4 Ways to Prioritize Strategic Planning for Contracting Success4 Ways to Prioritize Strategic Planning for Contracting Success

I recently revisited a 2018 article from the Harvard Business Review, in which Duke University Professor Dorie Clark discusses her survey of 10,000 senior company leaders. Of those, 97% said being strategic is their most important behavior. But of these very same people, 96% of them said they lack time to be strategic. Is that not a supreme disconnect?  

Strategy is a way of thinking big—that 30,000-foot view—and it's a process. Planning gets your entire team on the same page. Here are four ways to make sure you prioritize strategic thinking in your contracting company. 

1 | Get comfortable learning as you go. 

Often, contractors don't have background experience in planning big-picture company strategy. You build roofs, pour concrete, pave roads, bend conduit—everything needed to complete a given project, including some smaller scale project management. But day-to-day operations are tactical, not long-term business or strategic planning.  

Strategy needs a framework, and company leaders must create it. It may not be something that comes intuitively to you, but starting is the most important part. Doing something is infinitely preferable to doing nothing, and you can learn and adapt during the process.  

Learning to craft a strategic plan is like picking up any new skill. Take golf, for example. The first day you hit a golf ball, you're going to be much worse than after you've practiced your swing 10,000 times. Similarly, after you practice and study strategic planning, you get better at it. You're already good at project management; you just need to take that a step further.  

2 | Turn strategy into actions.  

When people think about strategy, they think about building that big three-ring binder and watching it sit on the shelf collecting dust. It feels like wasted time, money and effort. But what really happened is that plans were never turned into actions.  

I talked to a contractor recently who took their strategic plan documents and distilled them into a single-page, graphically appealing poster available for every employee to see in every job trailer, on every coffee break and anywhere employees may gather. That poster became the company’s North Star, the guidepost for everybody in the organization. The more complex plan was broken down to something that people could easily see and understand. That’s one way to translate strategy into action. 

3 | Track where you spend your time. 

Leaders often think they don't have time for strategy because they don't know where their time actually goes. All they know is it gets away from them pretty darn quickly. Clark talked in her Harvard Business Review article about using a time tracking tool to understand where your minutes and hours go during the work week. If you aren’t dedicating time to your top priorities, you need to get a handle on where you invest your energy and the places you may be wasting it.  

4 | Recognize the difference between commitment and effectiveness.  

Long hours and busyness are seen as a proxy for productivity and commitment in most organizations. If you work 70 hours per week, the likely perception is that you’re more committed to the company's success than the person who works 50 hours each week. This is often true in construction companies.  

But what most successful contractors care about is results. If somebody can achieve the same results in 40 hours that it takes another person 70 hours to achieve, I don't see any difference in commitment. I see a difference in productivity and an opportunity to learn from the person getting more done in fewer hours. Learning how to spend time effectively creates more space for planning.