Episode 446: The 4 Questions to Ask Before You Try to Fix What’s Not Working

Todd Dawalt (00:18.414)
Have you ever had that feeling that something is off in your construction business, but you just can’t quite put your finger on it? Have you ever looked at your sales, your team, your projects, your margins, or your schedule and thought? Something just isn’t right. But what is it? Have you ever caught yourself thinking, maybe we need another meeting, or I need to get more involved, or we need more software, I need to hire someone, or I just need to put in more hours for a while? Have you ever

Tried to fix one problem and then accidentally created three more. And what if the thing that your business needs right now is not more action, more meetings, more software, more rules, or even more oversight from you? What if the first move is to pause and ask better questions? That’s what we’re going to talk about today. Four questions you need to ask. You’re listening to the Construction Leading Edge podcast.

From constructionleadinged.com, where we are all about systematizing your construction business to maximize freedom, impact, and wealth. My name is Todd DeWalt, and my team and I have helped over nearly 500 construction companies now over the past 10 years eliminate chaos, grow their profits, and grow their teams. So be sure to stick around until the end to hear question number four because

It’s the one that may be the most important if you feel like you’re too close to the business to see what’s really going on. And if you’re wondering how do I figure all of this out by myself, there’s actually a better question. So, a couple of quotes about questions. Peter Drucker, the great management guru, once said the most serious mistakes are not the result of wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong questions.

Tony Robbins said this: the quality of your life is a direct reflection of the quality of the questions you are asking yourself. So it all starts with the questions. So see if any of this sounds familiar. When something feels off in your business, maybe your first instinct is to just do more. More meetings, more check-ins, more hours, more software, more people, more rules, more, more, more, more, more. And you could feel that.

Todd Dawalt (02:39.116)
Maybe something you can feel that something isn’t working, but you just can’t put your finger on it. I had a client tell me that a few months ago. There’s something not right, but I just can’t put my finger on it. Maybe sales are down, maybe the team just feels out of sync. Maybe the projects feel chaotic. Maybe margins are slipping. Customers are asking more questions. You’re getting pulled into more decisions. Maybe it feels like you you’ve lost traction.

You’re just not getting momentum. I’ve heard people say things like, it feels like I’m running with my feet in quicksand. And the frustrating part about that for a lot of people is not knowing where to start. You’re not sure if you’re going to spend your energy in the right place, or you’re going to waste a bunch of time over the next few weeks or next few months, and it just won’t produce any results. You don’t know what the issue is. Is it sales? Is it

Pre-construction? Is it estimating? Is it production? Is it the handoff? Is it communication? Is it an accountability issue? Or is it something you just don’t even know? Maybe it’s something else entirely. So you start throwing action at the problem and throwing time at the problem, maybe throwing money at the problem, but more time, more money, more action in the wrong direction doesn’t create.

progress, it actually creates more complexity and it can create more problems.

But when when something feels off, when something just doesn’t feel right, every action can feel justified, right? And when every action feels justified, you can you can just wear yourself out. You can exhaust yourself trying to do everything. You there’s this need to do something. Man, you need Todd, you need to do something. You need to do as much as you possibly can. Adding meetings, rules, time, software, complexity.

Todd Dawalt (04:42.22)
When when the the better first move is to just pause and ask four diagnostic questions. I I I can tell you after doing this for thirty years, the best thing you can do when something’s not right.

Or maybe when things are wrong, when you know things are wrong, or when things just don’t feel right, but you can’t put your finger on it, the best thing to do is to pause and ask four diagnostic questions. Don’t waste energy. Don’t just jump into action too quickly. maybe you’ve been guilty of ready fire aim. I know quite a few people who just like, something’s wrong, boom, let’s just fire some shots at it, and then we’ll

We’ll see how that goes, right? We’re just gonna ready fire aim because action is the best thing. And that’s just not the case. You can accidentally make things worse. You can accidentally make the business more complex and make it heavier. You can add a meeting that everybody now has to attend. You can add another rule that somebody now has to enforce. You can add software that people have to get trained on and have to maintain. You can add oversight.

