I feel like I may be a a crossroad. For the last year and a half, me and a business partner have been “flipping” houses. Its been pretty good to us but now were having a hard time finding a worthwhile project. We are now looking at building new construction(which is what i’d like to be doing). I was mentioning this to a friend who suggested that we should also be doing contracting. My question is should I follow his advice, or would I be better off staying focused on building?
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My favorite employer from the old days had a combination of spec houses to build, fixer-uppers to flip, and clients to build custom for. He usually had two client jobs and one property at a time. I was never laid off for a single day during those years because he always had something going, no matter how big a problem the architect or owner created on a custom job. Of course I have no idea how much dough he made but he seemed to do quite well and we had a great crew that lasted a long time because no one got laid off. I'm leaning that way myself because while I love doing custom work and dealing with the various personalities, there are definite downsides to a client based business. If you've been successful in property flips I'd probably say keep at least half a finger in that pie.
I agree with David, having a variety of work available at any one time is a very good position to be in. The only thing I do is make kitchen cabinets, but I always have at least 2 customers on the go at any one time. This is needed because customers do stuff like go on holiday, hold the job up because they are having something else done to the house, etc etc.
John
Sounds like expanding to new construction would be an okay thing. As for general contracting my only advice is to learn to say NO. By this I mean when someone calls and wants you to do something way out of your scope of expertise stay away from it if possible.
Learning HOW to do something while trying to make money is a hard thing to do.