My business was in a rut.
It was 2006.
I had a couple of large roofing jobs on new building sites and nothing was going right.
In 1999, when I decided to abandon my 18 year civil engineering construction career…. I had high hopes of building a roofing company under my brother’s guidance.
“How hard is it to start and build a small business in Sydney….?” I asked myself.
“Surely. I can do it.”
The first year was easy. The giant hailstorm that hit the eastern suburbs of Sydney kept us busy. Then things went back to normal and work slowed down.
After a couple of years, I was all by myself – still confident that I could make it…. Even though the major dip in 2003 almost left me with no money in the business to pay myself any wages.
It took 7 years to make me realise that roofing was not going to be my business..
By 2006, I was ready to throw in the towel.
Business Coaching was going to be my next business.
Running a roofing business was just too hard.
Like many of the other small businesses around, there were many challenges:
Roofing businesses do not sell for very much at all. So, I decided to continue on for a short while. I started to implement what a business coach would have told me (a bit of irony in this).
I built a website.
Then Google changed everything.
It initially gave me good search positions. Then slowly it started to feed me customers.
Slowly, I started to concentrate on the areas of roofing that I liked.
I abandoned new roofing work – and in doing so, stopped working for builders.
After a while, my roofers began to comment that all their work seemed to consist of fixing the faulty work that previous roofers had done.
There are a lot of leaking roofs in Sydney.
Some of it is simply because roof gets old. Rust and the ravages of time eventually makes the roofs unserviceable.
The other reason is inexcusable and it happens a lot more often than it should. …..And it is just roofs put together badly.
It is just a combination of:
But is enough to create lots of leaking roofs.
Over the last few years, we have discovered that there are far more leaking roofs than we can fix.
And the challenge today is how to do as much as we can with our limited resources.
Over the last few years, our nominal waiting time for inspections is about 3 weeks … and this unfortunately means that we cannot attend to urgent leaks any more.
At the time of this writing, I am over 63.
But, I feel that there are a lot more leaking roofs that I can organise my roofers to fix before I am done….
And my aim is to slowly …
