7 Questions Every Business Owner Should Ask Themselves Every 6 Months

If you own a building company or run a department, you probably get reviewed by nobody. Your team gets feedback, your jobs get inspected, your books get audited. But when was the last time you sat down and honestly checked your own leadership? Most owners I coach have not done it in years, and not because they do not care. They are too busy reacting to the day.

So here is a simple tool. Every three to six months, sit down with seven questions and answer them in writing. It is not a framework and it is not a personality test. It is a self-audit. I have asked myself these questions through my whole career, and I will be honest: for a long time, the true answer to several of them was no.

1. How often do you communicate the vision, and could your people repeat it?

The first question is not whether you have a vision. It is how often you say it out loud. If you asked every person on your team to tell you where the company is going and what matters most right now, would they say the same thing? Would they understand why their own job matters to the bigger picture?

Check yourself on three things. Are your day-to-day responses and directives in conflict with the vision you announced? Does everybody know the top priorities, and are we actually working on them? Is anyone confused about the results we are trying to reach? If the answer to any of these is a maybe, the problem is almost never the team. It is that clarity has not been repeated enough.

2. Are you working on the business or in the business?

When you work in the business, your to-do list is full of things you are personally doing. You are reactive. You get pulled into decisions that someone else should be making, and you never get quiet long enough to see the trends or the warning signs in your own numbers.

Early in my career I was promoted from one location and a staff of four or five to five locations and a staff of 33. My division president told me to go sit somewhere for an hour the next week and think. I am an operations guy, a box checker, so I had no idea what that meant. He told me to take a blank piece of paper and some reports and see what happens.

I drove to a lake, sat at a boat ramp with a stack of reports and a bologna sandwich, and started looking. Within that hour I saw trends I had missed. I was going to need more staff within sixty to ninety days, and if our success continued we were going to run short of product in a few months, so I needed new things in the pipeline now. None of that came from working harder. It came from getting quiet.

Two more pieces belong in your time. First, learning: conferences, audio books, podcasts, a coach. Part of your calendar has to pour into you. Second, walking around. People mostly stay at a company because of who they work with and who they work for, not because of pay (assuming you are paying them fairly). Walk the office and the jobsite to ask how people are doing, not to give orders. When an owner walks past and tells someone in accounting what to do, that instruction beats whatever their own boss said, and you have just undermined your own chain of command.

3. Do you give timely, direct, constructive feedback?

I coached at a company where the best employee in the building had no idea how good she was. Everyone knew she was crushing it. She told me, nearly in passing, that it would be nice to know how she was doing. When people get no feedback, they write their own story, and it is usually worse than the truth. Her work was great, but her confidence was suffering.

You do not need a scary annual review. Annually is not often enough anyway. Sit down at least quarterly and keep it simple: how are you doing, brag on yourself for the last thirty days, what could be better, here is what I have noticed, and how can we help? Then make a short list of training, classes or tasks over the next three to six months, and check in every few weeks.

Feedback also has to run the other way. Do you have a few people, maybe not senior ones, who will close the door and tell you what you need to hear? That only happens if you have made it safe to speak up. And as a rule, great leaders ask about 50% more questions than they give directives.

4. Are you identifying high performers ready for the next step?

Most companies are not good at noticing their best people, mainly because nobody has time to look. If you track results, you can see who is producing and who is having the biggest impact. Those high-capacity people may be on the very first rung of the company, but there is something about them.

Then ask what the company will need in three or five years. Do you have a one-year goal, a three-year goal, a five-year goal? Once you know where you are going, you can see which roles you will need and who might grow into them. Start exposing those people to new metrics and new meetings now. And do you have an accountability chart showing who is responsible for what, even if there are only five of you? Without it, people step on each other's toes and nobody can see the path forward.

5. Are you paying attention to changes in your industry?

Are you aware of what is going on in your market, your region and your trade, and would any of it change how you organize or run the company? The fix is to be around people who see different things than you do. Peer groups where builders compare metrics, profitability and staffing (no trade secrets required) are one way. Conferences, books and podcasts are another. The better equipped you are, the better you lead everyone else.

6. How do you behave under pressure?

I have seen owners throw things, cuss, and shut an entire job down because of the pressure of a customer or a margin problem. It is demoralizing for the person on the receiving end, and it does not make anyone want to go knock it out of the park. If you are going to explode, wait until everybody has left and go outside by yourself. But do not bottle it up either. Find somewhere healthy for that pressure to go.

The quieter version is passive-aggressive comments. I was guilty of this myself. In a meeting about warranty work, when the owner made a comment, I said something like, so I guess we are not going to sign off on warranty anymore. He slammed his hand on the table and said there is no place for that here, just say what needs to be said. It stopped me cold. My wife has a word for those remarks: heat seekers. They are aimed near someone rather than at them. Replace them with a plain statement: warranty is a struggle, so what do we need to do about it?

7. Does your leadership style reflect who you really are?

Are you leading the way you were made, or copying someone else because you think you should be more like them? I had a coaching call recently with a man who is excellent in his full-time career and struggling in a new part-time role. He kept comparing himself to people who were full-time and thriving. My answer: the experience that got you here is exactly what this role needs. Trying to be somebody else creates chaos and frustration for everyone around you.

That does not mean you never change. Your style may need tweaking, and books, peers and coaching all help. But the test is simple: is your style helping your team get great results?

Run the company by results, not by people

I heard a line recently that stuck with me: stop running the company by people and start running it by results. Decide where you are going, define what the results look like, then equip your people to go get them. Only after that should you ask whether you have the right person in the seat. Hiring people and hoping they figure out the results is backwards.

1. Block one hour this week on your calendar, somewhere quiet, with a blank piece of paper.
2. Answer all seven questions in writing, honestly, and circle the two that sting.
3. Pick one of those two and change one habit this month. Ask a trusted person to tell you how you are doing.
4. Put the same seven questions back on your calendar for three to six months from now.

Everything rises and falls on leadership, so the leader is the first person who should be reviewed.