You’ve got three projects running simultaneously, two clients breathing down your neck about delays, and your phone’s buzzing with another “urgent” issue that’s about to derail your entire week.
Sound familiar?
If you’re constantly putting out fires instead of preventing them, your poor scheduling is actively destroying your projects and your reputation.
Most builders think they’re too busy to plan properly. You’re jumping from crisis to crisis, making it up as you go, telling yourself you’ll “get organised next week” when things calm down.
Here’s the sad truth: Poor scheduling isn’t just making your days stressful, it’s killing your projects. Every missed deadline erodes client trust. Every scrambled timeline costs you money. Every excuse you make gives your team permission to operate the same way.
Meanwhile, your competitors who DO plan properly are winning the jobs you should be getting.
The answer isn’t working longer hours or hiring more people.
It’s recognising that everything in your business: your team’s performance, your client relationships, and your project outcomes is a direct reflection of how you plan and schedule.
When you take control of your scheduling, everything changes:
- Projects run more smoothly.
- Clients trust you more.
- Your team knows exactly what’s expected.
- And you actually get your evenings and weekends back.
Watch the video now, or read the transcript below. Be sure to also subscribe to the Live Life Build YouTube channel.
Amelia
Often builders will tell us that planning just feels really hard and it takes way too much time. They’ll get themselves stuck in this place where they don’t invest any time in planning or scheduling. They don’t make any time for themselves to be able to run their businesses better.
Duayne
If you’re running around like a headless chook just hoping things will work out, constantly running late for meetings, forgetting them, and having to reschedule, this can spill over into your personal life as well. You really need to take a step back and spend some time scheduling your weeks in advance.
Amelia
As a builder, it may feel easier to blame clients, your team, or the industry for not having the opportunity to plan and for always needing to be reactive. However, without a clear structure and a regular scheduling process, it becomes difficult to set expectations, improve your team, communicate with clients, and run your business efficiently.
What I find fascinating is that when builders actually sit down to plan their projects, they are thinking it through but they’re not documenting it in any way. The minute you take the time to document how you’re planning your projects and how you’re scheduling your time, all of a sudden you’ve got this fantastic visual communication tool that you, as a builder, can use to execute the project.
You can show it to clients so that they have greater certainty and trust in your ability to deliver. You can show it to your team so they feel more comfortable and know what they’re doing every day. It just makes everything run so much more smoothly.
You’ve only got yourself to blame for the business that you have, and it’s only you who can actually make the change.
Amelia
Duayne
I think the thing that really hit home for me is that everything around you is just a reflection of you. If you’re not scheduled, not structured, and turning up to the site like you turn up to meetings late, your team is constantly hearing you make excuses, then that’s how your team is going to operate.
You can’t expect your team to set up early and ready to work if you’re not arriving on time yourself. You can’t expect them to finish tasks promptly if you’re not setting clear expectations. If you’re always making excuses, whether it’s traffic or a missed email, you’re essentially giving everyone around you permission to do the same.
Amelia
I think you’ve only got yourself to blame for the business that you have, and it’s only you who can actually make the change. Once you take responsibility for seeing that this is how lack of planning is showing up in your business, you can take the power back.
By taking what’s in your head, documenting it, and structuring it into a clear plan, you not only create a system to work from but also a tool to communicate effectively with your team.
Duayne
As builders, we’re very visual people. So after listening to this video, I’d like you to go and get a scheduling app on your phone, if you don’t already have one. You can use a free Google option too if you like. The important thing is to have something visual where you can start putting things in and actually looking at it.
Make it the first thing you do every day when you get up. That’s how I run my life, and it works really well. Put in there the times that you want to wake up, the time you need to be at a job site, the meetings you need to have, the phone calls you need to make. You don’t need to get all that in there straight away. Just start with one or two things every week, and start building on that.
In just two to four weeks you’ll start to see a massive difference in the way you show up, the extra time you get back, how your business operates, and definitely in the way people treat you.
Your Next Move: From Chaos to Control
The truth Amelia and Duayne shared isn’t complicated, but it is confronting: everything around you is a reflection of you. Including the state of your building business.
If your business feels chaotic, if your team seems disorganised, if clients question your professionalism, it’s time to look in the mirror. You have the power to change it all, starting with how you plan and schedule your weeks.
It’s about taking ownership of your business, your time, and your life.
And it’s about building the kind of systematic approach that separates successful builders from those constantly fighting fires.
Ready to transform how you run your building business?
The Successful Builder Solution inside our ELEVATE program shows you exactly how to create the structure, systems, and scheduling approach that changes everything. Because your business and your family deserve better than the constant scramble.
Discover how hundreds of builders have moved from chaos to control with the proven framework.