How to Stop Abdicating and Start Leading in Your Building Company

When you’re running a building company, it can feel like you’re doing everything at once.

There’s barely time to onboard new staff, let alone manage your bookkeeper, oversee your marketing agency, or coach your team leaders.

So, what do most builders do?

They delegate… and then disappear.

It’s not intentional. You’re busy. You trust the people you’ve hired or outsourced to. But without clear direction, structure, and oversight, delegation becomes abdication and that’s where things start to go wrong.

If you want consistent results and staff performance, you can’t just hand things off and hope for the best. You need to lead. Here’s how to take back control and ensure every person in your business is set up to succeed.

Define success with clear KPIs

Every person in your business, whether they’re internal staff or external contractors, needs to know how their performance will be measured. Without clear KPIs, you’re setting them (and yourself) up to fail.

For team members, KPIs might be task or role-specific.

For carpenters, it may be timelines and quality.

For salespeople, it’s calls made, meetings booked, concepts delivered, or prelim agreements signed.

For marketing agencies, it’s metrics like cost per marketing-qualified lead (CPMQL), engagement, video views, or page views, depending on your campaign goals. If you’re driving traffic to a blog article, page views matter. If you’re building brand awareness, engagement is key.

For bookkeepers, set a KPI of closing off month-end accounts by the second working day of the following month. This means WIPAA must be calculated, all month-end tasks completed, and your accounting software locked off.

For your accountant, it’s not so much a KPI but a firm deadline for finalising the year-end accounts. To hit that deadline, you need to provide the correct financial data, including WIPAA, on time.

When KPIs are vague or missing altogether, it’s a sign that you’ve abdicated your responsibility. And when that happens, you’re likely to end up with underperformance and underwhelming results.

Don’t outsource your understanding

Another reason builders abdicate responsibility is because they don’t feel confident managing areas they’re not familiar with, especially finance and marketing. It’s easier to hand it off to “the expert” and hope they know what they’re doing.

But here’s the truth: no matter how experienced your accountant, bookkeeper, or marketing agency is, they can only make good decisions if they’re working with the right data and that comes from you.

You don’t need to be a financial expert. But you do need to understand the numbers well enough to ask questions, interpret results, and make decisions based on them. Ask your accountant to explain things. Research the basics. Use ChatGPT to help you get clear on what’s going on. The more you understand, the more confidently you can lead.

It’s the same with marketing. You don’t need to write the ads yourself, but you do need to set the strategy and hold your agency accountable to specific outcomes. Run your own reporting, cross-reference the data, and make sure they’re not just chasing clicks but driving real business results.

You’re not expected to do everything. But you are responsible for making sure the right things get done, the right way.

Set expectations with process

Clear outcomes are just one part of the equation. The second part is outlining how things should be done. That means systems. And that means processes.

If you’re onboarding new staff, get them started with a company manual as you train them. It saves time and builds clarity. Everyone learns faster when they can refer back to a documented process.

With agencies and contractors, you don’t need to micromanage but you do need to be firm about how success is defined. If your marketing agency is celebrating clicks when your goal is leads, something’s wrong. Set the rules of engagement early.

When it comes to your finance team, especially if you’re working with bookkeepers or accountants outside the construction industry, you’ll need to teach them about WIPAA. Many still operate using systems suited for manufacturing or traditional services, which don’t reflect how building companies operate.

You can’t afford to assume that just because someone is experienced, they understand how you need things done.

Define how people should operate with culture

The final piece of the leadership puzzle is culture. It’s the part that’s hardest to measure but easiest to feel.

Culture defines the way your people think, act, and make decisions when you’re not in the room. And strong culture doesn’t happen by accident. It’s built through consistent reinforcement of core values.

Do you have values like integrity, ownership, or communication? Then you need to live them and expect the same from everyone else who represents your brand.

That includes your staff, your subcontractors, your suppliers, your agency partners. If someone consistently operates outside your values, no KPI or process will save the relationship. You need to surround yourself with people who think the way you do and care about the things you care about.

Values aren’t fluffy. They’re practical tools that shape behaviour. And when enforced properly, they make your business stronger, faster, and more profitable.

Where to focus next

Leading your building company means stepping out of the day-to-day and stepping into a position of real oversight. Not control in the micromanaging sense but responsibility in the strategic sense.

You need to know what’s happening in your business. And you need to set the tone through clear KPIs, documented processes, and values-driven culture.

If you’re not sure where to begin, start by understanding how your company is really performing today.

The 2025 SORCI Report breaks down the key insights from top-performing builders across the industry, including what’s working in finance, sales, operations, and marketing. It’s a must-read for any builder serious about scaling with confidence.

Download your free copy of the 2025 SORCI Report and get a clearer picture of where your business stands and what you can do to move it forward faster.