The second benefit is one owners underrate. When the check has a time and a place, it stops interrupting everything else. Without it, you remember at two in the afternoon, in the middle of writing an email, and the strategic work never gets finished because something is always pulling you sideways.
Systems before you think you need them
The advice Alatis closes with applies whether you are one person or a hundred. Think about your processes as separate from you. You built the business and you are the expert, but the question that matters is how it runs without you.
His test: if you disappeared for two weeks, what falls apart? Those are the things that need a system, and the reason is not tidiness. Something will eventually take you out for two weeks, and the company either has a process that carries it or it does not make payroll.
Brent's closing agreement is blunt about timing. If you do not have systems or software in place, the moment to put them in is now rather than later, and the cost should not be prohibitive even for a one person operation.
What to actually track
The episode is deliberately not a list of universal KPIs, because the right ones depend on the work. The principle is that the numbers exist in one place, that they update without somebody rekeying them, and that the person running the company looks at them on a schedule rather than on a hunch.
If bids, job costs, crew hours and cash are living in four systems that do not talk, the dashboard cannot exist, which is usually the real reason an owner is flying blind. Fixing the plumbing comes before the habit.
Listen to the full episode, or find The Better Contractor Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.