For construction and trades business owners
I am Shaun Bisson. I have spent 30 years in the trades working as a carpenter, and I can tell you that an owner carries two households. One is the family waiting at home. The other has trucks, tools, a crew, and a payroll, and it needs feeding every single week. This page is about the second household.
If you went down tomorrow, would the jobs still get finished?
Picture an ordinary week. Two jobs mid build, a third one about to start, a crew that looks to you for the plan every morning, and clients with dates circled on a calendar. Now picture that same week with you in a hospital bed, or at home on the couch under doctor's orders. The jobs do not pause. The dates do not move. Somebody has to make the calls, keep the crew working, and keep the clients calm, and it has to be somebody the crew will actually listen to.
Most owners have never said out loud who that somebody is, or worked out whether the business could pay its bills while it waited for them to come back. That is not a failure. It is a set of questions nobody has ever sat an owner down and asked in plain language. Asking them early, while the answers are still yours to choose, is most of what I do with owners.
Keeping a good crew
Every owner in construction says the same thing right now. Good people are hard to find and harder to keep, and a bigger shop across town is always ready to offer your best hand another dollar an hour. Pay matters, and it is not the only thing that matters. Owners are asking what else a small company can put around its people.
That is where ideas like group coverage and health spending accounts come in. In plain terms, they are ways for a business to help its people with health costs and some basic protection, arranged through the company instead of every worker fending entirely for themselves. What might fit depends on the size of the crew, the kind of work, and what your people would actually use. A conversation about it is education first. What exists, what the differences are, and what questions to ask any provider before you sign anything. Nothing about it gets decided in a first sit down.
The person the job cannot run without
Every company has one or two people the whole schedule quietly hangs on. In a small shop it is usually the owner. Sometimes it is the lead hand who can run a job, read the drawings, handle the client, and fix the problem nobody saw coming, all before lunch.
Key person thinking is simply planning for that honestly. If that person were gone for six months, or gone for good, what would it cost the business to keep the jobs moving while somebody grew into the role? Owners who have walked through that question know their real number. Owners who have not are guessing, and the business ends up doing the guessing along with them.
Partners
If you own the company with a partner, the two of you have probably agreed on a hundred things over coffee and never written one of them down. The ones that matter most on the worst days are simple to say and hard to improvise later. What happens to a partner's share if that partner dies. What happens if a partner cannot work for a year. How a partner who wants out gets bought out, and how that ever gets paid for.
Those agreements belong in writing, and they get drafted with your own lawyer and your own accountant, not with me. My part of the conversation is the education around it. Helping you understand the questions before you sit down with them, and how owners think through the funding side, so that a promise made on paper is not an empty one on the day a family needs it kept.
The costs that do not stop
A household has bills that do not stop. So does a business, and the business list is longer. The shop or yard rent. Truck and equipment payments. Insurance on the company and the vehicles. The bookkeeper, the software, the storage, the loan taken out for the trailer. None of those send a card when you get hurt. They just keep arriving.
Part of planning as an owner is knowing that number cold. What does it cost to keep this business alive for three months with no work coming off your tools? Owners who know that number can plan around it. It is a much harder number to meet for the first time from a hospital bed.
What the business becomes when you are done
One day the business changes hands or it closes. Those are the only two endings, and one of them gets chosen on purpose while the other one just happens. A son or daughter stepping in. A lead hand or a partner buying it over time. A sale to the shop across town. Each of those takes years to do well and about one bad month to do badly.
You built something real out of your own hands. Deciding what it becomes when you are done is the same kind of work as deciding what your family lives on when the tools go down. It deserves the same early, plain conversation.
Questions an owner should be able to answer
An owner does not need every answer today. An owner does need to know which of these are still blank.
- If you could not show up for three months, who runs the jobs, and does that person know it?
- What does the business owe every month even if nothing gets built?
- If your lead hand got hurt or got hired away, how long before the schedule felt it?
- What have you and your partner actually agreed in writing, and where is it kept?
- What coverage do your people really have, on the site and off it, and could they tell you what it is?
- When you are done, who takes the business over, buys it, or closes it, and is any of that written down?
Start with a conversation
We sit down, in person or online, and go through the business questions in the same plain order as the family ones. I teach as we go. Nothing is sold at a first conversation, and there is no obligation after it. You leave knowing which of your answers are solid and which ones are still blank, and that alone is worth the hour.
Or start with the free class, the same money basics taught to a group.
The business is only the second household. The first one is the family waiting at home, and it has questions of its own that deserve the same early answers.