A sampling of industry wisdom and sage advice from seasoned home building pros
By Scott Sedam | Professional Builders
Is there any business topic covered more often than “business strategy”? Just for fun, I entered that term on Amazon.com in the “books” subcategory and got more than 40,000 results. Next, I refined my search by clicking “four stars & above” for the average customer review, limiting the results to only the highest-rated books, and that still turned up more than 10,000 items. Incredible!
Where do we start? In its most basic definition, strategy is simply a set of plans to achieve a goal. So how does this topic get so complicated that tens of thousands of people—including yours truly—are compelled to sit down, write about it, and then go to the trouble to get those ideas published? I believe it’s because most of us are fascinated to watch and learn how people create a mental plan for a business using a variety of resources and then convert that plan into tangible results—or not. I heard a statistic on the radio just yesterday that more than 90 percent of startup companies fail within 18 months, which makes learning about the successful ones even more compelling.
At Professional Builder’s recent 40 Under 40 conference at PCBC in San Francisco, I presented on “12 Things I Wish I Knew About Home Building Before I Turned 40,” based on the column of the same title that ran in last month’s issue of Pro Builder. Additionally, I told the participants I’d send the column out to a group of industry “gray hairs” to see what they had to offer on the topic.
