Process improvement holds significant potential for enhancing the profitability of your construction business, and the cherry on top is that it is where you have the most amount of control. Join Eric Anderton and guest, Moustafa Moursy of Push Analytics, as they explore the fundamental concepts of strategic process management and how they can revolutionize the way construction businesses operate. From defining processes and identifying key areas for improvement to balancing detail and flexibility, they unravel the essential components of strategic process management. Eric and Moustafa’s in-depth discussion covers crucial topics such as setting up processes, optimizing project management, and fostering collaboration with the executive team. Gain invaluable insights into onboarding salespeople, leveraging technical knowledge in sales strategies, and enhancing the overall customer experience. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or just starting in the construction industry, this episode offers practical guidance for maximizing profitability through process improvement. Tune in now and elevate your construction business to new heights of success!
Get the One Book Every Construction Leader Must Read: Construction Genius: Effective, Hands-On, Practical, Simple, No-BS Leadership, Strategy, Sales, and Marketing Advice for Construction Companies: https://www.amazon.com/Construction-Genius-Effective-Hands-Leadership/dp/B0BHTRDY1T/
Need executive coaching? Book a short call with Eric to discuss how he can help: https://10minuteswitheric.youcanbook.me
Website: https://pushanalytics.com/
LinkedIn Handle: https://www.linkedin.com/in/moustafa-m-71909456/
—
Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
From Bid To Build: Revolutionizing Construction Through Strategic Process Management With Moustafa Moursy
What does process improvement mean to the profitability of your construction business? It could have a tremendous positive impact. The good news is processes are the one area where you have the most amount of control. Whether it’s bidding work, planning work, building work, or getting paid, if you can develop processes that make sense, that has a tremendous positive impact. My guest for this episode is Moustafa Moursy. He has a strong background in construction.
In fact, he worked for one of the country’s largest electrical manufacturers, Schneider Electric, and in that work, he gained a comprehensive understanding of the construction space. He’s even been on a job site pulling wire. Moustafa knows what he’s talking about when it comes to construction and his focus is very much on the sort of processes you need to put in place to capture the leads that are coming into your company and make sure that you are maximizing your opportunities to grow your business.
Today, we dive into everything process-related and how you can identify the processes you need to improve and the sorts of tech stacks you need to bring to the table to help you with those. How you need to balance the demands of management with the realities on the ground to the people running the processes and how you can keep focused on your customers so that every process that you put in place drives more business with the right clients and the right projects in the right locations. It’s very much focused on helping you to improve your business. I know you’re going to enjoy the interview. Moustafa is a great interview. He really is passionate about what he does. It comes across in our discussion. Enjoy my discussion today with Moustafa.
This is Eric Anderton and you’re listening to Construction Genius. A leadership masterclass. Thomas Edison said that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. If you’re a construction lead and you know about perspiration, this show is all about the 1% inspiration that you can add to your hard work to help you improve your leadership.
—
Moustafa, welcome to the show.
Eric, thanks for having me.
I’m delighted. One of the arts in life is understanding what you have control over and what you don’t have control over in business. A lot of folks spend a lot of time worrying about stuff they have no control over and yet neglecting the stuff that they do have control over. In your mind, what is one of the key areas in business that someone has complete control over that they need to focus on?
Absolutely, that’s a great way to put it. I love that because to me it’s a process, right? We always talk about process and process improvement. That’s one of the things that I really love about the process is that if the ball is fully in your court, things that are happening and you’re controlling how you act and how you take advantage of them and it’s fully in your court which is much different than anything else in business.
What Is A Process
What is a process?
I like the kind of backup. If we were sitting in a room and I kind of asked people like, “How do you think your processes are today?” Right, just kind of open. How do you think they are today? Good bad or like a few choices are maybe you don’t have. A lot of people are going to be like, “I don’t have any.” Then that’s when I’m going to be like, “It was a three question because you can’t not have any processes just by getting from point A to point B, right?”
It’s the steps that you take to do that. If you have a business and you have any number of customers, you have a process because the customer got through something to be able to become a customer, right? It’s just the same like when somebody goes in there like, “I’m not on a diet,” and somebody else is like, “You are. You just eat whatever.” It’s very important because people aren’t paying attention to that sometimes so then they’re not even looking at optimizing it and that’s where a lot of that goes in. I could dive into that a little bit more.
Let’s do that. I think it’s important for us to recognize that we do have processes in place whether we realize it or not. How do I know when a process isn’t working?
Yes. Process improvement isn’t like destination. It’s a journey, right? It’s iterative. I mean it doesn’t like stay static in time. Again, it’s just I love the diet thing because it works really well. It’s just like you die. You don’t just be like, “It’s a salad today. I’m good. I’m done.” Like, right? That’s not how it works. There’s things you need to be doing. There’s things you need to not be doing. You always need to be checking what’s working and what’s not. Whatever your goals are like building up, am I losing or whatever, is this working? Do I need to tweak the strategy? Do I need to improve it? How am I doing?
You always need to be doing that with your processes. Now, I would say though if you’ve never looked at your processes at all, and if you’re one of those people, which is fine by the way, this happens a lot. Nothing bad. Who just never thought about it or you’re like, I’m not a diet kind of guy, right?
Then chances are your processes could definitely use a lot of work, which is actually a good thing because that means that however good you’re doing now or however you’re doing now, there’s actually a lot of room for you to kind of get improvement in a way that’s like relatively easier than some other stuff that you could be doing like marketing or whatever which the ball is not fully in your court to what I was saying earlier, right?
You could pay for a trade show and maybe pay a lot of money. Maybe it’s a great trade show, but for whatever reason people don’t show up that day or the weather is bad, or whatever. We’ve all done it like yeah, I’ve done so many trade shows because I was working corporate and construction trade shows. It was always like, very hit or miss like we would actually joke about it. Sometimes you’re going to just stand there and talk to the vendors.
