You're working hard, but your bank balance isn't growing. Perhaps you're constantly short of cash despite having a healthy order book. The chances are your business is leaking profit in places you haven't yet identified. Most contractors don't fail because they can't build. They fail because small profit leaks across the business quietly drain cash until it becomes too late.

There isn't a single silver bullet despite what you may have read or are told. Profit usually leaks from four connected areas of the business. Improve the wrong one first and you'll see little benefit. Our free AI-powered Profit Leakage Quiz identifies where your business is losing profit first, then produces a prioritised action plan tailored to your business.
Our clients are contractors just like you, tradespeople who built their businesses from the ground up and came to us when they were ready to stop leaking profit and start scaling with confidence. Read what they have to say about our mentoring programme.
"Before Peter started the program with us, our bidding did not have much logic. He introduced a discipline which now enables us to win profitable jobs, when we need them."
"Peter has opened up a whole new way of finding work which has enabled us to penetrate markets we wanted to get into to grow the business."
"The importance of how the figures informed the management came through so strongly after just one session with Peter that we recruited a finance person."
"Wow, light bulb moment. How had we missed what you said about tender feedback."
"Submitting a public sector bid exposed us to completing the quality section for the first time. Peter identified resources to cover the new elements of this type of contact and we scored highly on quality with his guidance."
"Thank you so much for our session. I thoroughly enjoyed it and now have a clear direction with a great value proposition."
Unlike most business coaches, I've managed construction projects, profit centres and regional operations within one of the UK's largest contractors. My career progressed from Setting Out Engineer through Project Manager, Profit Centre Director and Executive Leadership, supported by structured management training and an MBA. Since 2015 I've helped more than 100 contractors improve the way they price, manage and deliver profitable work.
Most SME business owners go from "worker" to "owner", missing out the formal learning at supervisory, middle & senior manager levels. They gain scars along the way, making expensive mistakes, some that serious their business folds. Like them, I have gained my fair share of scares and have learnt how I, and those working for me, can avoid repeating them.
Every construction business is at a different stage of development. Because we've worked with businesses of all sizes, we can usually identify the key issues quickly and focus on the changes that will make the biggest difference first. That keeps the programme practical, cost-effective and proportionate to the size of your business.


If you have decided to run your contracting business like a professional business rather than be on the tools or supervising a project, where should you start?
The single biggest profit leak occurs before a project even starts. If you consistently win work too cheaply, every project begins with a handicap. As an experienced businessperson I have developed a method for winning tendered construction projects at the maximum profit possible. The method is not difficult to follow; it simply needs to be applied with consistency and accuracy to be successful. As projects are tendered and won at the maximum profit the biggest profit leakage is fixed. Everything else you do can be tackled separately.
The primary concern should be to firstly stop any profit leakage occurring this week. Turn any “Project from Hell” round that you are working on. Then ensure that there is a pipeline of profitable work and that it is being secured at the highest price possible. Without profitable work coming in the business will fail but most construction businesses leak profit in four areas:
Winning Work
Running Projects
Commercial Management
Managing the Business
The best way to judge whether our approach works is to read what our clients say. Then take the free Profit Leakage Quiz to discover where your business is losing profit and receive a prioritised action plan to help you stop the leaks.
Take our Contractors Construction Quiz to find out where you could improve.
