Scaling your small business

By Emma Peterson. 

Starting off in the industry can be a challenge. No matter your long-term goals, there are key strategic choices to be made at the start.  

Robert “Bobby” Mesmer has not always been the CEO of the world’s largest pre-engineered erection company. 24 years ago, he started a general construction company. It wasn’t until they did a project on a military base that they found their footing in pre-engineered work and became RMG Erectors & Constructors. In this episode of MetalCast, Bobby shares his story with Heidi J. Ellsworth and talks about the importance of making careful, strategic choices as an owner. 

For Bobby, making the move into the pre-engineered space with RMG was a strategic leap of faith. He explained, “Businesses tend to replicate other businesses. Nobody's looking at things differently, no one asks ‘What can I change in this industry?’ When we dove into the erecting business, we were met with, ‘That's not the way it's done. That's not the way you should be doing it. That's not the way I've done it.’ We've always turned around and said, ‘We don't care.’” By breaking the mold and sticking to his own ways, Bobby has built a company that regularly erects millions of square feet worth of buildings each year. This attitude is one of the key ways they established themselves as a small business and started scaling.  

From there, it’s important to keep the big picture in mind as you move through the day-to-day. Bobby gave an example of what this means.He shared, “First things first;  get your finances in order. Finances in all small businesses are typically a mess. They really are. And it's not a problem, it's not anybody's fault, most people just don't know better and don't see value in it. The value is going to be in it when it comes if you want to sell, because having three to five years of good, clean, substantiated, audited financials that you can look back on shows a strong history of what you're doing.” 

His other big piece of advice for small business owners? Get your company structure organized. As an owner it is often tempting to be involved in managing every part of your company. This is something that you built out of nothing, after all. However, this can be a weakness. Bobby explained, “What happens if you remove yourself out of the business for two weeks? Can the business still operate? When you're a small business or even a medium-sized business and you are everything in the business, nobody's going to want to buy you because you don't have a good company structure set up...And even if you're not trying to sell, structure is key to making your business run more efficiently, stronger and healthily as you continue to try to grow it.” 

Read the transcript, Listen to the episode or Watch the conversation to learn more about scaling your small business.