Evaluating And Developing Processes
I know you have a lot of experience in construction. When I think of construction from a 30,000-foot level, I’ve got to bid the work. I’ve got a plan for the work. I’ve got to build the work, and then I’ve got to get paid, right? Those are four core areas. In your experience in construction and working with contractors, where does a construction company need to focus first in terms of evaluating and then developing their processes?
Perfect. Yeah. If you’re kind of starting from scratch and you’re like, “I really did this before but okay, you got me. It’s important. Where do I start?” I always say look at the number one most important thing in your business. Let’s kind of trace that and I start from there. That’s obviously going to be your customers. Right? We got to look at kind of like the customers and start moving in more and more until we get there.
The first thing is you have people that come in and they want to interact with you, right? If I was presenting, I’d show a process board and put one process up on the board. I want to interact with you. I want to work with you. People that you’re bidding, right? We’re calling it lead management or whatever. That’s people that you’re going to be bidding, where you’re going to be trying to prospect and get them to bid, but they get to a point where they come to you and they’re like, “Okay, fine give me a bid.” Let’s take the first thing.
I would always start with us, it’s really important because what happens is a lot of times and a lot of businesses whether construction or not, you’re doing a lot of things. The last thing you want to happen is somebody wants to work with you but it falls through the cracks because you guys got busy whatever. We had like 30 bids to put out this week or this month or whatever because it was really busy. We did good like remembering off hand and we put out 25 of them or 27 of them, right?
Which is pretty good like 90% right, but you missed 10% which could have actually turned into deals. You want that to be like really ironed out whether you want to have reminders, whether you want to have like okay somebody sends in a bed. Maybe we have like some sort of inbox and we log. We create a ticket or a deal in our CRM and we’re going to have like daily or weekly or whatever we look through and like all our bids moving along. Are we sending them all out? Are we following up on them? That’s really the key.
On that note, something even kind of before that actually happens more than you would think is, if you ever have any entryway to your business not physically, but a phone number and email or form anywhere on your website, anywhere on your business cards, anywhere, make sure that somebody reliably checks that. This sounds obvious, but it’s actually not. A lot of times people maybe have one form on the website they check but then they have another form that was made a contact us form when they made the website and it goes to like some WordPress junk box somewhere and they’re like, “I don’t know we never look at it.”
Make sure you do that because that’s just a big loss. It’s like somebody walks into your store and there’s nobody at the cash register and they’re like, “What do I do?” They just leave. That’s really key. Yeah. The starting point I would say is definitely the lead management process. That’s the first process put that in your head like a virtual process board is the lead management process. When we do get leads? How do we work with them? How do we bid them? Then make sure that we’re following up on those.
Okay. Let’s just go into a little more detail. Let’s assume that I do want to take a look at the way I handle my incoming customers. How should I go about that process in terms of what questions do I need to ask as I’m putting together the process? What steps sometimes get missed or what obstacles should I be looking for?
Perfect. Yeah. It’s definitely an iterative thing. For example, if we’re doing process optimization or consulting for somebody one of the first things we ask them is like, listen, tell me where you are today, wherever that is. There’s no wrong answers. There’s no bad answer but tell me where you are today, what you’re doing today, and what your process is like today even if your process is we take the stuff. We write it on a napkin and we give it to the customer and that’s their quote. That’s fine. We need to know where we are so we know where we got to be.
If you’re doing this yourself, you got to ask yourself that, internally ask your team, ask whoever, “Guys, what do we do today?” Find out what that is, right? Personally, we like to like really map things out a little bit It really helps. We got an email and then whatever we have somebody in the office throughout and whatever. You’re going to kind of find things as you’re doing that. You’re going to start seeing we have to route all the quotes through like this one person. Well, guys what happens if they’re out? I don’t know. I mean, nothing really, okay, well that’s a problem. The first thing is like understand where you are today because then you can really understand where you need to go.
Balancing Detail And Flexibility
Once I understand where I am. How detailed do I need to get into the process? What is that balance between detail and allowing flexibility in terms of the response or the way that the processes is put together?
Absolutely, I’m sure we’re going to talk in more detail on this point, but this comes up a lot. A good process really needs to account for different things at the same time. One is it needs to make sense from the context of the customer journey. You can want to do things a certain way as a business. If nobody buys that way, you could be like, yeah, we just want to for example, not bad. We just want to go straight to selling projects, right? That doesn’t make sense. Nobody actually buys that way, right? You can want to do that. It doesn’t matter how good your process is that little mark.
A good process really needs to account for different things at the same time. One of those is it needs to make sense from the context of the customer journey. Click To TweetWhat do you mean by a customer journey?
Any customer whether it’s in construction, whether you’re buying a house, or whether you’re just buying a product goes through a journey of steps before they reach the point where they make the purchase or the transaction. It’s a very common word in marketing but they go through a series of steps before they make that purchase. Right? In this case, if the customer is like a builder or general contractor in you’re the sub or whatever the case may be. I mean their journey is that they’re going out and they’re first getting the project or requesting a bit and then getting the project and then shopping out different bids, negotiating, giving you a PO, and then you get the PO.
I mean that’s their journey. You guys know that stops. That’s their journey but any customer anywhere has a journey. If you’re buying a house, you go, you talk to the bank, you got to pre-approval, and then you go to the realtor, you find the house, you make an offer, and then that’s your journey. It’s very important to understand what things look like from the perspective of the customer and what they should look like from the perspective of the customer because a lot of times what happens, and I’ve seen this a lot even like in corporate actually, where it’s like they want to do things a certain way and that’s fine and it’s like, I have this crazy good process.
It’s like no, you don’t because nobody buys this way. The way that you want to do is not what any customer expects or thinks or understands the world to be you can’t just like decide to do things in a way that is completely different. Not saying you shouldn’t do anything different but in a way that completely breaks all the rules of engagement. You can’t do that. It’s not going to work.
It ends up causing a lot of friction because in the salespeople will fight you. The salespeople are going to be like, “That doesn’t make sense. How do you expect me to do this? How do you expect me to put a number before I estimate? How do you expect me to do something to tell them that their estimate is only valid for like a week when projects take a month to be awarded?” For example. All right. Stuff like that. Yeah, that was the customer journey point. Hopefully, I answered your question.