Now that’s more decisions that have to run through you. You can add more follow-ups, and now your team waits for you instead of owning the work. And before long, that thing or the things you added to fix the problem become another layer of complexity. And that’s why the the pause matters. I’m not talking about a three-month strategic planning, not a three-day off-site.

not creating some enormous document just just pause long enough to ask four questions before before you start doing something before you take action okay so before we get into those four questions here’s the simple framework step one is just pause when something’s not right or when something’s going wrong don’t immediately add more action more meetings more oversight more complexity just pause right just pause I heard a story

Todd Dawalt (06:54.976)
About a there was a an army ranger in Vietnam, but Captain America type, grizzled veteran. He’d started out in World War II, Korea, and then he was in Vietnam. And one of the guys who was in his squad said that when the mortars would start coming in around them, people c people typically panicked. They would just start running around. So what he would do is this grizzled Captain America type.

non-commissioned officer, he would point at two guys and say, You, you, panic. And then he would point at the rest of them and say, The rest of you guys, let’s get some work done. And this guy always had took time to put a piece of gum in. Even though everything was kind of going crazy around him, there was always time for a pause. So step one is to pause. Step two is to diagnose with these four questions. You may want to write these down. These are questions you can use.

May want to keep them in your phone. These are questions your team, you can train your team to ask themselves and ask each other. Use these questions to look at what changed, what’s working, and and how it’ll give you a different lens through which to look at this situation. And then once you’ve asked these questions, you can decide what action actually makes sense. And the good news is there may you may not need to do anything. You may actually need to do the opposite.

Of something. I’ll explain that. So let me take a quick break for something that might hit close to home with you. If you are, if you own a construction business, especially custom home building, remodeling, or a commercial GC, and your business basically lives in your head, and your nervous system is the foundation of your business. This might be for you. I was on a business evaluation call recently with a builder who was doing multi-million dollar custom homes and big renovations.

And on paper from the outside, everything looked pretty great. But behind the scenes, he was working 60, 70 hours a week. And it came out that he was spending about 75% of his time on in reactive mode and putting out fires. When I asked him about his handoff from the office to the field, he graded it as a C minus or a D. See, they were starting jobs before scope was nailed down, subs weren’t clearly lined up, selections were halfway there.

Todd Dawalt (09:23.926)
Still missing a lot. And there was a lot of, hey, we’ll figure this out as we go. The just enough to start trap. And as a result, that led to costly mistakes, delays, and then there were a couple of near disasters on high-profile projects that he could absolutely not afford to screw up. So we went through and evaluated his business. We found hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in the hidden profit that was leaking out between rework.

giveaways, lost productivity, schedule delays, and opportunity cost. And the common thread was a week pre-construction and handoff process. There was a pre-construction deficiency. And that call is what I want to invite you into. It’s a free, about 45-minute business evaluation call with my team. We’ll walk through a simple diagnostic to grade your office to field handoff, quantify the hidden profit.

That might be in your business and how much profit could be bleeding out, and map out what a real operating system for your business would look like so it can run without everything going through you. Then if it looks like we can help, we’ll schedule a second call to talk through that implementation program and our specific recommendations that fit your situation. And if it if it doesn’t look like a fit or we can’t help you, which is the case for 60 to 70% of the people we talk to.

You’ll still walk away with clarity and a concrete plan that you can take action on. So, either way, no matter what happens, my goal is that my team leaves you better than we found you. Here’s the deal: we only have capacity to take on a handful of clients each month. So if you want your business to look different twelve months from now, now’s the time to take action. Don’t wait. Click the link in the show notes to book your business evaluation call or go to constructionleadingedge.com forward slash apply.

A P P L Y, that’s constructionleadingedge dot com forward slash apply or click the show notes and click the link in the show notes and book your free business evaluation call. So now let’s get to these questions. Okay. Here’s question number one.

