- Highspire
- Posts
- The 4 hallmarks of bad strategy (that hold construction businesses back)
The 4 hallmarks of bad strategy (that hold construction businesses back)
This is what keeps good builders from scaling.
Most construction companies don’t really plan their year.
Sure, they might roll into January with a few goals:
Hit a certain revenue target
Make a couple key hires
Fix a few parts of the business that keep slipping through the cracks
But for the most part?
They go off of gut instinct, play each month by ear, and start the cycle all over again come December.
Plenty of builders can keep their business afloat like this indefinitely.
Some might even grow (slowly).
But let’s be honest... it’s not a strategy!
If you want to actually grow your construction company year over year, fast, and eventually step away from the daily operations, you’ll need to dial in your strategic planning before anything else.
We’re going to unpack this topic over the next few emails.
Today, we’re going to cover:
How to spot a bad strategic plan in your own construction business, before you waste the next 12 months chasing the wrong goals.
The 4 hallmarks of a bad strategic plan
You can’t build a good strategy until you know what a bad one looks like.
Richard Rumelt’s book Good Strategy / Bad Strategy is a fantastic resource on this front. It’s not aimed at construction companies specifically, but every builder should pick up a copy and read it front to back.
(If the Amazon link doesn’t work in your region, you may have to Google the book instead.)
Rumelt says there are four major hallmarks of a bad strategy:
1. Failure to face the problem
A lot of construction business owners never stop to define the actual challenges standing in the way of growth.
In simple language: You can’t solve a problem you haven’t identified!
Without a clear challenge, you might stay busy all year... but that doesn’t mean your plan’s actually working.
2. Mistaking goals for strategy
Saying you want to “grow the team” or hit $5M in revenue is a goal — not an actionable strategy.
Most annual plans fall into this trap. They’re really just a wishlist of goals, and not much more.
3. Bad strategic objectives
This usually shows up in one of two ways.
The first is the laundry list: a scattered set of goals, usually pulled from a team meeting, where every little idea makes the cut.
To make it feel more intentional, it gets labeled “long-term”... and then most of those items get ignored for another 12 months.
The second is what Rumelt calls a “blue-sky” objective.
These are vague aspirations like “be the top builder in the region,” with no plan to get there. It sounds nice, but it skips the hard work of figuring out what needs to change first.
4. Fluff
This is when vague ideas get dressed up in buzzwords to sound more strategic than they really are.
Phrases like: “We’re optimizing operational excellence across all phases of delivery.”
What does that actually mean? Nobody knows!
If your strategy wouldn’t make sense to a foreman on site, it’s probably fluff.
What’s next?
Over the next two emails, we’ll dive into:
How top-performing builders handle uncertainty before setting goals or timelines
How to build a strategic plan that actually works
In the meantime...
If you’re ready to level up how you plan, lead, and grow your construction business...
This is exactly the kind of work we do every day with our clients inside Highspire Coaching.
If you’re thinking about joining the next cohort, book a call to apply here.
Forward always,
Highspire