Who Should Be In The Room
That was helpful. Once I’ve established the processes that I need to work on, who do I need to bring in to go through the process of deciding how I’m going to improve the process? In other words, who should be in the room in my company so that I’m making sure that I’m really outlining this in a way that’s going to make sense and also is going to be helpful?
Yes, so let’s go back to the things that I was saying make up a good process. One of them is that you account for the customer journey on one end of it. Your process has to take that into consideration. On the other end, you want to account for the business needs because prices also play into how you’re tracking things. You might be like, as a business, we would really like the CR KPIs. I’m like how many jobs are we bidding?
What’s like our winery show and be able to tell customers like, “Hey, we bid you like 100 jobs and give us nothing,” or like, “Hey, actually there’s a lot of work,” or whatever. Account for the business needs as well. Then you want to account for the actual capabilities and functionalities of the tools that you’re going to be using to execute that process. Whatever you’re doing needs to work in a way with your CRM or whatever tools that you’re going to use to actually execute that process.
Then you want to account for the personnel who are actually going to be manning that process. This is a big one. Again, people really sometimes forget. A lot of times we see this where let’s say a big company or whatever we’ll bring in somebody and it’s like oh so and so and he has I don’t know Wall Street experience or something and it’s like yeah, okay puts together this process and it’s like dude, we have no idea how this works.
Then the salespeople like, “Dude, this guy hasn’t sold anything and he doesn’t know anything,” and this doesn’t even make sense. You guys are asking us to put like 1, 000 clicks so we can get to the quote screen and then like, how am I supposed to do anything? You can’t do that right. Good process management between both. It’s going to require obviously change in people but it also has to account for the usability from the people who are actually using it. Right now, each organization is going to bring in different people at different steps a little bit different but you always want to get feedback from the different stakeholders at some point so that your accounting for that.
If you’re going to launch something maybe take your top sales guy your top estimator and be like, “Hello. We’re thinking of doing this. What do you think?” Does this make sense? Again, you don’t have to agree with everything but it’s like, “Did you guys consider this? What about this? What about this?” Then you kind of start incorporating some of their feedback into it and seeing. One other thing you do even before that is interview people and be like, “Okay if you could have a few things that were better, what would help you?”
Sometimes you might not have inside because maybe they can’t think of possibilities or tools that help, but sometimes they will. Sometimes be like, “I forgot about my quotes a lot. We bid so much. I just can’t keep up. I can’t keep up with having to follow up,” for example. That’s actually a common and maybe they’re really good. Again, if you have 30 bids and you’re 90% good, which is amazing. That’s still 10% that you’re missing, which is three bids, which is actually all right. I would interview kind of like the stakeholders and get some pinpoints and then help us kind of decide where we want to go and not that out and then get some feedback on it.
How do you handle pushback from your employees on processes? I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you have a reporting process when you’re building a project and the executives want a certain cadence of reporting but the field, the folks are running the projects from the project managers specifically they’re pushing back and they’re saying, “Dude, why do you need all this information at this cadence? It’s not really helpful. It’s not really useful. I’ve got 3, 4, 5 different spreadsheets I’m working with. I need some help in terms of being more efficient with my reporting and getting you the numbers that you want.”
Absolutely. That’s something we run into a lot. Obviously, it’s a very common thing. It’s interesting. I have the experience of looking at it from both perspectives. I was in B2B sales and construction sales specifically. Did that for a long time. I was the person who like, “Why do we have to do this?” Then we also help organizations and help people kind of get that together. I get it from both sides. Now, the thing is there’s a balance to doing this, right? For example, anytime we do you always want to get buy-in as much as possible.
Again, you’re never going to get 100% buy-in because people still do have to change something they’re doing and it’s still a little bit of work, but you want to get buy-in as much as possible. That’s why I was asking people what their pin points to try to incorporate like give everybody something to be excited about. Maybe they’re not excited about one thing but it’s like, “Look, we’ve made the follow-up for the bid. Now you won’t forget your bids.” Yeah, you have to report on stuff but like you got the fall. It’s like there’s kind of like, “Okay fine.
I get something in return for doing this. Maybe I’m not happy about everything but I’m happy about something.” I have seen cases. There’s a really bad process where it’s like I’m not getting anything. This tracking isn’t even useful. It’s not even useful to me. It’s not definitely going to be useful to management. Why am I doing this? If people feel like it’s pointless, they’re not going to want to do it no matter what, and especially if they feel like it’s pointless even if I’m a rep and there’s a manager and I feel like this isn’t even going to help the manager. Then I really don’t want to do it because like it just feels like I’m doing it as a check-off-the-box type habit. Getting that buy-in as much as possible. Again, you’re never going to get 100%. If you wait for that, you’re just never going to do anything. Getting buy-in as much as possible is key. You’re asking for the pinpoints, showing people along the way making sure you didn’t miss anything obvious, then maybe like, “I don’t want to put this in. You could try to find it an easier way. Maybe there isn’t maybe they just have to put it in.”
They might bring up like have you considered this and it’s like a whole thing that you haven’t even looked at. Have you considered for example that we might be bidding on four different contractors? How do you have reminders on four different builders or general contractors? How do you have reminders on that? You remember that’s actually good. We can think of that. Let’s build that in. They might give you really good tips there. The other thing is always kind of showing people it needs to be a balanced approach from management.
When people feel that manageable is just trying to do things just to be like Big Brother, they usually will push back more but when it feels like a team environment like, guys is it? We’ve done this kind of even coach like some managers and CEOs. We were looking at like a report for the support team. Then one of the reps may have had a much longer time to address tickets. This was a different type of business, the address tickets. Listen, you can’t approach this as like, this rep sucks. You have to understand what’s happening.