Todd Dawalt (11:37.43)
What did you stop doing that was working for you? This is a good question to start with. What what did you stop doing that was working? If sales are down, did you stop networking? Did you stop posting on social media? Did you stop putting out yard signs at your projects? If your team seems to be out of sync, did you stop having weekly meetings? Did you stop communicating priorities to them? If your projects seem more chaotic and margins are down, did you stop having

Handoff meetings? Did you stop getting all of the selections before you handed off a project? Sometimes you don’t know something was working until you stop doing it. And this is a powerful first question because the answer may not be to create something brand new or be creative. The answer may be to restart something old. Maybe the business didn’t break because

You need a new system. Maybe it started drifting because you stopped doing that basic thing that was quietly holding things together. Maybe the the weekly meeting that felt boring, repetitive, or unnecessary. Maybe that was the case until you stopped doing it and the team started drifting. Maybe the the handoff meeting from the office to the field felt like just another meeting until you stopped doing it and projects started.

Launching with missing information, unclear expectations, and that handoff grade went from a an A minus to a B minus, maybe to a C. Maybe the the marketing, the yard signs, the networking, the social media posts didn’t feel urgent when business was good until you stopped doing them and the pipeline started to dry up. So before you ask what new thing do we need to come up with, what new thing should we do? Ask

What did we stop doing that was already working? That’s the first question. The second question is, what should you stop doing? What should be removed from your process? The second question is, what should you stop doing? There’s this thing that humans do, it’s called the additive bias, and it’s our tendency to solve problems by adding something.

Todd Dawalt (13:58.444)
We tend to, when there’s a problem, we want to add things instead of considering what should be removed. So when something isn’t working, our brains naturally look for the next thing to add. What else can we do? Another meeting, another checklist, another rule, another approval step, another person, another piece of software, another AI agent, another fill in the blank. And in construction, that feels responsible, right? When when things aren’t going well, it it’s like, what are you gonna do?

What are you going to do about it? It feels like leadership to do something. It feels like you’re taking action. It feels like you’re fixing the issue. But sometimes the answer is to stop doing something, just to delete it altogether. About five years ago, I was doing a deep dive with a team in Virginia, a custom home builder, and they were building doing somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 to 50 homes a year.

And we were mapping out their process. And I kept hearing about this one particular step. And every time somebody mentioned this step, people just rolled their eyes, like, geez, I hate when we have to do this. And I hate this. These things take hours. And it was the electrical walkthrough. The house was framed. And part of their process was they would one of the salespeople would meet with the customer, go to the home that’s framed up, and they would do an electrical walkthrough. And these electrical walkthroughs turned

into two, three, four hour sessions that just covered everything. Every issue came up and they hated them. So I said, what would it take to eliminate the electrical walkthrough?

Todd Dawalt (15:46.166)
People started looking at each other and said, you know what, we could probably just spend a little more time on our electrical plans, have lighting plans and lighting layouts, and just delete the owner looked at his team and said, That’s it. We’re cutting, we’re cutting these out. We’re not doing electrical walkthroughs anymore. We’re gonna find another way to do that. So instead of trying to figure out how to do the electrical walkthroughs more effectively, the the better question was, what if what would it take to eliminate this thing?

So Peter Drucker, the management expert, said this. There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all. I’ll say that again. There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all. So a lot of times you’re trying to do things more efficiently.

You’re thinking, how can we do this more efficiently? How can we use AI to do this? And the answer, a better a better question would be, what would it take to eliminate this? Should we be doing this at all?

I talk about the 80-20 principle a lot. I use the 80-20 principle a lot. And the 80-20 principle says that 80% of your results come from 20% of your inputs. So 80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers. 80% of your problems come from 20% of your customers. Same thing with your subcontractors or your people. So according to the 80-20 principle, only about 20%.

Of what you’re doing, 20% of the things you’re spending time on are yielding 80% of the results. So this is good news because that means you could find something that’s taking up time and energy but not producing results and just eliminate it. So here are a few examples. If you’re wondering, am I doing something? Am I trying to do something efficiently that should not be done at all? Here is here are a few examples. Free estimates.

Todd Dawalt (17:54.574)
If you’re doing free estimates and you’re trying to figure out how to do them more efficiently and how to do more of them, better question is how can I get paid for pre-construction? And you should get paid for pre-construction. You may be taking on projects that are not a good fit. You may be taking on projects that are too small. You may be hiring people too fast. I was doing a deep dive four or five years ago.

