I received this note last summer from a woman helping her husband with their construction business. They had young children, finances were tight, and she was frustrated. Her note:
“I read Markup & Profit this winter and it was life changing for me. The problem is, I am the unpaid wife/office manager (with no office!) of a handyman. I just quit that job (after reading my husband the part of your book where you tell unpaid spouses to quit and why, a few months ago). This business needs help that I cannot give, and I think you could help.”
She wrote about a few incidents that set them back financially, but things were starting to look up. She went on to say:
“He does great work. He is detail oriented, honest, perfectionistic, clean. He has everything most people would want in someone working in their home. I want to help him get to the next level of business, and I want to feel financially secure.”
“I have done tens of hundreds of hours of unpaid labor in work for him, mostly office work and especially invoices, in which he always tells me the price is too high. I try to explain why it’s not, why it may even be low, and it has really affected our marriage.”
“This evening, I was preparing to do an invoice for him to give to a current client tomorrow, when he told me that he already gave them a set amount that they will just pay him weekly until end of job ($1500). I thought we had agreed on the last job that the invoices would reflect the amount of work done (with measurements he’s supposed to take and report back to me) and job done and difficulty etc. instead of a flat fee. He has a hard time remembering to take notes of what work he has done, so all of this is a lot of mental load for me, to have to remind him and calculate etc.”
“And I thought I would start being paid for my work. The amount he told them definitely has no room to pay me. So, I ‘quit’ tonight. I am emailing you with the hope that you can do some kind of consultation with him and help him realize we need to make more money in order to take business to the next level instead of living in constant stress.”
Sadly, this situation isn’t uncommon. Over the years I’ve heard from many wives or significant others who were tired of living with no money and essentially no future for the business. In all my years of working with contractors, I’ve only heard from two men complaining that their spouse wasn’t running the business like a business.
The problem is, I can’t help someone who doesn’t want help. Her husband needs to realize that he needs help. If he doesn’t, I can’t help him.
If she can get him as focused on the business as he is on building jobs, or if she can get him to let her handle all pricing and quotes, they’ll survive. The first thing he needs to do is recognize the things he’s doing now that don’t work. Then he needs to raise his prices so that he can start paying his wife on a regular basis, the same amount she could earn working for one of their competitors. That’s not an option. She quit for good reason, and I told her she did the right thing. Hopefully he’ll get the message.
Making money is what being in business is all about. Working for free is no fun. When your business starts to affect your marriage in a negative way, something is wrong and it needs to be fixed, yesterday.
The problems she outlined are covered in our book, Markup and Profit. Her job now is to get her husband to read it, put his ego in his pocket and start making changes to make his business profitable. We’re hopeful he will.
The knowledge and experience Michael Stone gained in his 60+ years in construction has helped thousands of contractors improve their businesses and their lives. He is the author of the books Markup & Profit Revisited, Profitable Sales, and Estimating Construction Profitably, and is available for one-on-one consultations.
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