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264: Fuse Your Personal Brand into Your Business with Brandon Jones

Brandon Jones, CEO of Delbert Adams Construction Group, is driven by a mission to close the knowledge gap in the construction industry, fusing his personal brand into a values-driven, sustainable business.

We learn about Brandon’s journey to create a thriving construction business that leverages technology and data to enhance project management. He explains the Financial Forecasting Framework, a strategic methodology to project revenue, align it with individual and company capacities, and identify future resource gaps or overloads. This framework enables businesses to overlay opportunity volume projections and engineer strategies to close opportunities effectively. He also discusses the importance of transitioning a personal brand into a values-driven organization to ensure long-term sustainability and success.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Fuse Your Personal Brand into Your Business with Brandon Jones

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Brandon Jones, the CEO of the Delbert Adams Construction Group, an award-winning builder and remodeler with outstanding project management and the finest artisanship in and around Baltimore. Brandon, welcome to the show.

Good morning, Steve. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, I’m excited because we’re going to be tackling a topic which has not come up in the 250 episodes that we recorded on this podcast, which is personal branding for a construction firm or for any owner-operated business. But let’s start with my favorite question, which is, what is your personal “Why” and how are you manifesting it in your business?

I think that’s a great question. It’s a question I’ve been asking myself as my career has grown and changed. I think it’s very easy for somebody to fall into a trap of starting to focus on financials, monthly financials, financial performance, and start to live their life through spreadsheets. So what is the “Why?” What do you really do this for? And for me personally, the highest goal that I can say I would apply my “Why” to is closing the knowledge gap in the construction industry. It’s a major issue for our industry. And what excites me most about doing that is it does something that’s very important to me and something I can feel very good about, which is it creates opportunity for people who have historically faced dead ends in their careers. So by closing the knowledge gap, we’re actually giving people an opportunity to grow their own careers and to start to move into roles in the construction industry, bring their knowledge with them.

So what is the knowledge gap? Why is there a knowledge gap to begin with and what’s the gap between?

A couple of factors there. So we have people that are retiring from the industry at a greater rate than those that are coming into the industry. So that’s a major issue. So we have people leaving with knowledge that are not passing it down at the rate at which we need to. So we have fewer people with knowledge trying to reach the people that are coming in, which is not enough for the industry, but it’s more than what can be touched by the individuals who carry that information. So we wind up with a knowledge gap. One of the reasons why that knowledge gap exists is that our industry, construction industry, happens to be very slow with adoption of technology. And technology can be great for expanding the accessibility to information and to making it archival for people in ways that simply in the field, hands-on, direct person-to-person training can’t do.

Yeah, that’s interesting. I heard about a McKinsey study which came out a couple of years ago, and it measured the productivity improvement since the Second World War in different industries. And generally, on average, it was like a 4x productivity improvement. So exponential. And for construction, however, it was only 10%, which was mind-boggling to me. So what are ways that you can institutionalize this knowledge inside your company to create this knowledge-based construction company, so to say?

I think that we’re looking, I’m looking at technologies that are probably more prolific and have been adopted better in other industries. So when we look at a construction management software, for instance, what we’re really doing is we’re putting the information structure in place to manage a project. But when that can be done with economy and that can be done with efficiency and that can create an accessibility to people that are in the field, to things that would have had to involve direct conversations, phone calls, trips to the job sites, those types of things, we can put people who are in position to provide that guidance, provide that technical oversight, to communicate that technical information, to do it oftentimes from the office and to do it at a broad scale much faster. So a project manager who has that knowledge or a site superintendent who can now become a project manager with the right training can now communicate that information more broadly in the course of a day and may be able to touch instead of two projects or three projects at a time, four or five or six projects at a time.

So that's communication of knowledge that can happen through the technology. Share on X

It also does good things for the business as it relates to overhead and efficiency of operations and those types of things which a business operator or owner is going to be interested in as well.

