My 30-year-old self was confident, energetic, and almost completely wrong about several important things. I figured most of them out eventually. Here's what I'd tell him if I could go back and save him about five years of expensive learning.
Your People Will Make or Break You Faster Than Your Skills
I spent the first decade of my business thinking my success was mainly about my technical ability and work ethic. I was wrong. The ceiling of a one-person operation is low. The ceiling of a well-run team with good people is high. Learning to hire well, lead clearly, and build a culture people want to stay in is worth more than any technical certification you'll ever earn.
Hire for attitude first. Skills can be trained. Character can't.
Know Your Numbers or Hire Someone Who Does
I ran my business on gut feel for longer than I should have. I knew roughly what I was making, roughly what things cost, and roughly how we were doing. Roughly is a bad way to run anything that matters. The day I hired a part-time bookkeeper and started getting monthly financials I could actually read was the day I started running a real business instead of a busy job I'd created for myself.
You don't have to love accounting. You have to understand your numbers. Those are different things.
Say No More Often
I took too many wrong jobs, wrong customers, and wrong opportunities because I was afraid of the gap they'd leave if I didn't. The gap almost always filled with something better. Every time I said yes to something that wasn't right for my business, I was busy in a way that didn't build anything. Every time I said no and waited for the right work, the business got stronger.
The Relationship You Have With Your Business Matters
You will spend more time in your business than almost anywhere else. If it's exhausting and joyless, that's a design problem, not a permanent condition. Design it around your strengths. Build systems that handle your weaknesses. Delegate the things you hate. A business that fits you runs better and lasts longer than one you're grinding against.
And take the vacation. The business will survive a week without you. If it can't, that's also a design problem worth fixing.
Put this into practice with WerkOps
Run accurate load calculations, build estimates, and send invoices - all in one tool.
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Written by
Dina Good
Founder, WerkOps
Dina grew up in the trades. Her father was a contractor, then a building inspector, and the job site was her classroom long before any formal one was. She went on to own her own contracting company, which is where she first felt the pain of running a skilled trade business on bad software and worse spreadsheets. A love of data pulled her into programming, and the two worlds eventually collided into WerkOps - software built by someone who has actually been on the truck.