One of the most important things you can do for your building company is to establish your core values.
Because when you do, it will save you an enormous amount of time.
That's because one core value can replace hundreds of pages of dos and don'ts inside a company manual.
And instead of getting frustrated by a team member who maybe did not do the right thing…
And feeling like it’s your responsibility because you didn’t have the process nutted out and documented for them, you could simply direct them to one of your core values and ask the question, “Did your actions align with our core value?”
Core values save time, establish company culture and give your team a structure to follow.
One of the core values we set up for one of our private clients at the Association of Professional Builders is, “We never make assumptions, we ask more questions.”
This core value is so important to use for a number of reasons…
And it forms an important part of the sales process…
Like when qualifying a consumer to see if they would be a good fit for what the building company offered….
The salesperson would not assume the prospect could not afford to build the home they were describing for the budget they were sharing.
Instead they would ask more questions to establish how they arrived at that figure...
Equally, whenever a team member found themselves in a situation where a prospect, client, contractor or even a colleague was not treating them in a manner they considered to be fair or reasonable, rather than become annoyed or upset, they would ask more questions and attempt to get to the root of the problem.
The reason we introduced this principle as a core value for our client, was because they had one particular employee who was constantly reacting to crises that didn't exist and spending time working through solutions that were simply not required…
As a consequence his productivity was well below where it needed to be.
The problem was, whenever a problem arose, instead of spending time digging deeper into the root cause of the problem and fixing that, this team member would constantly overreact, pull other team members into the situation, and then work on a solution that was not needed…
He was literally spending his time solving problems that didn't exist!
And all because he hadn't taken the time to remain objective and dig deeper, rather than hitting the panic button and disrupting everyone else in the company.
One solution could have been to write comprehensive, step-by-step procedures documenting a process to follow the next time a case like this popped up.
But that would have been too time consuming, and it was reactive…
Another option would have been to sack the employee and replace them with someone that had the required attributes, but hiring and firing is also time consuming and reactive…
The better solution was to look at what was happening and then create a core principle that everyone in the company understood and followed in order to avoid the situation occurring again.
By never making assumptions and asking more questions, this employee now had a trigger that would fire every time they found themselves in a situation where they were not in a position to review all of the facts…
It led them to quite naturally ask more questions.
Establishing core values is just one of the many things you need to create in order to be successful in business.
However, you don’t need to figure out everything by yourself…
Because the Association of Professional Builders has mapped out everything for you, step-by-step.
Click on the link below to learn more.