Okay. So that’s fascinating. Another aspect that we talked about in terms of knowledge is how you manage your backlogs and your billing and your schedules and how do you forecast, because as far as I understand construction, any time that is not used efficiently is wasted forever. So it’s really critical for staff to be consistently working on projects. And weather can, of course, intervene, but to the extent possible, to be consistently working at a high productivity in order for a construction firm to be successful and profitable. So you developed a framework for maybe call it a financial forecasting framework for integrating billings and backlogs and schedules. So can you explain why that is important and how it works in your business?

Sure. Certainly in my industry, but I think this kind of crosses over industry barriers or boundaries. Even a sophisticated business sees a great deal of degradation of the value of certain core tools that most businesses have. So we have financials, that’s produced by our accounting software. That’s our rear view mirror. How have we done this quarter, this quarter past, this month past, what have you. We have our financials. We have our backlog also produced by our accounting software. That’s going to be our short-term, more or less guaranteed forecast. That’s going to lay out what we know or can say with a certain degree of certainty is coming forward. And then we have our pipeline. So that’s our sales management software. And we can look at our probability, but that’s really our optimism scale. So how optimistic are we about the future based on what our opportunities are and how likely they are to close. So as business operators, what we have a tendency to do and what I think a lot of people rely upon is a view of the financials, a view of the backlog, and a view of the pipeline. And those views are more or less compartmentalized views. After that, what we step back into is this kind of murky, gut-driven action plan that is driven by experience, driven by the intellect of the people who are operating the businesses, those types of things. But it’s really more of a gut and hustle type attitude, which is exactly what we’re trying to avoid with a company that’s sophisticated with technology. We’re trying to avoid that gut and hustle because without those tools, we can gut hustle our way towards how do we do this month, this year, what have you, how much money do we make? Let’s see. And we see that at the end. That’s all gut and hustle. So how much better are we than that if we don’t combine these tools in some way, shape or form, and we really can. So it gets even more complex than that because of course we have a backlog, but we also have performers. We have individual performers and we have individual departments and those types of things that are part of that backlog, but those backlogs are not necessarily synced with one another. We’ve got different capabilities of individuals within departments. That backlog, the backlog for the individual, may not be consistent with the overall backlog of the company. So you can wind up overtaxing and under-delivering opportunities to parts of your company, and then you wind up with an imbalance that winds up aggregating into an underperformance of the company or an over taxation of the company’s resources.

So how do you enable it? How do you equalize these different personal backlogs so that the company is at a consistent schedule? How do you create this figurative conveyor belt of projects so that you consistently work on them?

Well, I think you have to break it down into your component parts. So for my business, it’s the component parts of the individual producers. And that happens to be for us project managers. So project managers, individual backlog. And you can say that this project is 50 percent complete. It’s a million-dollar project. That’s $500,000. I’m simplifying, obviously, but $500,000 of remaining backlog at this profit margin, and we can forecast out how that’s going to bill until completion. And you can measure that against that individual’s capacity. That could be aggregated into groups or departments, and then that can then again be aggregated into a holistic view of where the company is. But what you really want to do is you want to be able to drive into that individual level because that person’s capacity, that person’s expectation for production, really, we want to be thinking about gross profit production, not revenue production, gross profit production. So that individual’s role in meeting your company-wide goals is production of a certain amount of gross profit. That divided by month can give you a measure of their backlog, their performance to date, and what they’re likely to do in terms of performance. So all that’s good. We’re talking about backlog, we’re talking about financials, but then we talk about pipeline. So what is business development doing? What is sales doing? How aggressive do you want to be? What types of jobs do you want to focus on?

