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Working With What’s Within Your Control

managing projectsTalking with my various contacts (dealers, vendors and whoever), discussions lately always seem to turn to whatever new and unforeseen complications have made life difficult. It’s been a real smorgasbord, from supply chain delays and material shortages to climate disasters and more. And that’s just the last six months. It really does feel like the motto for this decade should be, “Oh no. What now?”

All these issues have consequences, sometimes immediately and sometimes further down the road. What those consequences are may vary from one company to another and one channel to another, but one that isn’t hard to anticipate happening to AV installers is the delays on your projects.

Job site delays aren’t a new problem by any means. They’re hard to avoid, and it’s rare to ever have a project that doesn’t experience one delay or another. It may not even be your fault or the fault of any of your partners. Since most projects have multiple contractors working in sequence, delays from one of them may mean delays for you.

The fact is, since the AV guys inevitably go in last, you can count on other people’s delays impacting you.

Delays are a problem and come with costs of their own. Having nothing for your people to do until you can get back to work costs both time and money. Not to mention that pushing one project further down the road risks impacting scheduled work coming up on other projects that are committed. That is, assuming those other projects themselves don’t get delayed. Try not to think about that.

Considering how many of the cards you’re being dealt that are beyond your control, it’s crucial to focus on what you do have under control. Hopefully, you’ve always actively sought diversity in the size of the projects in your team’s funnel. If you haven’t, it may be too late, but there’s no time like the present. Like many problems, this is easier to solve in advance before it becomes a problem. The rationale for striking a balance in keeping projects of different sizes on your books is because, even without new external pressures, large, complex jobs are more prone to delays, while small jobs are (usually) quicker to complete and — most importantly — get paid for.

As great as it is to have big, complex projects (and equally big invoices), it’s imperative to cultivate a steady stream of smaller jobs in the pipe, slotting those in amongst the days-long install phases of the big projects. Not to mention the fact that big projects that take a lot of time to work through their phases also take a long time for those progress invoices to be paid. Getting paid for those small jobs keeps your cash flow happier.

That said, there are going to be scenarios where all your projects are going to be delayed because the materials you need for all of them are delayed. That motivates a furious scramble to find a vendor, any vendor who has what you need. Being able to look for a new source is under your control; whether or not you can find one is not.

As it was explained to me a long time ago, professionalism isn’t about not having problems; you’re always going to have problems. Instead, professionalism is about how you overcome those problems. You’re not always going to get dealt a good hand of cards, at least not lately, so be creative in figuring out how to play your hand.

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