Maybe that rep’s actually really good and they’re getting all the hard stuff that’s getting punted to them and then they just need to spend more time on it because they just have harder problems they’re working with. They’re like that makes sense or whatever. Instead of having the conversation in a tone where like, “Why are your things so off?” It’s like, “Okay like help us understand what’s going on, right?” We have to work together. Having that environment creates less resistance.
When people feel that everybody just kind of like fighting or it’s like big brothering, they just don’t want to cooperate, right? It’s normal. I’ve been there. I know how it works. Anybody is like that. When they feel like, you know what, we’re all working together like, “Yeah. Whatever all along my stuff. Who cares.” They’re going to just come or we’re going to have a conversation. I’ll tell them what’s going on. That’s no problem. That’s really key. Then kind of showing people again the benefits for them.
That’s why anytime we do any of this work at the end of the project always at least how we do it. You always want to have training with the team at large. Having a lot of meetings with whoever is setting up like the managers, or the CEO, you have to end it with at least probably multiple sessions but at least one session. With the team large, here’s what we did and here’s why we did and here’s how it works, and here are some of the benefits, by the way. You know what?
When you log this and then you go out on vacation, the other sales rep is backing you up. Doesn’t have to bug you and call you 70 times and be like, “Where did you put that file for the bid?” Because they already have it. It’s already in there. You can just assign it to them when you leave and they can look at it and then great. It’s easier for you too. Then people start getting excited about these little things which [00:18:54]
Processes For Salespeople
Okay, so let me ask you this then. One of the frustrations that a lot of contractors have is they bring in salespeople, and business development people and they may have industry experience and they may not. Then the BD folks are totally pumped up and enthusiastic and of course, they want to do good and generate some business, but then they bring in a bunch of leads that really are not the right projects with the right clients and the right locations. What processes can you put in place to help discipline salespeople to go after the kind of things that you’re looking for and the kind of work that you want to build?
One of the key things that you’re looking for when you’re setting up your processes. One of the key benefits is the ability to be able to track kind of what’s going on so that you can make better decisions which actually is kind of a loop. Because you track a little, you make better decisions. Then you’re like, okay, we’re going to change our process a little bit more and then we’re going to track something else. Then we’re going to keep making. It’s like a wheel. In that case, you would want to actually set up in a way where it’s like, okay, we need to at least have some sort of reports on what bids we’re putting out.
One of the key benefits of setting up your processes is the ability to track what's going on so you can make better decisions. Click To TweetIt doesn’t have to be too crazy but we need to what bids we’re putting out. How many are we winning? Who are we putting them out with? We need to have some sort of cadence. Well, we’re reviewing that together because also shouldn’t be that you come to them at the end of the year and you’re like, “Dude, all these guys were not qualified.” That rep is going to be like, “Well, where were you all year? Why don’t you tell me something earlier? Why’d you wait now?” All of a sudden you realize when you’re doing your books or something. That’s not really fair to them either.
You have enough of some sort of cadence. We’re going to meet every month or every two weeks. Every two weeks is probably good. Because the process is part technology, part human. You got to work both. We’re going to meet every two weeks. We’re going to talk about what kind of jobs are being bid. We’re going to pull up this report which is a kind of an ongoing report of what we’re winning and what we’re not winning and what industries maybe we’re biding.
Then you can adjust quicker. Because the quicker you have insight, the quicker you can adjust, “Dude, you just put out 10 bids last week for like high-rise jobs.” We don’t do that good and high-rise jobs. We’re not competitive. Right? We do more like commercial work or industrial work, whatever right? Why did you do that? Then he might have a reason or you talk about it but I have a really good relationship with this guy. I still think we can get it and then okay, you might decide you still want to go for it. At least now you can have the conversation earlier and pivot earlier as opposed to like, “John what the hell, you spent all last year bidding on wrong jobs,” and he’s like, “Who told me not to.” Definitely, a big part of that.
Sales And Project Management
When you were in your sales role in your construction company, what was your biggest frustration with the project managers and the executive team?
Okay, those are two very different questions. Let’s start with project management because actually, that’s a huge point that we like to talk about in the process. If you remember earlier I said the process board we went through a couple of things. One of the points that we get to presenting a deck is we’re like, okay you got a customer. You’re done. You pee, right? No, that’s when it really just begins and that’s a really big friction point for a lot of businesses. Transitioning from sales to execution is a huge friction point. Any business, it’s a huge thing in construction, but it’s big even outside of construction.
Software companies have this onboarding. Service companies have this with just transitioning to the service rep. That’s a huge friction point. A big part of it is process right driven. There’s not a good process for that like handoff. It’s going to be a mess, especially in construction. The jobs are so complicated. There’s so many parties. Many things were said. There’s so many moving parts. There’s so many systems. We were selling like massive systems and there’s so many different details, right? If the rep and the PM are on the same page and the customer, then it’s just going to be a disaster.
You need to have some sort of process that makes sense. At some point in my company, we instituted an order hand-off meeting that was required. It didn’t solve everything but it was certainly better than not having anything. We already did that regardless, but it was kind of mandatory before you convert an order that you do like some sort of order handoff meeting. You could do something like that some sort of order handoff meeting. We document things a little bit better throughout the sales cycle. That’s that the project management team has a little bit more insight into what was happening and they can be able to go back and refer to it and not have to go back to sales for every little thing. That’s a key thing. If you’re using this CRM for example.
What kind of things would you document?
Concessions, deviations, timelines, commitments especially if they’re not on the quote or they’re not standard. I mean there’s different calibers of salespeople and different people do different things. I would have personally walked up to my project manager. Met with them and told them by the way, here are the things. Again, we want to make a process that any kind of to your point just works for everybody or the most common denominator or whatever. I would definitely put in any commitments like, “We told the customer that if there’s an issue with this thing, we’re going to take care of it.”
Any timelines, we told them that we’re going to install temporary power within two weeks, for example, because they really need that. They have more time on everything else. Any price concessions or anything? We told them we’re going to include these extra products at no cost if they’re needed. That stuff has to be documented. I mean there should even be a process on how to even get that approved. I’m not even talking about that even let’s say it is approved. It still has to be known because we don’t want is like we agreed to it.