I think any business would love to be able to say that we fish with a spear. Share on X

We’re going after exactly the type of thing that we want, and we’re going to successfully fish with that spear and we’re going to feed ourselves. But too often we wind up fishing with a net because we’re out there creating opportunities. We just aren’t curating what that opportunity base is. So what delivers to the dock at the end of the night? It’s whatever that net is caught. And what that does is it infuses chaos into your organization, your production team. What is the kitchen? How does the kitchen understand how to cook the fish that has arrived at the dock that night. Different fish are cooked different ways. How do we actually produce that work? Who’s ready to produce that work? Whose backlog is going to give us an opportunity to do that? Or who’s exhausted? Who has too much of their resources taken away? And therefore, we brought the wrong fish back to the dock that night. That is really what’s critical. So what this does is it gives you an opportunity to have a clear view, not only of where you are near to date, where you’re likely to be at the end of the year or the end of a period of time, but also what kind of opportunity are you looking for? And where should you be more aggressive? With your best development efforts, with your sales effort, should you go in harder with a price? Should you be more aggressive with your price? That may be a decision now better informed by where your backlog is when you understand that in smaller pieces.

That’s fascinating. So it reminds me of what the airlines do at different times of year and different cycles of length of time to the flight. They change the prices. So depending on supply and demand, if they sold out the flight because there were a bunch of soccer players who were traveling together, then they’re going to raise the price of the remaining seats. If the sales is slow, then they’re going to drop the price so they can attract more people and they’re going to manage the volume so that they fill as many seats as possible. I’ve seen that apartment rental companies do the same thing, that depending on the length of time you’re renting the apartment, they’re going to change the price. And then as you go in time, they’re going to dynamically change the price in order to kind of optimize their revenue. So it sounds a little bit like that, that you’ve got your current backlog and existing projects and then you see the different skills and you are hunting with a spear for those fish that you will have capacity to actually cook going forward. Is this how your analogy works?

Yeah, it is. And I would tell you that an important lesson that I’ve learned is that what we’re really looking to understand is we’re looking for all of this information on the basis of gross profit. So we have a relatively consistent or predictable overhead for the business. We have a gross profit that we need to earn to produce our net income. So when we start to understand, okay, what is the backlog look like for an individual or division or whatever component part of your company, we want to understand that in terms of gross profit. So we may take, we may be aggressive to go after a project that has a really nice revenue number associated with it, really nice sales dollar value associated with it. But in order to get that project, we needed to take a lower gross profit percentage on that project. So the assignment of a person to running that project is going to now be measured on what is their gross profit potential per month. And that gross profit potential per month on that project may be below what you hoped to achieve with that person because of the decision you made in sales. So now you have a deficit that is at the individual level that has to be made up, or you’re going to get to the end of the year, that gut driven, hustle driven year, and find out at that point, we underperformed. Why did we underperform? Oftentimes we don’t know. Well, we can look back and say, now we’re going to have to dissect our year. Let’s dissect our year and find out why we didn’t do so well. That’s too much rear-view mirror thinking. We can be looking at this through the windshield and understand we’re still going to make that decision. We’re still taking that project at a lower margin than what we’d like to take. And our project managers could be underutilized from a gross profit production standpoint, but we’re going to offset that by these measures. We’re going to take more projects of this type. We’re going to hire another project manager in this category because we have that opportunity volume.

All of that can be better understood, better enacted, better prepared, and it can factor into all of your things. Share on X

I talked about business development, I talked about sales, but we’re also thinking about human resources. Think about the job search. It can take six months to find a good employee.

Yeah, so there’s a high level of complexity of basically throughput. It’s the theory of constraints. So you have to create a consistent flow of high gross margin work in order to reach your plans and you have to constantly adjust because things happen along the way and you have to adjust your pipeline, which is six months into the future, perhaps, and you have your backlog and then you look at your hiring. So there are many moving pieces and to consistently manage this is a pretty complex process. Are you using a specialist software for this, or do you use Excel? And I don’t want to spend too much time because that’s still another topic I want to touch here, but how do you do that? Is this something that you’ve developed, a software, or you just have a table in Excel, a Gantt chart, and you’re managing from there?

Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of the best thing about it. The subject we’re talking about, the conversation we’re having right now, tends to be on the more sophisticated end, but the information that’s necessary to achieve something like this really isn’t all that complicated to get. At some point, you’re having a conversation with a manager of a project and saying something as simple as, tell me how you think the rest of your project is going to bill out. And based on that project manager’s understanding of their own schedule, their own budget, their own buyout and so forth, can tell you, I think I’m going to bill this much, this much, this much over the next three months. And that’s all. What you need is the tool back behind it. You need the ability to input that and to be able to do all the calculations that are necessary to give you the information you need. It’s not very complicated. A given project’s running at a certain gross profit margin. That’s already understood. That project manager gives you their billing amounts, their totals, their projected billing amounts, best guess today. That’s all we’re asking. And you understand how to take gross profit per month out of that just based on your margin. It’s really simple stuff. It’s a somewhat sophisticated tool. I mean, it was a complex tool to put together, but once it’s put together, the collection and processing of information is very simple. It’s really the understanding that this is how you need to think about running a business that’s most important. And it took us a lot of years, and I hate to admit it to you. I’d love to tell you that I knew this earlier than I did, but we’ve always had these tools, financial, backlog, pipeline. We’ve always had the tools. We never put them together.

Yeah, that’s super important and it’s very cool because a lot of companies struggle with creating that flow and how to create the tool that will help them make that flow more consistent. Let’s switch gears here and let’s talk about another very exciting topic that you raised earlier, and this is the personal branding of the owner or the founder or CEO when transitioning a business and how that plays into the company’s future and what to do with the personal brand. So what is your experience with the importance, what is the importance of a strong personal brand and what kind of complications can it cause for a business as it transitions to the next generation or to maybe a different owner?

I think what’s really hard at the beginning of creating a company is understanding what that future looks like. So I can come to you and your household and your family and say, imagine what your family’s gonna look like in 10 years. And you can kind of close your eyes and think about what that looks like. So I can talk to a family about renovating their house and they have three small kids. And I can say to them, you have to think about what your house is gonna look like when those three small kids are 18, 14 and 11 years old. They’re bigger creatures. They’ve got more stuff. They’re moving around this way. They have cars. They have all these types of things that you can’t think about. So the reason why I bring that up is I think a lot of times it’s very difficult for us when we start a business to understand what that business is going to look like down the road and what our own exit strategy is. How do we plan on getting eventually out of the business that we create? And a lot of us create businesses based on a particularly strong skill that we have.

And we create a relationship with a community that's driven by that skill. We become known for that skill and we grow around that skill. Share on X

So a personal brand or a brand that’s really driven by the owner of the company’s particular special skill is not an uncommon thing to find. And it’s certainly not uncommon, it’s extremely common in the construction industry to find that being the case. I know a lot about construction. I’m savvy, I can talk to people, I can solve people’s problems. And as a problem solver available to the community, I generate business. So I hire people to help support me. I hire my right hand, left hand men, women, so forth. That’s what I do, that’s how I’ve grown my business. Now, how do I get out of my business? So it’s a difficult challenge, it’s a difficult problem, because what you hope to have created is you hope to create business value. Business value that can endure beyond you. Business value that’s understood intrinsically by the marketplace, but also potentially business value that is a financial relief for you as you leave the business. Can you sell your business or do you have to close? We all face that, we face that question. And so if we can have the foresight when we start a business to anticipate that thing, then we’re going to position ourselves as the brand leader in a certain relationship to the brand itself. So we want to put the brand out front and have ourselves back behind that brand. To change from being out front of the brand and pulling the company with you, behind your brand, personal brand, to stepping behind the brand is a very, very difficult thing to do. It’s an expensive thing to do. You have to retrain a community of people to think about your company differently. And in order to be able to do that, you have to infuse your own values, the values that are the origin of the company that you drove your company off of. Hopefully you’ve driven your company off of more values than just your sales ability. Hopefully there’s something beyond that, something more important in the value set of your company that can be understood and processed and supported by other people, that they can feel that and they can start to act on that. So by asking yourself, what is the purpose? Why do I do what I do? I’m gonna start to say, well, this is why we do what we do. And now, therefore, what I’m going to do as the leader of this company is I’m going to put my people in position to not only execute, but to have the tools to support execution of work on this value set. And so the community of consumers start to have a relationship to a business that functions a certain way, a business that represents, and all the things it does, these values, and that becomes the attraction. So it can be a shift, it can be done. It can be something where a company’s founder can be succeeded, but we have to understand how to do that. And it’s very difficult for people. One of the things that I understand well, and I can relate to very well, is that it’s very difficult for people to let go. It’s very difficult for people to step back. When you've been out front, and you have created something that's so precious to you, it's a business that represents you. Share on X It represents you individually in a market. It’s very difficult to step back from that, and to start to hand that to other people.

