Pick the one thing you've been ignoring, chunk it into the next 90 days, and start making real progress.

A 90 Day Challenge for Restoration Owners Who Keep Saying They’ll Get to It

I’ll bet there’s something in your business right now that you’ve been telling yourself you’re going to deal with. Maybe for months. Maybe for years. You haven’t dealt with it. And whatever it is, it’s costing you money every week you let it sit there.

I’ve been there. Let me tell you about one of mine . . . because there were many. I was always thinking about what I could be doing to improve my business. What’s something that I’m putting off? Then I'd pick the next thing to improve and get to work on it. 

There was a stretch in the early days of my restoration business where my team was literally trying to push me out the door to go make sales calls. We were starting to slow down, and they were the ones telling me, hey, Scott, you need to go sell something.

I had a sales background going back well before I bought my restoration franchise. I sold for the broad line food distributor Sysco. I sold for an advertising company. I ran a printing and direct mail and ad specialties business for an absentee owner for about eleven years. Selling restoration was different than any of those, but I got comfortable with it pretty quickly, and I enjoyed it. In the early years of the business, I was the one out there bringing in the work.

Then the business started to grow, and the other things an owner has to do started taking up more and more of my week. My sales activity went from every day to maybe once a month, and sometimes less. I knew I needed to hire and train my first sales rep. I had known it for a while. But I kept telling myself I’d get to it, and I kept not getting to it, until my team was basically shoving me out the door.

That’s when I finally hired my first sales rep. And I’ll be honest with you about why it took so long. It wasn’t because I was scared of hiring someone. It was because I was already good at sales and I liked doing it. I just didn’t want to give up the part of the job I enjoyed the most.

Most owners I work with have something like this in their business. They’ve got their one thing. The thing they keep telling themselves they’re going to deal with and never get around to.

So what’s your one thing?

If I asked you right now to name the one thing in your business you most want to change, the thing you’ve been thinking about for months or maybe years, what would you say?

Maybe it’s getting your numbers cleaned up so you can actually read your financials. Maybe it’s getting serious about job costing. Maybe it’s hiring and training a salesperson. Maybe it’s having the tough conversation with the longtime employee that everyone on the team is waiting for you to have. Maybe it’s developing a second-in-command so you can step away from the day-to-day. Maybe it’s getting yourself out of the field and into the office where you belong.

Could be something else entirely. You know what your thing is. There's more than one, though, right? - Which one is the most important right now? 

And whatever it is, it’s costing you. Time, opportunity, profit, peace of mind. Maybe all of those. The cost goes up every month you keep avoiding it.

The lies we tell ourselves

The reason you haven’t dealt with your one thing isn’t a mystery. Why do I say that? Because we all do it.  We tell ourselves a story about why we can’t deal with it right now. I’ve heard these stories in my head and for the past sixteen years of coaching, and they sound like this.

“I’m not a numbers person.” That’s the most common one I hear, by a long way. Owners who couldn’t tell you their gross profit on a typical water job will say this almost like it’s just who they are. It’s not who they are. It’s an excuse to keep avoiding the most important information about their own business.

“That’s what I have my accountant for. That’s what my bookkeeper handles.” Sure, your accountant and your bookkeeper do their part. But they’re not the ones running the business. You are. And if you don’t understand what your numbers are telling you, you can’t use them to make decisions. You’re just hoping things work out.

“Yeah, I’ll deal with it later. This just isn’t a good time.” Restoration owners have been telling me this for fifteen years. They’ll deal with the hard stuff once things slow down. Well, no matter how much things slow down, somehow it’s still not enough that we find the time. There’s always something else getting in the way. If you’re waiting for the calendar to clear before you deal with this, you’re going to be waiting a long time.

“I’ll just do it myself. It’ll be faster.” This one is trickier because it actually feels productive in the moment. You’re taking action. You’re getting something done. But if the reason you’re doing it yourself is because you haven’t developed anyone else to do it, what you’re really avoiding is the work of building your team. I wrote an article about this called 3 Key Words for Leadership: Do, Develop, and Check. The short version is that a leader isn’t supposed to be the one doing the work. A leader is supposed to be building a team that can do the work, and checking that it’s being done right. Every time you say “I’ll just do it myself,” you’re putting a cap on how much your business can grow.

I struggled with this myself in the early days. I had to catch myself almost every day. Every time I caught myself thinking “I’ll just do it,” I stopped and said, no, can’t think like that. You’re never going to get where you want to go if you keep doing it all yourself. After a while it became automatic. The thought would come up and I’d dismiss it, because I had a strong enough vision for what I was trying to build that I wasn’t willing to keep trading my time for the short-term feeling of getting things done.

What changes when you actually deal with it

I’ve been coaching restoration owners since 2009, and I’ve watched a lot of them go from avoiding their one thing to finally dealing with it. Here’s what I’ve seen happen.

The blinders come off. They finally see what’s actually going on in the business. Even if what they see isn’t great at the moment, at least they know where the problems are, and they know where to start fixing them.

They get more profitable. That’s the bottom line. When you stop avoiding the part of the business you’ve been avoiding, profit usually follows.

They get more engaged with the business overall. They feel equipped to take action instead of just hoping things work out. If they’re thinking about selling someday, they’re actually building a business that’s sellable. They’re making decisions based on real information, not a gut feel.

They don’t feel in the dark anymore. And that’s the part that surprises owners the most. They didn’t realize how much it had been weighing on them.

The One Thing 90 Day Challenge

I built a worksheet I use with my clients called the One Thing 90 Day Challenge. It’s a few pages long. It walks you through six questions, and if you fill it out honestly, something useful happens.

The first question asks what the one thing is. The thing you most want to change in your business. The next two questions are where most people get a wake-up call.

Question two: what have you been doing to make that a reality?

Question three: how is that working for you?

What I see again and again when clients sit down with this is that the answer to question two is usually some version of “nothing.” They haven’t actually been doing anything about the thing they say matters most. And then question three is basically a non-answer. It’s not working because nothing’s been happening.

The rest of the worksheet helps you build a plan. Turn your one thing into a SMART goal. Identify what to keep doing, what to start doing, what to stop doing. Decide how you’re going to make it happen, whether that’s an accountability partner, a coaching program, or a weekly review of your own progress. By the time you’re done, you have a 90-day plan to deal with the thing you’ve been putting off.

I picked 90 days because it’s enough time to make real progress on something hard.

Here’s how to get the worksheet

Two options.

Option one. Email me at [email protected] and I’ll send you the One Thing 90 Day Challenge PDF and you can do the work on your own.  

Option two. If you’ve been telling yourself for a while you’re going to deal with this and you keep putting it off, your odds of actually taking action go way up if you do this with someone else. Book a free strategy call with me at thegrowthleague.com/schedule. No pressure. I just want to help you. I want to see you take action.  

When we talk, you’ll get a sense of how I work and what I can help with. I run two coaching programs for restoration owners. Restoration Sales Academy is for owners who want to grow their top-line revenue and build a real sales engine. Restoration Profit Academy is for owners who want to understand their numbers and get more profitable. Some owners work with me on one of those, some on both, some prefer one-to-one coaching.  

Either way, do something. Don’t close this article and let another month go by.