A Business Coach, a Peer Group, or Both: What I’d Tell Any Restoration Owner

I was flying blind on my numbers until a peer group member showed me what my P&L should actually look like.

Should a restoration business owner hire a coach or join a peer group? For me, the answer was both, and I'm glad I did both.

I hired my first business coach in 2006, a year after I started my restoration company. He was an accountability coach who didn't know anything about the restoration industry, and he was still a big help to me. Then I joined a peer group where I got to be around restoration owners who had been in the business longer than I had. One of the early conversations I had in that group changed my life. I don't say that to be dramatic. It really did.

The conversation that scared me

One of the owners told me that several of his friends in the industry had gone out of business. He'd been within days of folding himself, more than once. What turned things around for him was a deep understanding of his numbers. He figured out how to do his bookkeeping and track everything so the numbers told him what was actually happening in the business.

That scared the heck out of me, and it was exactly what I needed to hear, because I was flying blind. When I was on the trucks and on the jobs myself, I didn't realize it, but I was calculating the profit and loss on each job in my head. Once you have a bunch of employees and you're not on the jobs anymore, you can't do that. It doesn't scale.

What I did about it

I got on a call with him, along with my bookkeeper. This was a long time ago, so we used GoToMyPC to share screens. He taught us what to do in QuickBooks and what our bookkeeping process needed to look like. It took a couple of hours. Then we did the work. About a week and a half later we got back on a call so he could check what we'd done and answer our questions, and we kept going.

Once we got caught up, I was blown away. For the first time I could see what was going on in my profit and loss statement, on the accrual basis and the cash basis, and I knew exactly what was happening at the job level. I got addicted. I wanted more. So we went back to the beginning of the year and cleaned up everything, and that's when things really started to change. I could finally use my P&Ls as a tool to build a better business.

Where the accountability coach fit in

Every time I got on a call with my coach, I knew he was going to ask me, "Did you do what you said you were going to do?" I'm a pretty disciplined person by nature, but without accountability I get less done. It's been 20 years since I hired my first business coach, and I still have one. I've almost never been without one in all that time.

Do you have both?

Do you have a peer group? Do you have a coach? Do you have the combination of the two, and is it working? If you're setting goals, making steady improvements, getting more profitable, and learning how to build a business that's more valuable and more attractive to a buyer, you're in great shape. You've pulled together the same kind of resources I did early on.

If not, book a call with me at thegrowthleague.com/schedule. I'll tell you more about the Restoration Profit Academy and the Restoration Sales Academy. They're both peer groups. I also do one-on-one coaching.

Scott Miller is the founder of The Growth League. He started his own restoration company in 2005, sold it in 2017, and now helps restoration owners get more profitable, reduce the chaos in their business, and build something sellable.