Aspire presents
Two powerful workshops to help lift your bottom line
Workshop #1: Where Does Profit Really Come From?
This workshop for owners and senior managers is guaranteed to teach you fresh and reliable methods for making much more profit. Most attendees are blown away by the methods available to reshape and generate exceptional profits that they never even knew existed! We’ll show you those methods and teach you how to implement them to put more money in your pocket now.
Workshop #2: Prospering Through the Next Recession
This workshop will bring clarity and implementable tools to protect your business from the oncoming recession. You don’t have to standby and watch your business and family be hurt. You can’t wait until it hits the fan — once the run up to a recession starts it is too late! You’ll earn the 5 essential business adjustments every GC must make now. Not general advice but concrete steps and how to do them. Not magic but real business techniques proven far and wide by professionally managed businesses. The business knowledge and adjustments needed are mostly the same moves you should make to generate exceptional profits while reducing workload and stress.
What will I learn in these workshops?
- To spot the top six profit leaks that affect most residential builders
- The three critical, common, mistakes most GCs make in their job pricing strategy
- How to increase your earnings without taking on more work or raising prices
- Simple methods that will allow you to charge more and get higher quality jobs
- Powerful, field tested, tools and techniques that let you easily differentiate your business from the competition
- How to get out of the multiple bid wars
- Five factors that often result in taking bad jobs you’ll later regret and how to avoid them
- A proven path to take on fewer projects while making the same or more profit
- The difference between reactive and targeted leads, and how to reach the right prospects at the right time for maximum sales success
- Proven strategies to insulate your business from the coming economic downturn
- Strategies to protect you from cost escalation
- Evolving strategies to attract, hire and retain top talent in a difficult labor market
I’m too busy/not busy enough…will these workshops really help?
Been in the construction biz long? If yes, then you have survived both Boom and Bust times. Did you enjoy either? Certainly periods with an abundance of work are preferable to periods of work shortage.
However, even the go-go times of a Boom period often exact a high price on the contractor’s quality of life with long hours, stress and chaos, with less banked results than the available potential gains.
In these workshop, we won’t repeat recycled advice such as be sure to save money during the good times, but instead to dig down to a deeper, more granular level.
We will explore how the cycles really work so that you can chart a better course through them. You can minimize the negative impact of these cycles, maintaining a healthy balance in income and workload throughout each part of the Boom and Bust cycles.
Where have all the employees gone? Will these workshops help?
Yes. We know there are times when it seems impossible to fill necessary positions with quality candidates—or any candidates at all.
The Aspire Institute for Contractors is not a recruiting or employment agency but a business consultancy that has one purpose: to help contractors become more prosperous. We have helped thousands of small businesses like yours with all aspects of their business, with an unwavering focus on increasing real profits.
In that process, we have helped many businesses find and secure the right people, even in very tough recruiting markets. Much of the hiring and team building challenge is linked to the overall health of your company. If your cash flow is tight and your profits are small, the job of attracting and maintaining a team is made far more difficult, if not impossible.
So good hiring must start with a solid business footing. That is what we do at Aspire — guide you through the challenge of attracting, hiring and retaining top talent in a difficult labor market.
What else will these workshops do for my business?
We guarantee these workshops will increase your annual bottom line by at least 3-5 points (depending on your business size and model).
Plus, each attendee will leave the workshop with:
- A confidential, professional profit analysis of your business
- A one-on-one visit with one of our on site experts to help you get a clear picture of what’s working, what’s not and what, exactly, to do about it!
Some things just can’t wait. Start learning now.
A recession is coming — we all know that.
Nobody can say when, but experts and business indicators tell us the next one is close. There is a powerful set of things a GC can do to insulate themselves from the downside of a down market. Once the next recession starts, it’s too late to make those changes. This informative white paper will let you start now to put that protection in place.
Workshop Presenters
Ken Brookings
Aspire Founder and Chairman
Ken is the son of a painting contractor. After nearly a decade of undergraduate and graduate level business education Ken became a Vice President with a Fortune 500 company before the age of thirty. After that company was acquired Ken founded and sold two other successful businesses before beginning his consulting career. Focusing on high level strategic and operational business consulting Ken worked with the senior management teams of clients including Apple Computer, Texas Instruments, Goodyear, British Petroleum, Firestone, SPX and other major corporations.
Ken then changed up everything, “The high-level corporate consulting business was interesting and financially rewarding but something important was missing. The work, no matter how important didn’t really change anybody’s life. It just didn’t seem to matter. My head and maybe my ego led me to this kind of glamorous work, but it was my heart that brought me back to the kind of work that matters.”
Ken repurposed the successful business that he had built to focus entirely on helping small businesses. According to Ken, “The heroes of the business world are the small business owners and managers. They do the real work and produce the most jobs in this country. Sadly, they seldom get the rewards that their honest work deserves. My focus became, and remains, to change that.”
Ken has been a featured speaker at countless industry events to tens of thousands of business owners. He has written for and been featured on the cover of trade publications and holds four industry-related patents.
For over 20 years now Ken’s company, The Aspire Institute has focused on the two business segments in which Ken grew up; the automotive service industry, and construction contractors. Thousands of business owners and their families are more prosperous today through Aspire’s work.
Fred Farris
CEO
Fred grew up in the Automotive Service Business. He acquired a small, struggling service provider and promptly partnered with Aspire to help turn it around. Fred then turned this small struggling auto service business into one of the most successful businesses in the country in record time. He sold that business and joined Aspire as an instructor and eventually took the role of General Manager of Aspire’s automotive businesses. Fred has taught hundreds of auto service businesses on a one-to-one basis and has presented to thousands of shop owners in groups large and small all over the United States. Fred’s passion is to see the lives of small business owners get easier and build real wealth.
Brent Baker
Director of Coaching and Curriculum
After a great 40-year run as a premier builder of high-end custom homes, large-scale remodeler, and commercial contractor, Brent sold Baker Construction to his long-time partner to become the head of The Aspire Institute’s coaching team. Brent has a real passion for helping other contractors find their dreams by reshaping their businesses. After graduating with a degree in Psychology from Sonoma State University, Brent married his wife Laura and began his career as a woodworker. Eventually, Brent and Laura were able to buy a ranch in Idaho where they raised their four children and today that ranch is alive with visits from their four grandchildren. They bought a home in the South of France where they spend a couple of months every year. Community service has been another passion for Brent. Just a fraction of Brent’s contribution to his community includes; a gubernatorial appointment to a water quality board, founder of an Educational Research and Development Organization, Chairman of his county’s school district board of trustees and Commissioner of his local fire district. Brent also co-founded a high school residential carpentry program and designed and implemented an experimental youth job skills training program.
As a senior manager at Aspire, Brent designs educational programs as well as develops and manages a team of talented construction industry business coaches.