We gotta approved by whoever sales manager or whatever approves that but then the PM doesn’t know about it. Then the PM like a week later and then the clients like, “Well, where’s my temporary power? He’s like, “It takes us a month,” and he’s like, “We said two weeks,” and he just didn’t know. Then you just tighten a tight spot. If you have some sort of CRM or something and you’re putting in and you’re putting in notes on this, and the project manager can come back and just look at the notes and just be like, “Okay. This is the key thing to the talk.” You have to know everything. I called John and had coffee with it or whatever. You don’t have to do that but at least the core things should be documented.
—
This is Eric. I hope you’re enjoying my discussion with Moustafa today and I want to give you a quick reminder about my book Construction Genius: Effective, Hands-On, Practical, Simple, No-BS Leadership, Strategy, Sales, and Marketing Advice for Construction Companies. Today’s episode is all about processes. Your processes are run by your people. If you put the right people on the right processes and you lead them in the right way, you’re going to make a lot of money in construction.
To help lead those folks in the right way, you should read my book because it’s packed with tons of practical information that will help you become a better leader. Go to Amazon. Purchase a copy for yourself and all of your leaders. When you purchase 10 or more copies, shoot me an email at [email protected]. Tell me that you purchased 10 copies. I will contact you and will schedule a one-hour question and answer session around the book plus a bonus leadership training session. All of that, I bring to the table and I would normally charge $3,000 for that but you can get it less than $200 if you purchase 10 or more copies of the book. Now, let’s get back to my conversation with Moustafa.
—
In one of those handoff meetings, think about the best handoff meeting you were ever in when you were in construction. What were the key elements of that handoff meeting between sales and the project management?
I think part of it is on sale. I don’t know if everybody does this but it’s a kind of a common thing where sales like [00:25:51] whatever. They’re just the PM. Some salespeople do that, but I think a lot of it also lies on the sales themselves, actually the salespeople. Because who’s really controlling the scope of what’s being sold, it’s not the PM, it’s the salesperson, right? If I didn’t scope it properly or I missed something or I missed a couple of floors on the drawings or something. It doesn’t matter how good the PM is. It’s going to be a crap shoot for them you too, right?
Part of it actually starts way before that meeting which is like how good of a job in the salesperson does scoping. Those are the things I really learned from construction is scoping is one of the most important things you can do. Right now, the agency, for example, we do some types of project work. One of the things that kind of distinguishes us is that we’ll scope it out very specifically and the customers love that even customers are like I’ve been burned before by like three other HubSpot Partners or whatever and then they’ll see our scope be like, “It’s good. Yeah. Those good.”
Because they know exactly what they’re getting and it’s very clear and we’re on the same page. I learned that from construction because I used to scope out my jobs very specifically like here’s what we’re doing. Here’s Not doing and I have a discussion with the contractor as much as possible. We’re selling to contractors. I have a discussion with the contractor as much as possible. I mean we would we kind of go through this. I think that’s the first part of it. Sales have to get the ducks in a row as much as possible.
Now where there are deviations or where there are things that are maybe let’s just call them like not 100%, right? Let’s say they’re interpreting [00:27:19] a certain way that could go either way. We know that happens. You should let the project manager know even if that’s not something that was like specifically talked about the customer. You should let the project manager know like “Look, here is the issues that we might anticipate coming up. We might anticipate that the inspector give us a hard time for clearances because the room is tight.” We might anticipate that we might have this issue.
Then at least they can keep it in mind because now they’re going to be driving and you’re the passenger. Initially, you were driving and they weren’t there. They need to keep it in mind that they can kind of like at least like try to plan around it when they get there and try to manage expectations with the customer. That’s a big part of it. I think the important thing for the project managers is to know that you should own it now. Like you really need to own it. This is your baby now, right? You took it on.
Usually, the good project managers were the ones that can kind of run with it be like I have my questions, tell me all the stuff. All right, I don’t need you. I’ll let you know if I need anything. I’ll take care of it. You kind of don’t need to worry about it unless they bring you in which they can and should, but unless they bring you in the. Not-so-good project managers would kind of like, okay. Unless you follow up with them like 70 times on the things that we’ve already discussed, they won’t do it.
Then you’re kind of like just okay on my project managing or your project managing and what’s going on? That’s kind of like the give and take. The responsibility falls on both and on the company to have some sort of medium or process or something where it’s like here’s order to hand off bidding. Maybe we have standard questions that you got to go through and maybe you got to document it or talk about it or whatever. That kind of helps people not forget because also again, there’s just too many moving parts. Then training from both sides. As sales, here’s what you need to do for clean jobs. As project managers, here’s what you need to do to manage results properly.
Sales And The Executive Team
Earlier you said there’s a difference between the interaction of sales and project management and sales and the executive team, tell me a little bit about how to optimize that interaction between sales and the executive team.
Absolutely. The executive team thing is interesting and I think some of that falls on sales, and some of that falls in the executive team. I kind of alluded to earlier like listen, you have to take into perspective what your salespeople are doing and what actually happens, and if you don’t know for whatever reason, then actually try to find out. Don’t just kind of come in and you’ve never been in their shoes, for example, right? Maybe you have, it’s a different story. There’s two types of executives. Some that kind of been in those shoes, and some of them haven’t. It’s fine.
I’m not saying you have to have been in the shoes, but then find out what their shoes look like because you can’t kind of come in just make a judgment or make a decision. It actually happens specifically in construction because people come from a different industry and they’ve done whatever, they sold widgets and they come to construction and then why is this happening? Why is this happening? You guys doing it all wrong. It’s like no. No, we’re not. You just don’t understand construction. It’s not like anything you’ve worked with construction. Now I’ve seen like we’ve worked on like multiplying this man like 10 industries including medical even. I think construction is actually the most complicated.
Yeah, definitely.
