If you are building a business, the right infrastructure is essential to manage growth and get to the next level

Contraks.com assists contractors and other business owners to “get on the right trak” and correctly manage and organize the heart and soul of their business.    

Jeff Hamby is a concrete renovation and coating/painting contractor however he increasingly finds himself and his staff buried in paperwork and getting off "trak".

"I was involved in everything except the coatings industry" he said. "I had papers all over the office in stacks, and no system to manage it. The most mundane office chores often took my personal attention to get accomplished. I was running around with my hair on fire”

When customers or client would call for a copy of some type of paperwork related to a bid or a ongoing project, Hamby spent an inordinate amount of time searching for the lost document. The chaotic atmosphere produced train loads of stress and wasted time that should have been spent on other more productive endeavors and on what Hamby knows best, the coatings business.

Then Hamby was introduced to Thomas S. Uhlich who has been in his own business since the early seventies after spending two tours in Viet Nam as an Army Air Traffic Controller. Uhlich invented, developed, and evolved processes and procedures to organize his businesses to facilitate the growth of his companies. “Many of the organizational skills I started out with were learned in the Army and that experience provided a good foundation of reference in the early days of my business experience that carry on to this day” Uhlich said.

Many entrepreneurs are experts in a certain field however their expertise is generally not related to business organization. Most realize the need to do something however most don't posses the time or the technical know how to accomplish it.

“Most small businesses need assistance in this aspect of their business” says Thomas S. Uhlich, Owner of Contraks.com, a consulting business for small construction and supply companies, and he is now offering his solutions to all small businesses. The basic systems taught are applicable to most businesses. “It can take years of hard knocks, and, the painful lessons they teach to finally realize before you can grow a business and get to that “next level”, you must have a system in place to manage yourself and the business. The years spent learning these lesson can literally break a company or the entrepreneurial spirit of the owner before the business has a chance to succeed.” Uhlich says.

Most entrepreneurs are a creative individuals and concentrate mainly on starting a business or trying to find more business rather than how to control and manage it. Often, little thought is given to the infrastructure that is critical to maintain, control, and grow a business. There are many old sayings or idioms that apply to this situation and “putting the cart before the horse” Uhlich says is one of them.

The problem is most entrepreneurs don’t realize what’s going to happen “down the trak” as they pursue and secure more business Uhlich says. Most don't plan for this because they've never been in the situation before and lack experience. This is especially true of a start-up business. It seems once a business owner arrives at that point of awareness and recognizes there’s a problem, it’s often difficult to get the entrepreneur to allocate the time and funds required to organize the business correctly. Some become comfortable with the stress and the chaos. It’s human nature. The fear of the unknown comes into play and it’s a powerful emotion to overcome, but it can be done.

The solutions to the “runaway train” of chaos can seem overwhelming to an owner, however, there is help and it’s not hard to implement.

Taking a “one small step at a time approach” seems to work best for most small business owners Uhlich says. Given too much information at once, the owners eyes glaze over and those thoughts of “how am I going to do this with all the things I have to do now” start running through their mind. Sound familiar? It’s important to realize that bad business decisions are often directly related to high levels of stress. That stress is usually associated with the chaos and the insanity of an un-organized business that has an inadequate or non-existing infrastructure to mange the everyday processes off a real business.

Streamlining and standardizing basic business practices is critical to relieve stress to enable the owner to think clearly. Standardization once implemented, the business owner finds he or she is more relaxed and has more time. Some owners report feeling guilty they aren't working hard enough because the stress is gone. Being stressed out isn't what running a business is supposed to be like. It’s should be an enjoyable and rewarding experience. Once standardization is implemented and the stress is relieved, taking the next management steps are much easier to implement.

Hamby took the time to organize himself and his office using the approach Uhlich recommended.

Now there is clear definition about what happens next. As I was taught in the Army, “Standard Operating Procedures” or “SOP”, for each and every situation that develops there is a well defined documented procedure to follow. “It makes everyone’s life so much easier” Uhlich said. Now, for every action, there is a clearly defined reaction by Hamby and his staff.

When leads are generated, sales calls are made, proposals are written, employees are hired, financial issues and decisions based on real time, project management, project cost analysis, sales and marketing, long term strategic initiatives, market awareness among others areas, there is documentation generated and everything is clear and concise and the information is available to those who need it, and best of all, it’s easy to find. Gone are the days of “hunting expeditions” trying to find a simple piece of paper that should be at your fingertips. Hamby says “I can believe how easy this is”.

Its like, “what came first the chicken or the egg?” Uhlich said. The best solution is having a system in place to manage not only yourself but your business. The new or the seasoned entrepreneur should have a system that enables the company to take advantage of any business situation that presents itself without the fear of chaos.

Now when Hamby is with a customer a standard “Call Sheet” is filled out with all the standard proposal information so he knows what questions to ask so nothing is overlooked. Hamby’s sales staff and independent sales agents use this form also. “I simply email or give a copy of the form to my secretary. The first draft is emailed back to me or a hard copy is produced for review prior to being sent to the customer” Hamby said. This method enables Hamby and his staff to move on to the next sales calls and keep the flow going in an organized fashion.

“It has improved our sales flow dramatically and we are able to send more detailed and professional proposals/job specifications to our customers in a fraction of the time it took to produce a short proposal in the past” Hamby said. Instead of spending time dictating information to a secretary, the information on the “Call Sheet” is inserted into a standard proposal paragraphs template and a detailed proposal/job specification is completed in seconds. Everything is documented and nothing is left to chance.

“This method is very useful as we graduated from small projects to larger commercial and industrial construction projects that require more paperwork documentation” Hamby said. The standardization has saved them time, money, and aggravation in all aspects of the business.


It has been close to a year now that Hamby has been using this and other systems to streamline the typical business bureaucracy that exists in most companies. He said the systems have dramatically reduced the time it takes to write a complex or a standard proposal by as much as 75% or more. This enables Hamby to make more sales calls and focus on other important aspects of the business. Coupled with the ease of finding this documentation by other process introduced by Uhlich, Hamby has been able to more than double his work load with less work than it took prior to implementing these systems.


With his company’s infrastructure in order, Hamby has more time for strategic initiatives. Looking to the future and implementing new programs to facilitate growth are essential and often overlooked Uhlich notes. Market awareness is crucial. Many business owners are “left in the dust” when new technology and process’s are introduced into the market place because they are to pre-occupied with putting the fires out and not really concentrating on the market. Often, the owner realizes when it’s too late that the company should have been entrenched in the new technology or process from the beginning before the market became saturated with “me too’s” and then forced to play that frivolous game of catch-up.

Hamby has taken the next step towards larger and more complex commercial and industrial work. He is also well aware of market trends now and has acted upon those trends. Hamby is also involved in more profitable areas of the residential market based on his companies’ expertise using new and emerging technology and processes for both markets.

Most entrepreneurs’s should seriously consider allocating the time to take a good hard objective look at their business. If anything in the above article sounds familiar then take the time to bolster the infrastructure of your business. Eliminating chaos and stress is imperative before the business attempts to take that next step and grow a business.

“When a company secures more business, it must ensure the infrastructure is in place to provide the customer with the highest degree of support, maintenance, and project quality. Without an organized infrastructure, the company will lose customers and quality will suffer. Companies can learn this lesson the hard way or the easy way. It makes more sense to eliminate the pain and suffering associated with the school of hard knocks with a refined infrastructure before stepping up to the next level or even maintaining an existing business” Uhlich says.