It’s that time of year when holidays and winter allow a spell away from hectic business activities, providing a few hours for feet-up-on-the-desk reflection. What inspires me to think about my business in a new way is often a book with a fresh perspective–a kind of mental tonic. I wish I could recommend a number of books specific to our business, building and remodeling, but nothing has been published in the trades about the building business since 2013. However, there are a few books worth reading that you may not have considered. Here’s a brief list of recommendations:
Defensive Estimating: Protecting Your Profits (by William Asdal, $19.95, Builder Books): Bill Asdal is one of the most innovative and successful remolding contractors I know. Innovative enough to have constructed the nation’s first net-zero remodel and built a bed and breakfast business next door based on the concept of ecotourism. And he’s successful enough to have built a stable of “speculative remolding” projects that now provide him a comfortable passive income and capital gains. His book, Defensive Estimating, does not provide pricing guidelines, per se, but describes a philosophical approach to estimating that safeguards the bottom line. “A disciplined strategy to protecting profits is a quest for clarity,” Bill writes in a chapter titled, “Defending the Bottom Line in Your Remodeling Estimate,” and this quest for clarity well describes the essential approach advocated throughout the book. If you have been in business for a few years, you have the information you need to incorporate the defensive strategies Bill describes, and you will want to. A lucid and convincing method to reduce mistakes in estimating and make the money you expected to make when you bid the job in the first place.
Business in Blue Jeans: How to Have a Successful Business on Your Own Terms, In Your Own Style (by Susan Baroncini-Moe, $19.37, Sound Wisdom.) A realistic and yet amenable guide to the basics of running a small business from a woman’s perspective. The nut of the book comes within the first chapter in the section entitled “Brain Junk,” which describes the counterproductive attitudes and ideas that can trip up your business even before it starts, or may be simply preventing your successful business from providing the lifestyle you had hoped for. Like Bill Asdal’s book, which presents a nuts and bolts quest for clarity in estimating, Susan Baroncini emphasis the basics of setting up and organizing a business step by step, without skipping steps as a strategy to get “absolute clarity” about what you want out of your life and your business, as the two will always remain intertwined. Although this almost therapeutic approach to business represents a decidedly female mindset, the sections on building a business plan and marketing you offering provide excellent, concrete business education geared toward the small enterprise.
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction (by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner, $15.78, Crown.) One of the more interesting business books of 2015 and an overall great read. This may not help you with your building business directly, but it will explain why it’s so hard to predict the future and why the experts get it wrong so much of time. Instead of relying on expert opinions about what will be, the authors provide you with thinking tools to analyze what you read and how you interpret it. Great perspective to have before the year-in-review and what-to-expect-in-2016 shows start during in the next couple of weeks. And an excellent primer to your own business predictions for 2016.
Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception (by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, $17.53, Princeton University Press): If you consider yourself an entrepreneur, then you will find a certain perverse pleasure in this discussion by two Noble Laureates on how canny moguls can alter the fundamental laws of economics, not always for the public good, but certainly for private profit. It will open your eyes to the manipulative traps you have already fallen into, not realizing that you were ensnared, and help you avoid those traps in the future. Again, not a book about the building business per se, but with co-author Robert Shiller of the famed Standard & Poor’s Case–Shiller Home Price Indices, you’ll find plenty of material on the real-estate economy. Akerlof is married to Federal Reserve chief Janet Yellen and Shiller, who keeps a keen eye on housing issues, predicted the housing collapse of 2008. You’ll take away a new view on the consumer capitalism, and a new sense of how much of what we want results from wily selling and not necessity. A consideration at this time of year.
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William Asdal, owner of Asdal Builders, LLC, of Chester, New Jersey, is an award-winning residential remodeler and custom builder. A former chairman of the National Association of Home Builders' Remodelors™ Council, bill has written several books on the building business including Defensive Estimating: Protecting Your Profits. Asdal was one of the founders of Professional Remodeling magazine.
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Phishing for Phools explores the role of manipulation and deception in a consumer economy. A sobering and yet enlightening look at the economic environment we live is, especially appropriate reading for the buying spree we call the Holidays ahead.
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In Superforecasting behavioral economist Philip Tetlock reveals why some forecasters are better than others, and the tools they use to make the most accurate predictions are remarkably simple and accessible to all.