It’s your identity. So what you’re saying is very interesting. And I often see that the companies who successfully navigate this transition or transmute the brand of the owner into the fabric of the company, they do that by articulating what are those core values that this owner has represented. And the chances are this owner or CEO would have hired people like them. So that possibly other people also embody these values. So what are these values? And then how do you articulate that and reinforce that so that the organization, even when the founder is gone, is going to look for people who embody the same value and therefore build these values of the founder into the DNA of the company and transmute it that way?

I would tell you that it’s interesting what happens when you ask the question of somebody, why do you do what you do? I mean, you wake up, Steve, every day and you come to work as you, with your intentions, running your business the way that you believe you should. But when somebody steps back and asks you or forces you to step back and say, write and explain to me what you do and why you do it, and how would I do it? That’s a very difficult thing to do. We’re operating on our gut and our instinct. We’re making decisions that come together, they form our identity. Individual decisions every single day that form our identity, and we’re proud of it. So how do we start to break that down? How do we make that digestible? We don’t often even ask ourselves the question, because we’re so used to being us. It’s hard to help other people understand how to be like us.

Yeah. So that’s a great segue to the last question I want to ask you before we wrap up here. What do you think is the most important thing for an entrepreneur or CEO to ask themselves?

I think it gets back to what you asked me at the beginning of the podcast. Why do you do what you do? What is it that you’re looking for? What is it that you hope to achieve? I understand that a business really is looking to understand something in a hierarchy of needs of a consumer that is something that the consumer may not know that they’re actually looking for. They may not understand that they are actually seeking out something that is beyond their needs or their wants. And that somewhere in there is our purpose. And when we can find that purpose, identify that purpose, and build a system around pursuit of that purpose, that it becomes easier to look and say, my job today is to create a tool or a device or put a piece of software in place or to find some kind of solution that can help my people execute that purpose. And so when it does come time to exit the business, we’ve already done that work. So as an entrepreneur starting a business, to ask the questions like this, are really asking questions, what is my company going to become? And one of the subsets of that question is, how am I going to get out of this business someday? It’s hard to think about that when we’re starting, but it’s important to think about that when we’re starting, because that is the key that unlocks many of the things that we do on a day-to-day basis.

Begin with the end in mind.

Yes.

That’s awesome. This is fascinating. So we talked about a framework to manage based on the theory of constraint, the flow of a construction business, or it could be any project-driven business. So how do you make sure that you are executing, you’re optimizing, maximizing the growth, high gross profit projects in the right sequence so that you keep your staff busy with the most valuable work they can do on an ongoing basis, looking ahead at the pipeline, at the backlog, at the hiring needs. And then we also talked about how to infuse your personal brand into the company so that it’s no longer you that is in the minds of the market, but your company represents those values that you infused into the company and your company carries your DNA forward. If people would like to learn more about you, about what Delbert Adams Construction Group can do, or they want to connect with you, where should they go and what should they do?

Certainly. Well, starting with our website is a good place to start. That’s www.dacgllc.com. DACG stands for Delbert Adams Construction Group. My contact information is there. I’d welcome any of your audience to reach out to me directly. Reach out to me by email is probably best, bjones@dacgllc.com.

Awesome. Well, definitely check out dacgllc.com. It’s a fascinating construction business. Brandon, thanks for coming and sharing your experiences and learnings and your methods with our listeners. And if you enjoyed listening to this podcast, make sure you give us a review on Apple Podcasts, you follow us on YouTube and stay tuned because twice a week we’re coming with exciting entrepreneurs who are sharing their unique frameworks with you. So thanks for coming, Brandon, and thanks for listening.

 

 

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