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On March 16th, UCLA Anderson forecast officially declared that the “U.S. economy has entered a recession, ending the expansion that began in July 2009.” Because of construction being deemed “essential”, most of our construction clients have yet to feel the full impact. We have had very few of our contractors report of jobs being shut […]

I received a year-end financial statement for one of our contractor clients, and the results were truly extraordinary! Not only did they manage to have their biggest revenue year ever, they also had their highest gross profit margin. I asked one of the owners what they would attribute their success to, and I thought his

Chris Thornburg of Beacon Economics spoke to the Southern California Contractors Association in January and had a different view than most economists in media. According to a Wall Street Journal survey, 75% of economists polled believe there will be a recession in the next two years, but Thornburg disagrees and says there is, “still little

I was cleaning out some old files the other weekend, and I came across an article published in ENR in January 2008 by construction management expert, Dr. Thomas Schleifer, titled Success Can Bring Deadly Distractions. The article reminded me of when I graduated college in 2003 and started to take over ownership of my agency.

Some might recognize the title of this article, as it was borrowed from a book written by Jim Collins. In his book, Collins explores why certain companies that rose to become the best in their industry eventually spiraled downward. Companies like Circuit City, Kodak or Sears that once dominated their respective sectors and have faded

One of the really interesting things about the surety business is you get to look behind the curtain of a ton of contractors’ operations. Daily, we get to hear the opportunities and struggles that our customers face while at the same time seeing how the financial results play out.

When most of us hear the words “taking inventory”, we typically think of reviewing physical assets that a business has for sale to determine their true value and see which ones have become obsolete. A similar review can be periodically done on a company’s “intangible assets” or key operating areas like field operations, business operations

There was an eye-opening article in ENR on March 14, 2019 about Munilla Construction Management (MCM), the prime contractor involved in the bridge collapse at Florida International University that left six people dead last year. MCM recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy as it was unable to win new projects, lenders pulled their financing, and

When most people talk about the continuity of construction businesses, the focus is typically on the technical elements such as who the buyer will be, how the purchase will be funded, tax ramifications and how to maintain bonding and banking credit. However, successfully transitioning a business starts years before these decisions need to be made

In Jim Collins’ famous book Good to Great (Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t), he says that, “One of the dominant themes from our research is that breakthrough results come about by a series of good decisions, diligently executed and accumulated one on top of another.”