This is the second of three essays on my lessons, struggles, and successes in and around time management within the context of running a small construction business.
In my first year or two of working for myself, I found very quickly that bidding is tricky. Even with the advantage of having served as an estimator at a large company for a few months, I still struggled to build good, accurate, and reasonable bids. When bidding, one essentially considers a project deeply, attempts to anticipate every step of work that the project will require, assigns hours, materials, and subcontractor costs to each piece of the project according to a breakdown of trades. The estimator will then then tally those costs, assign detailed notes each trade (which will become the definition of the project scope), then add a markup for profit and overhead and send it off to be challenged or approved. It’s much more difficult to bid large complex remodels that might be full of unhelpful secrets waiting to be revealed in that first week of demolition, as opposed to those early days when I was simply trying to consider what it would take to replace the fascia on my neighbor’s house. Yet the consequences of bad bidding in either case are catastrophic to a business.
Especially in those early days, I would find extra ways to make my bid work challenging. I was keenly and privately conscious that I did not fit the typical builder mold; I just didn’t know any other construction workers who enjoyed listening to podcast tomes on Roman History while they tore out bathroom tile. In many ways I embraced that uniqueness and set out to be something different from the average builder, but in other ways, I allowed it to affect my confidence in my abilities, and thereby affect my bids. Instead of looking at my neighbor’s fascia and thinking about how long it would take me to replace it, I would look at my neighbor’s fascia and consider how long I thought it should take me to replace it. The standard I used to define what it should take me to do the work was a mythical contractor in my head, born out of my own self esteem issues, who was faster, cleaner, and better than me. Bidding this way inevitably made problems down the road. Even when I made no bad cuts and fit the fascia together like a puzzle, I still wasn’t as fast as that perfect mythical contractor in my head that I had used as a basis for my bid price. As a result, I almost always ended up working late on the day after the day that I had thought I would be done with the project, deeply frustrated by the greatly reduced hourly rate I was now earning.
Eventually, in an effort to stem the flow of losses streaming from my poor bids, I switched to a time and materials basis. Since I seemed to have a hard time considering my skills and speed accurately enough to provide a good bid, I instead attempted to set up jobs with a fair market billing rate, and then bill simply and cleanly according to the hours and materials the project took. In theory, this would cover those lost hours I had given away so many times in my bids; the hours spent picking up lumber, adapting to hidden conditions, and replacing dulled blades. Yet the specter of my self-esteem still managed to find a way into my income, this time showing up in billing instead of bidding. In my head, that mythical contractor never made a bad cut, never had to go back to the hardware store to get another piece of fascia or a few more screws, and never went long on a project simply because he was better at my job than I was. So I wouldn’t bill for hours that I felt I was undeserving of; instead I billed for the time that I thought the job should have taken me rather than the time that the job actually took me.
I struggled my way quietly through those early years; my issues were humiliating, so I smiled big, worked hard, and gave positive answers every time someone asked how things were going. And despite my foibles, there was a steady creep of improvement that gave me enough reason to give those positive answers. A few years into my business, I had improved my planning, and was faster and cleaner in my work, and I had built enough experience to know what things costed and how long they actually took to execute. With my increased competence came an increased confidence. Mistakes and inefficiencies felt more like exceptions, and less like rules and my work on the ground was starting to look a lot more like the work of that mythical standard I had set out in the earliest years. Yet the success of my business, the great project of my middle years, was still heavily reliant upon the hourly rate at which I valued myself, along with all of the surrounding emotional baggage I had imposed upon the process of establishing that value. Even as that rate and the subsequent income increased, I found myself in an unhappy world of dollars and hours, viewing everything I did through the heavy veil of opportunity cost. What might have started as a simple evaluation to determine if it was more efficient for me to hire a lawn service than mow the lawn myself, eventually became a cost analysis of every church meeting, vacation, or hobby I entertained. When I started quietly tallying my hourly rate against the time I spent with my kids, I realized something in my thinking might be deeply unhealthy.
It was in this time that I was providentially gifted a mentor. I met him at a class my church offered, where we were paired up by the teacher to discuss the topics of the course over an afternoon. In the initial perfunctory niceties, my discussion partner and I discovered a lot of common ground. Some 15- 20 years to my senior, he was also a contractor and he saw in me the rookie that he once was. We subsequently gave the minimum attention to the class content and devoted the rest of the afternoon to talking shop. We continued to meet periodically for the next several months before he moved away, and among many other topics, he coached me to a much healthier relationship with time, billing, and home life.
As a provider of services, my income will always be tied in some way to an hourly rate, which will force me to repeatedly reconcile my relationship between time, money, and ultimately my personal value within that context. The ability to handle this process in a healthy and successful way demands a level of character and emotional health that I’m not sure I can consistently inhabit and may well take the work of a lifetime to perfect. There is no way to escape the quirks of my own character, and I still need to manage my own insecurities or suffer business losses due to my own lack of courage. Yet at the same time, it is imperative that I detach myself from this work and allow myself to be wholly present for the life that exists beyond work. Time is money, but both are pretty terrible masters.