Tell people me knowing construction is actually makes it really doing anything else because. You have so many parties, so many people in those parties, so many permits codes, rules, regulations, and all this stuff. It’s really complicated. Because of that, this happens even more so in construction. Executive will come in from the outside and they’ll be like, “He’s doing wrong. I used to sell pens and this is so much easier.” You don’t get it, right? People will also pick that up and they won’t respect that person.
They might still do it, because whatever management but they won’t really want to work with that person because all right, this guy is just here. He doesn’t really know what we do and he’s trying to tell us stuff. Why should I listen? It’s like anything else. If you have a kid, if you just start yelling at them and they’re like, you don’t even understand why I did. They’re just going to like they might do whatever you say, but they’re not processing, right? That’s a key part of it. Once you get that understanding, then you can kind of do things with that in mind.
Right now, I’m not saying that it’s always going to be like on the executive, but you have to get the understanding first before you can make a decision. Now it might be that yeah, you have 10 salespeople. Maybe you have one person who really just doesn’t do anything. That happens. Not everybody’s perfect. Maybe have people that they’re not good or whatever. Right? You need to have the baseline to determine what is even good before you can kind of make that conclusion and vice versa, right? This guy’s really good. What is he doing?
What does he do good? Let’s take what that guy does. He already knows. Why don’t we just take what he doesn’t have other people kind of trying to mimic it instead of letting me who doesn’t know anything about this process bring in my way of doing it which I’ve never even done it, let’s learn from people. Again, it could be suggestions back and forth, but I think that’s the key thing. On the sales front, I would say that if you have somebody who is trying to learn and is trying to understand what you do and they’re trying to be reasonable.
Don’t just like Stonewall. It’s like, let me show you because that’s going to help you in the end. Because if they get some level of understanding, then when they make decisions, they’re going to factor that in. If you just tell them nothing well, then they’re still going to make a decision, but they’re just not going to factor in anything that you have to say because you didn’t tell them that right? I think that’s a kind of the part on the salespeople. It is on the executives also to make people feel that like, okay, we’re trying to learn, we’re going to incorporate some stuff that you say maybe not everything but we’re going to incorporate some stuff. Suddenly, two-way straight, but that’s that’s kind of the executive side of it.
Helping Sales Maximize Opportunities
Let’s say I hire in you salesperson and I want to set them up for success and the first 90 days in my business. What are some key things I should focus on to make sure that I maximize their opportunity to get some deals and get moving in a good way?
That’s a great question. There’s so much that goes into I feel like we could do a whole episode, but that’s something that a lot of people kind of don’t do on all levels. You just hire yourself, a person. You assume that they know things and then you come like six months later. You’re like, “Dude, you’re like 70% off your quota,” and he’s like, “What is my quota anyway? I don’t even know. Yeah, it’s bad.
What’s your quota?
There’s a few things. You got to assess first the capabilities of the person that you hired and where they’re starting from. Again, going back to what I said earlier about the process, but really applies to anything. You got to know where you are to kind of know how to get where you want to go. If you know where you want to go, you also need to know where you are. If you hired somebody who is let’s say from a similar company or whatever and they’ve already been doing that and they’ve worked with the same type of client, it’s going to be a much different road map than if you hired somebody who is out of college for example or like an intern or whatever.
It’s going to be a lot different. Why don’t you ride with these 2 or 3 sales guys, and spend a day with them? First month you don’t even have, don’t worry about selling anything, right? The first month, first couple of weeks, or whatever it is. Don’t worry about anything. I just want you to go, find out whatever they’re going on the road, ride with them, take turns, whatever, and see what they’re doing. That’s really important. If you havn’t done it, you need to know how to interact with customers and it’s a very specific thing.
If you just kind of jump into it, but especially certain personalities, you can get destroyed like eaten up alive. That’s really key. Then you have like some sort of cadence where you’re checking in right? Let’s say do that. I would say separate from whatever your regular cadence is especially somebody new. Maybe you guys meet every two weeks as a team. I would say like, look you need a little bit more attention. We got to give you that attention. Every week we’re going to meet separately one-on-one and let’s discuss. Let’s just go through like what you did last week.
Let’s go through what the jobs you’re bidding. Let’s see any help you need and then have that. There’s a lot more you can do but at least if you stop there and you adhere to that then you’re having these checkpoints, you will know if something needs to be addressed. It’s like all right, they sit down and it’s like I actually don’t understand how this product works or how I’m supposed to sell it. I don’t get it. Let’s help you with that. Now we get that there’s a problem and you don’t get it. Let’s help you with that.
If you have that cadence, that will help a lot because what often will happen is maybe they do that initial training. Maybe they don’t even. All right, they kind of assume that the person gets it but it’s very complex. I thought really that reasonable. You can’t expect that. Okay, we gave them two weeks of training and now he knows everything.
There is to be some iteration where you’re kind of like checking and seeing like okay are they called processing it? I’ve seen it. It can actually end up really bad. Sometimes that happens. What ends up happening is somebody ends up in a company for three years or four years and they still don’t know very basic things because they always never that checks and bounds and I can’t fully blame them because it’s like nobody’s ever trained them or sat down with them or gave them the opportunity.
For me, when I started, I was very fortunate. I was surrounded by a lot of people that were very senior and time I was like one of the best teams in the country almost and [00:35:30] learned from every single one of them. They would spend time and they spend like an hour teaching about like a really basic thing. I remember one guy like an electrical one guy sat there and for like an hour explained to me, what a log was. It was like if you’re not electrical just like a piece of metal where the wire goes, but he sat there for an hour explaining the type of logs and he’s like, “Let me pull up a sample.
I have on my desk. Let me do this. Let me do that and whatever.” That was like cool. That’s really good because the foundations were really strong and if you have set somebody up for strong foundations, they’re going to crush right later on. For me, I felt like one thing that really helped me, I had a really good foundation. I was in a program and I asked a lot of questions which I like to do anyway, and then that just helped me throughout life not even just that one job. You got to set that environment for people.
You’re working for an electrical contractor, when you’re in sales, what was the biggest project you ever sold?
I mean I did projects. I worked at the manufacturer level. I did projects in the millions.
