For many small construction companies and sole traders, the current market is a difficult one. Economic uncertainty, tight margins and the pressure of finding the next project can make running a business feel like a second job on top of the actual construction work.

For tradespeople who spend their days on site, that second job can mean evenings spent dealing with paperwork, clients, quotations and the other demands of running a company. Working longer hours does not necessarily translate into greater financial security.

Construction entrepreneur Greg Wilkes has seen that problem first-hand. He says the current difficulties are part of a longer period of uncertainty for the industry.

“At the moment, I must say, in the UK, there’s a lot of pain being felt by a lot of people in construction. It’s not easy with, you know, the war going on Iran. But not only that, I think that the UK was in a lot of trouble before this war even kicked off. It’s, it’s not really recovered from Covid. I think it’s been in a pretty bad place economy-wise.”

That uncertainty is affecting the willingness of businesses to commit to new work, according to Wilkes.

“A lot of builders are feeling the pain at the moment of trying to win work, trying to win the right projects, and a lot of uncertainty around so I think people are just holding back on what they actually want to do at the moment.”

For business owners, there is another problem. A company can be turning over significant sums of money while its owner is still effectively working for themselves.

“All of a sudden they’re earning less than like an admin worker. And you think, like, what am I? What am I doing? I’ve gone into business to give myself more time, freedom of money, and actually, I’m working like a slave to this business and not getting anywhere.”

For Wilkes, the answer is not simply to work harder. It is to understand what is holding the business back and build systems that allow it to grow without depending entirely on the owner.

From apprenticeship to West London

Wilkes’s own route into construction was not particularly planned.

“I’ve always been in entrepreneurial and as a kid, I sort of did paper rounds and window cleaning rounds and all that sort of stuff and but always wanted to set up my own business,” he says.

Construction came largely through his family. His father was a bricklayer, and Wilkes initially trained as a carpenter.

“I ended up falling into it because I didn’t do great at school, and my dad was a bricklayer, and I thought, well, you know, what else am I going to do? And I had a brick layer teaching me how to be a carpenter, hence why I was a useless carpenter, and I did that for a couple of years, but my aim was always to start my own business.”

He considered leaving the trade for automobile sales, but his father persuaded him to finish his apprenticeship.

“And I’m really glad that he made me do that, because it’s opened up, you know, a whole world for me now.”

Wilkes believes construction can offer a strong career to people who might not thrive in conventional academic education.

“I think sometimes construction and trades can be, you know, a little bit underestimated or maybe people at school don’t think that it’s a great career to get into, necessarily, they look at maybe IT and other stuff like that. But I think it’s a absolutely brilliant career path to get into construction.”

After qualifying, Wilkes found an opportunity in the West London residential market, working with an experienced roofer on loft conversions in Ealing.

The business grew into a substantial company, but eventually the two partners decided to go their separate ways.

“And we ended up actually creating quite a decent sized business in Ealing, doing lofts. And that was pretty much what we did for quite a while, for for many years, and then I split up with him. That’s really painful decision. If anyone’s been in a partnership with a friend, you probably know how painful it is. If you you’re with him for a while, and in the end, you end up going in different directions. So we split up, and I created quite a large construction business.”

Growing and then losing 

After the partnership ended, Wilkes started another construction business and grew it rapidly. Eventually, it reached a turnover of around £5 million.

On paper, that looked like success. Behind the scenes, however, problems were accumulating.

“And then it all went wrong. Badly,” Wilkes says. “And we grew and we grew, and we had a lot of things that were going wrong in the business that I was trying to cover over plaster, over the cracks.”

After 14 years, the company became insolvent.

For Wilkes, the failure was not an abstract business setback. He had a young family and a mortgage, and suddenly the company he had spent years building was gone.

“It was the just awful, you know, having a business for, like, I think it’s like 14 years, by that point. Everything you created has just collapsed around you, and it was horrible, really stressful. I had young kids, mortgage to pay, and everyone thinks sometimes that going bust is an easy way out, but I can tell you, it’s, the probably the one of the worst experience of my life.”

The experience did, however, force Wilkes to examine what had happened.

With the help of a mentor, he began separating the things he had done well from the things that had gone wrong.

“…and I thought: I’ve got there’s some things that I’m doing right for sure, like I’ve managed to build a 5 million quid business. That hasn’t come about by chance. So, there’s some things I’m really good at, but obviously… it went bust. So, there’s things I’m really bad at. So, I documented everything. Started the second business again, and we created that that was a seven-figure business, really profitable in the first year.”

The lesson was that growing a business and building a good business are not necessarily the same thing. Wilkes had demonstrated that he could generate £5 million in turnover. The challenge was understanding how to do it without allowing the underlying business to become unmanageable.

That experience eventually became the basis for the framework he now uses when working with other construction businesses.