And it came out that there was a job site superintendent for a custom home builder. And he shared that when he took over the project, he liked to revisit all of the material selections with the customer after they’ve already made the selections. He wanted to start all over and talk about their inspiration. And that resulted in a bunch of changes. So instead of your superintendents efficiently revisiting all of the selections with your customer.

That step should just be eliminated. Free estimates should be eliminated. So this question matters because most business owners default to action and addition. If there’s a problem, you want to add something. You’re like, what else can I do to make this go away? If there’s confusion, add a checklist. If there’s a mistake, add an approval step. If the team misses something, add another layer of oversight. But some of the biggest breakthroughs.

actually come from subtraction by asking what should we stop doing?

One of the most famous examples in business is Steve Jobs. When Steve Jobs came back to Apple in nineteen ninety-seven, Apple had so many products, too many products and too little focus. And one of his major moves was to simplify the product line dramatically and focus the company on a small number of core products.

Todd Dawalt (19:54.036)
One article said that Jobs cut when he got there, Apple had 15 product lines and he cut 70% of their products, narrowing the focus down to four core machines, two laptops and two desktops. He cut, he subtracted 70% of their products. And Apple didn’t turn around because Jobs added more products, more divisions, more committees, more complexity. He did the opposite.

He removed distractions so the best people could focus on the few things that mattered the most. So, question for you to think about: what are you doing that no longer needs to be done? What are you attempting to do efficiently that should not be done at all? What are you doing now that creates more confusion than clarity? What are you doing because that’s how we’ve always done it? Or what are you doing because you see other guys?

In the industry in your market doing it. What’s taking up time and energy and attention and money or decision making capacity that’s just not giving you any bang for your buck? Sometimes the most profitable improvement is not a new process, it’s removing the thing that slows everything down. So the second question is, what should you stop doing?

The third question to ask when things just aren’t going right and you can’t quite put your finger on it is what is actually working for you?

What is actually working for you?

Todd Dawalt (21:31.968)
I have a had a professor in college. He was a an engineering professor named Dr. Wu. W U. And he stood in front of our class of aspiring engineers. And he told us, I’m not going to try, he had a Korean accent. I’m not going to try to replicate that. But he would say, he would wag his fingers at us and say, you guys, you are not doctors. You’re not injured. You’re not creative. You are engineers. You are not that smart.

Your job as an engineer is to find the right formula and turn the crank. Find the right formula, turn the crank. He said that hundreds of times. And he’s right. Find the right formula, turn the crank. So if you find something that’s actually working in business, you need to put everything you’ve got into that thing. You don’t need to be creative. You don’t need to diversify. You don’t need to double down on that thing. Or you don’t.

You you need to double down on that thing. You don’t need to come up with you don’t need to be creative. You need to find one thing that works and then double down on it, quadruple down on it, 10x down on that thing. If you if you find something that’s working in business to generate clients or get referrals or find employees, something in your sales process that works, that’s that is a competitive advantage, and you need to.

Double quadruple 10x down on that thing. You have found the formula and you need to turn the crank. Southwest Airlines is a great example of finding the right formula and turning the crank. They ask the question: what is actually working for you? They figured out that their advantage was not luxury. It was simplicity, speed, low fares, and operational efficiency. They only fly 737s.

Up until recently, they did not have assigned seating. They were all about being the most profitable airline in the world. And they they figured out what their advantage was. They figured out the right formula and they turned the crank. They didn’t try to become Delta or American. They didn’t try to have a business class or first class or any of that stuff. They doubled down on the formula that was already working. They found the right formula and they turned the crank. So for example.

Todd Dawalt (24:00.75)
You can ask yourself, what’s working when it comes to finding customers? What are the projects that are most profitable for you?

maybe when you realize that nailing the handoff and focusing on pre-construction, being very thorough and making all of the selections prior to the start, maybe that’s working for you. This question is especially important because business owners, you guys you often get bored with what works. Here’s the problem: you find something that works and you get bored with it. You find marketing that works, you find an operational strategy that works, you get bored with it, and then you want

You have shiny object syndrome. there’s a shiny object. We should. I saw something about AI. I need to, we need to, and you go to your team and say, we need to figure out how to use AI in our estimating process, even though that’s a solution in search of a problem. So I’ll say this again: this question is especially important because you very likely get bored with what works.