Millions.
Yeah. In the millions.
Can you remember one where you were on the verge of losing it, but then you were able to turn it around and win the project?
There’s a lot. I mean that happens all the time. It was the funniest thing for sure. By the way, when i say millions for the manufacturer means that it could go up to 20 million, 30 million contracts for the contractor because we’re only one part of it. Yeah, I mean there was a lot and I definitely remember specific ones. This is more like sales not really processed but it’s fine. There’s a lot of different things that go into it. One of the things though that really went into it. Now I just add somebody to be good in this field. One thing that’s like really useful is being good at both not just the sales aspect but also the technical aspect to some degree. People sometimes overlook that or they lean on one in the other but you really got to be good at both.
I was always interested in both. I started engineering but I didn’t want the setup. That’s how I ended up as a sales engineer short a little bit of a story. Because I like talking to people and doing all the stuff and doing business. That really helps because then you can have some ingenuity like, “The job needs to be a lot less,” and then you’re like, “All right. Well, maybe we have this option.” We got to be creative here. Maybe you have a discussion with that contractor or whatever the builder in your case or whatever. It was like different options that you can do so that came in a lot.
That ingenuity came in a lot. I mean there were times where we cut jobs substantially. There were even times where hell, it wasn’t our job like I would redesign a job. I completely redesign them. Once to the extent where like without the AutoCAD from the engineer and I remember I was watching the World World Cup and I was sitting there on a Sunday and I was redoing some of their calculations. I didn’t even have to do with this but it was like what it took to get the project and we had a sales manager. It’s pretty good. Whatever it takes just do it to get the project, right? I was like, simple but good advice.
It’s interesting though because you made the really good point there that I think one of the reasons why contractors sometimes struggle with their business development people is because they don’t have the necessary technical background and they don’t take the time to train them and so you just have these nice people running around but they’re not really that productive.
Yeah, there is the stereotype, again, I’m not saying anything about the guy that just comes and drops off. That’s right.
No, that’s what it is. Yeah.
Not that that’s bad but you also want to try to be a little bit more than that guy.
Some substance.
Yeah. You don’t have to be a full-blown like I can install this job myself either, don’t get me wrong. I’ll tell you one thing I did for example, I worked at a manufacturer and we sold the stuff but I actually was I really wanted to know how it’s installed. I actually called contractors and shadowed them and I went and pulled wire myself. That helped a lot like being a contractor, no I didn’t do it enough but I know what they go through like, okay pull and pull this and I did that with a lot of different parties, right? Now I know like what it’s like on the field. I’m talking about contractors.
This is actually easier because of this and I actually did. I actually know. That helped a lot. I didn’t do all that much, but even if a few times dips helped a massive, massive amount because you got to realize people always think that experience in terms of years. First of all, the number of years of experience you have doesn’t matter because based on what I told you earlier, the quality matters a lot more. You could be sitting there and you’re not even asking basic questions. You have no foundation and you’re there for 10 years and you’re like, “I don’t even know what this product is.”
The number of years of experience you have made matters but the quality matters a lot more. Click To TweetThat actually happens. Right? It’s like the quality, but also when you’re coming from zero, you can gain that first bit of experience really really fast. If you’re new and let’s say you’ve never just seen a side of the business or you don’t know how it works on the field, especially if you work out of contract it’s even easier just be like, I want to tell the manager, tell whoever be like, look can I just get a few days a week, I don’t want to sell anything. I’m going to go on the job site and just treat me like a worker, treat me like a fieldsman, and just tell me what to do.
Tell me to pull wire tell me to put this conduit or whatever. Then that one week is going to give you massive confidence because now you went from zero to one week, which is an infinite percentage. That’s really key. I would say again, the management, and the executives have to facilitate that and understand that. Sometimes executives overlook that especially if they haven’t been in that themselves. It goes back to what I was saying about types of executives. You haven’t been in that yourself. You’re from another industry. It might not be that important.
If you sell widgets or something or you sell, whatever like phones or something. It’s like, okay, you don’t really have to understand the inner workings of the phone, but it is actually important. It’s very important in construction. You got to facilitate that and give them the chance and it’s nothing wrong with like okay, we’re going to wait a month or two before we put this guy on the road. People think it’s going to delay my revenue but it’s really not because he’s not going to be doing anything useful if they don’t want anything anyways. It’s really not.
Putting Processes In Place
If I’m going to be coming after this idea of process improvement, as we’re wrapping up here, give me three steps that I need to take immediately to begin to move towards putting in place processes that work and that benefit the business.
Yeah, absolutely. The first thing and it’s always going to be the first thing is to find out where you are today. Take a cold hard look at where are we today. Again, don’t feel bad. There’s no bad answer. In fact, if anything it’s going to give you an idea of how much room there is for improvement, which is always great. If I told you that you could come today with the same exact resources, you can get 10% more sales with the same exact resources because you’re just improve your process.
Everybody’s going to think that’s good news, right? That starts by finding out. Where are you today? What are we doing? What are we getting? Where’s our issues? The second thing is you’re going to want to get the right tools in place to help you kind of with this process. Once you kind of decide what the process is, you’re going to want tools. You’re going to want to have like a CRM maybe you want to have like a bidding tool. You do not have different tools like a tech stack, right? Assess where you’re tech stack is today, right? What tools do you have right now? What are you using?
What are you not using? Where are the gaps? Again, it all starts with the business first because sometimes people get excited about tools but then like, you can have the best tools in the world. The house isn’t going to build itself. It’s not how it works. Right? You need to know what you’re doing with the tool. If you’re in construction, you know this. You need to know what you’re doing until you have skilled labor doing this stuff with the tool. You need to have a plan to use the tool. It’s not about the tools first and a lot of people will get excited and jump into the tool but then that doesn’t really do anything.