Five areas to get right

Wilkes originally developed a seven-part model for helping construction businesses grow from around £1 million to £5 million in turnover. Working with builders subsequently led him to simplify it.

“To be honest, it’s actually, we’ve actually, since I’ve been working with builders for a while, we’ve actually pulled that back down to five steps,” he says. “And we thought, well, what are the big five meaningful steps that builders need?”

The first is Plan: establishing clear targets and understanding the numbers behind the business.

The second is Attract: building a marketing operation that brings in the kinds of clients and projects the company actually wants.

The third is Convert: turning those opportunities into profitable work rather than simply chasing whatever contract is available.

The fourth is Deliver: making sure projects are delivered efficiently and that the margin survives the process.

Finally, there is Scale: developing the people and management structure needed to allow the company to grow without everything continuing to depend on its owner.

Importantly, Wilkes does not see these as five stages that a business completes once and then moves beyond.

“What’s interesting is we diagnose this straight away. So as soon as we talk to someone, and we actually get our members doing this every quarter, we diagnose, we do a bit of a heat map and say, Where are you on the scale at the moment of plan? And they’ll go, I’m strong or I’m weak. Where are you on a track? And they go on this and that. And it’s interesting how every single quarter, those dynamics change, and you’re always working on one of those things. But it so we’ve, if you ever look at our model on our website, it shows the five things, but it’s got a circle going all the way around it, because you fix one thing and then something else breaks, and you just it’s a flywheel that ever continues.”

That idea is particularly relevant to businesses moving beyond the stage where the owner can keep everything under personal control. Growth tends to expose weaknesses that were less obvious when the company was smaller.

Keeping the work moving

Of the five areas, Attract is often the one that gets builders’ attention first.

“Well, I think the one that brings people in more than anything is the Attract because, and this is true for any coaches. I think you bring people in if you’ve got a really good marketing strategy, because everyone wants leads. Everyone wants sales. It’s the life by blood of a business.”

The problem is that many construction companies treat marketing as something to turn on when they need work.

Wilkes advocates a more deliberate approach, identifying the projects a company wants to win and then approaching the architects and other professionals involved in them.

“And this would apply to engineers, architects, you know, whatever you’ve got to go out and find your ideal clients. So we’ve got a really cool method, especially for builders of where we identify the ideal projects they want to work on, and then we go for those architects and target them and say, Hey, I’m a builder that’s doing million pound projects. I’ve just seen you’put this project on the planning portal for 123, Smith Street. This is why we think we’d be a great fit for that project.”

There is another part of marketing that is easy to overlook: continuing to do it when the order book is already full.

“It’s the key. And you can’t rest on your laurels,” Wilkes says.

The danger is straightforward. A builder becomes busy, stops looking for new work and assumes the current pipeline will last. Six months later, that work has been delivered and the company is back to chasing whatever it can find.

Wilkes argues that continuing to market gives a business more choice.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re booked up for six months or a year. That’s great. We always keep that tap on, because what you then put yourself in a position is of actually, I can take on the cream. I can take on the best work. I can price it high. If I win it, I’ll win it. If I don’t, I don’t, I don’t really care, but you’ve always got to keep that on, otherwise, you know, you find yourself chasing.”

The contract matters

Marketing and sales are only part of the equation. Once a construction company begins taking on larger projects, the contracts themselves can become a significant source of risk.

Wilkes says this was one of the areas he failed to understand early enough in his own career, particularly when dealing with JCT contracts.

“I know this is really boring, but I wish I’d have known about contracts and understanding JCT contracts and all of that stuff. I didn’t know that, and I just got rings run around me by contracts, administrators, architects, clients, because I just didn’t know what I was doing, so I just sort of accepted what they were saying to me.”

The problem, he says, is that these issues can remain hidden until a company takes on larger and more complicated projects.

“And the problem is, sometimes you don’t face this stuff until you start taking on larger projects. And it was, yeah, it just caused me a world of pain.”

His response in the second business was to make contract knowledge part of the company’s development rather than something to learn through expensive mistakes.

“So I think for anyone now, and this is why, especially in our course, we’ve actually hired a specialist Qs contractor that comes in, and he teaches our members every month on contractual law. And it sounds boring, but actually, everyone comes away of it, going, Oh, wow, like, you’ve probably just saved me, like, whatever on, you know, missing out on this clause or that clause.”

For construction businesses looking to grow, the lesson from Wilkes’s experience is not simply that £5 million of turnover is achievable. It is that growth exposes weaknesses, and those weaknesses need to be dealt with before they become fatal.

Wilkes’s first business showed him that he could build a company to that scale. Its collapse showed him what he had failed to build underneath it. His second business gave him the opportunity to put those lessons into practice.

The five areas of Plan, Attract, Convert, Deliver and Scale are his attempt to turn those lessons into something other construction businesses can use.

Growth, in this model, is not about working longer hours or simply winning more contracts. It is about building a business capable of handling the work it wins.