You want something new and shiny, a new offer, a new software, a new process, a new idea, a new employee. But if something’s already working, the opportunity may not be to go find something else. The opportunity may be to put more energy into that thing that’s already producing results. That’s the double down, quadruple down, 10x into that thing that’s actually working. So if referrals are working, how do you get more referrals? How do you make them for referrals more intentional?

Ha ha ha.

Todd Dawalt (25:46.09)
If one type of project is the most profitable, how do you pursue more of those? If pre-construction is where your projects are made or lost, how do you make that process stronger? If you find out that handoff meetings prevent chaos, how do you make them non-negotiable? How do you make them even more effective? Find out what’s working, find the right formula, and turn the crank.

Now the fourth question, this is the one that a lot of people would never think of. I struggled with this until I actually read a book on it.

Most of you, you were probably thinking, How can I do this? How can I figure this stuff out? How can I? How can I? How can I? But the fourth question that you should ask when you pause is who can help me figure this out? Who, not, how? There’s a great book called Who Not How. It’s a it’s a whole different concept. Jocko Willink and Leif Babin talked about a similar concept in

Extreme ownership, they called it cover and move, I think. Instead of having to do things on your own, cover and move. Who can cover me while I move? That’s the the military approach. But the question is who can help me figure this stuff out? Because when something feels off, a lot of you think, How can I fix this? How do I fix this? How do I figure out what’s wrong? How do I figure out the solution? How do I get the team back on track? How do I, how do I, how do I?

And these are reasonable questions, but they can trap you into thinking that you have to solve everything by yourself. Puts you in a box.

Todd Dawalt (27:29.706)
It automatically puts you in the DIY box, the do-it-yourself box. So a better question may be: who can help me see this more clearly? This is the fourth question to ask. Who can help me figure this out? Who can help me see this more clearly? Who, not how? Ask questions like: who has an objective third-party perspective on this? Who can help me see my blind spots?

The nature of a blind spot is you can’t see them.

Another good question is who can help me see the things that I’m too close to? Who has seen this pattern before in other construction businesses? Who can help me look at our processes, our pre-construction, our project flow? Who can who can look at the issues I’m having and be able to say, this is the problem? I had a s an experience like this several years ago. My my left shoulder was incredibly painful.

And I couldn’t really move it, couldn’t raise it. It was incredibly painful to to move. And I was just, I was sure that I would need shoulder surgery. So I went to an orthopedic surgeon and I remember they did an x-ray and they had me sitting in this exam room with my shirt off, waiting. And the doctor walked in and he said, without any question at all, you have idiopathic adhesive capsulitis.

Frozen shoulders.

Todd Dawalt (29:07.986)
And told me exactly what I needed to do. and how did he know that? Because he had studied it and he had seen hundreds of people with my exact same symptoms, and he knew beyond the the shadow of a doubt what the problem was and what the solution was. I thought I knew the solution, but I didn’t know. I just jumped to the conclusion. So that’s the power of getting a an object objective third party.

and asking who can help me with this? Who has seen this pattern before? Because one of the things the hardest things about owning a business is that you’re inside the bottle trying to read the label.

This sounds kind of folksy, but recently I heard somebody say you can’t read the label from inside the pickle jar. You can’t read the label from inside the pickle jar. So you’re you’re close to the people, you’re close to the projects, you’re close to the customers, you’re close to the history, you’re close to the financials.

You know why things are the way they are. And sometimes that closeness makes it hard to see what needs to change. So instead of asking, how do I figure all of this out by myself? Ask who can help me figure this out. This could be somebody on your leadership team, it could be a mentor, it could be a pastor, it could be somebody in your peer group, which, if you’re not part of a peer group, I strongly recommend you do. It could be a coach, could be somebody who’s solved this problem before, or it might be somebody.