First understand where you are, where you want to go, where you need to go, and then kind of the tools and start there. As far as processes if you’re only going to optimize like two things. I’d say the first one is when people are coming inputs to your business, people are requesting bids, people requesting or whatever make sure make 100% sure that’s like airtight there’s a reminder, there’s this whatever that like we got to get back to them. That’s really key because people who potentially want to work with you and if you’re just like kind of like not there then that’s like kind of the worst ways of job. Make sure of that, airtight whatever.
Then the other thing is like you also want to make sure like following that through that you have a good follow-up on a lot of the stuff that you quote and that you’re able to like look at that and see because it brings up more macroscopic conversations where it’s like you go to somebody and you’re like and for those who’ve had to have these conversations, but only when you look at it because you don’t realize day to day. You’re like wait a minute, we quoted this guy 30 jobs we got one. There’s no way in business if that’s all they got. There’s no way. It’s like, “Dude, what’s going?”
You guys haven’t given us anything. You give us a tiny job like a $10,000 job. We quoted you like $30 million worth of work. What’s going on? Then you have that conversation like you guys even want to work with us because we’re also not like a quoting house. Do you guys want to work with us? Maybe they’re like your prices are too high. Well, okay. What can we do about that? We’re competitive on these jobs, but not these jobs. Let’s just call Evija. you can have these conversations, right? A lot of people don’t do that.
Again, sometimes you don’t notice because like day to day getting ten quotes in a week, you’re quoting different people, getting some order, some places are really good, some please aren’t but you’re not really sitting and thinking of this one company didn’t give us anything. It’s not necessarily immediately obvious. I would definitely look at that and then I’m adding a thing but the the transition between sales and project management is really key. I was going to say even though project management necessarily can’t win you. Well, they can’t win you the first order.
They can definitely lose the second order, and they can also win you the second order too. Sometimes people like I had a really good experience with the project. I want to work with you guys. I don’t even care if it’s a little bit more but all the time. Actually, if they come back because they had good service, they are less likely to be as price-sensitive. It still can be ridiculous but they’re less likely to be as price sensitive because they’re like at least I’m getting peace of mind. That’s really important. People pay for peace of mind all the time and it’s worth it. It makes sense for business wise too. Like if I’m not going to have to spend all this time fixing mistakes, then fine, whatever. I’ll pay an extra 5%, who cares. This is totally worth it.
When you’re looking at the processes then you’ve got to first evaluate where are we today. Assess the tech stack to see if you have the right tools in place and then focus on making sure incoming leads are airtight. That you have a good follow-up with the stuff that you’ve bid and then that these changeover between sales and project management is really dialed in.
The first two are essentially just macro what you got to do. The next three are like if you’re only going to optimize a few things in your process, start with these. That’s kind of like the hierarchy of the two. Yeah. Assess where you are. Assess your tools and then you could optimize a lot of things but if you’re like, I’m I only want to do a couple of things then do those three things that we just say.
Push Analytics
Excellence. Tell us a little bit more about your business and stuff and how people can get in touch with you.
Yeah, absolutely. I run Push Analytics where a full-service visual agency we do. We do a lot of different things beyond the process stuff. We do process consulting. We help people build out their CRMs. We’re a top-tier HubSpot partner, like the Platinum tier. We also work with other platforms as well. We do marketing. We have a growth ads team. We have a kind of we’ve worked with a lot of different types of businesses.
It’s pretty cool because we see what works and how people kind of reach that point where it works. I think I like to think of us as business engineers. We’re not working on like solving a specific feature or whatever. We’re actually working on trying to engineer the business and that’s kind of like I’m always taking. We started with growth ads. I was like how we took it and that’s how we ended up in this space. It’s kind of where the business engineers.
Excellent. We’re going to have links in the show notes to your website so people can reach out to you and, Moustafa, I appreciate your insights. Thanks for joining today.
Yeah, I’ll just add one thing if that’s okay.
Please.
Especially, I really love talking about construction. That’s like where I kind of like grew up.
That’s cool.
It was like really fun. I’m having a good time here. If people want to reach out and I’ll take the call just reach out to us at [email protected]. Just put in the title like Construction Genius Council. I’ll happily do, no cost or whatever, I’ll sit down and chat. We’ll chat for like 20 minutes or whatever and kind of go through if you want to just pick somebody’s brain or you need help or whatever, but I’m happy to just kind of like jump in and talk. Just make sure you put that in the title so the team knows to like specifically route it to me and I can pick to call you.
Great. Again, if you want to reach out to Moustafa specifically email [email protected] put Construction Genius in the subject line. It’ll get forwarded to Moustafa and he’ll get in touch with you and have a deeper conversation with you about how you can improve your processes. Excellent. Appreciate your time, man, and thanks again for joining us.
Thanks for having me.
—
Hey, this is Eric. Thank you for listening to today’s topic. I hope that you came away with some killer takeaways on how to improve your process and thanks to Moustafa for spending some time with us here today. Just a quick reminder. You can reach out to Moustafa. [email protected] put construction genius into the subject line and Moustafa will reach out to you and give you a free consultation on how to improve your processes.
I think that would be a good use of your time because he has some tremendous insights that would benefit your business. Again, thank you for listening to Construction Genius today. Please give us a rating and a review. Hit the five stars if you think we’ve earned. Write a few lines about why you like Construction Genius podcast and do that where you get your podcasts, whether it’s Apple, Google, Spotify, or even on YouTube, you can leave a comment under the video. Thanks again for watching and listening. We will see you on the next episode.
Important Links
- Moustafa Moursy
- Schneider Electric
- Construction Genius: Effective, Hands-On, Practical, Simple, No-BS Leadership, Strategy, Sales, and Marketing Advice for Construction Companies
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
About Moustafa Moursy
He gained a comprehensive understanding of the construction space and commercial processes while working for Schneider Electric, one of the largest electrical manufacturers nationwide, known for their renowned “Square D” product brand. Moustafa’s exceptional talent lies in guiding clients through the rationalization and optimization of their businesses. Through careful observation, in-depth conversations with key stakeholders, and collaborative creation of elegant structures and processes, he empowers contractors, distributors and other construction professionals to streamline communication, operations, and overall growth.