Outside the business who can help you see the patterns, the constraints, the profit bleeds that you’re just too close to notice. So to recap, when something isn’t working or when something feels off, pause and ask, number one, what did you stop doing that was working? Number two, what should you stop doing? Number three, what is actually working for you? In other words,

Todd Dawalt (31:10.168)
Find the right formula and turn the crank. What is working for you? And then put all of your energy, 2x, 4x, 10x effort into that. And then number four, who can help me figure this out? Who, not, how? And these four questions will interrupt the instinct just to take action, just to do more. They will help you pause before adding complexity. They’ll help you look at what changed, what should be removed, what should be doubled down on.

And who can help you see what’s missing? It’ll help you step back so you can see the forest from, you can distinguish the forest from the trees. So imagine this. When you you build the habit of pausing and asking these four questions before jumping into action, you start, you stop spinning your wheels. And imagine you and your team do this. You actually move the needle. Things actually change. Not because you worked more hours.

Added more meetings or made the business more complicated. But because you put your energy at the right kind of action and in the right place, you start spending less time reacting to whatever feels urgent. And you start spending more time working on things that actually matter, things that actually move the needle. That might mean more time to think strategically, more time to coach your team, more time for

To be in your deer stand or on the golf course or on your boat. And your team will start to feel that too. When you stop constantly changing things and adding things and reacting to every fire, your team will start to to gain real confidence in you. They’ll trust that you’re not just

Throwing stuff against the wall and hoping it sticks, you’re actually leading instead of just doing more. And over time, that kind of leadership compounds. And your business starts to grow more organically because you’re putting more energy into what’s already working. You’re pruning away the things that aren’t. You’re removing things that aren’t working. You’re getting help to see the constraints and the blind spots that are hard to identify from inside. And instead of forcing growth through just brute force.

Todd Dawalt (33:27.18)
And more hustle and more complexity, you get this flywheel effect that builds momentum in your business. And the business gets lighter, the team gets stronger, you get more focused, and things, things finally start to change, right? So let me ask you something. If you’re if you’re building custom homes, remodeling, or you’re a commercial general contractor.

And you’re starting jobs before scope, subs, and selections are truly dialed in. If you have a pre-construction deficiency, how long can you keep scaling like that before something cracks? Another way to ask it is: if you were to scale, what what breaks first? That’s exactly what we will unpack on a free business evaluation call. In about 45 minutes or so, my team will help you grade your current handoff.

From the office to the field, put some real numbers to the hidden profit bleeds in your business, and then sketch out what a repeatable operating system would look like in your business from pre-construction through completion. We’ll talk about what will what working with us looks like. But if it’s not a fit, that’s no problem. we only work with 30 or 40% of the people we talk to. But if it is a fit, we’ll book a follow-up talk to

Go through the implementation program for you and exactly what our recommendations would be. Either way, we’ll leave you better than we found you. You’ll leave with clarity and some concrete next steps. So if you want to book your business evaluation call, there’s no risk, it’s not a sales pitch. Go to constructionleadingedge.com forward slash apply, A-P-P-L-Y, or click the link in the show notes to book your business evaluation call. So I want you to I want to leave you with a five-minute action item.

Want you to ask yourself, what is one thing you can do in the in less than five minutes to take the first step toward implementing what we’ve talked about? What’s one thing you can do in the next five minutes or less to take the first step toward implementing what we’ve talked about? You may want to open up a note on your phone, grab a sheet of paper, write down one thing in your business that currently feels off, and then answer these four questions. What did we stop doing that was working? What should we stop doing?

Todd Dawalt (35:50.37)
What’s actually working that we should double down on? Find the right formula, turn the crank. And then fourth, who can help me see what I might be missing? Who, not how? Don’t try to solve the whole problem yet. Just pause and ask those diagnostic questions. yeah, I hope you got some value out of this podcast. If you could take a moment, if you did get some value, and leave a rating and a review or and or share this with somebody who needs to hear it.

I would appreciate it. It means a lot. If you have a comment, if you’re watching on YouTube or listening on Spotify, leave a comment. I’m curious what which of these questions resonated with you. And yeah, until next time, my name is Todd DeWalt from constructionleadingedge dot com. I appreciate you listening. Thanks so much. And I’ll see you next time.