anything that was going bad.” In order to do that, the first thing they did was “put the brakes on bringing any more business in.” “We needed to get our house in order before we invited any more guests to visit,” he explains. “So we stopped estimating entirely for three straight months. We focused on every project we already had in order to make sure we were delivering a good product and becoming predictable and trustworthy.” “We’d had too many fires on too many projects happening at the same time,” he adds. “Many of those fires were coming from the same sources. They were indicative of a lack of training, they were indicative of a lack of processes and support, and they were indicative of a lack of accountability from individuals in the company.” In order to resolve those issues, Neil says that they looked at “hiring new people, replacing people, and replacing customers in cases where the customers were not a good values match for us.” At the same time, they didn’t walk away from a single project, even when it meant taking “massive hits.” “We lost more than a million dollars last year,” Neil recalls. “Inmymind, and inmy partners’ minds, that money was an investment. It was worth losing that money to show that we’re trustworthy, that we’re going to stick around and we’re going do what we say we’re going to do. We could have spent that million dollars on marketing, but I think we got more value out of investing it this way.” As Neil said, Ascent also spent last year figuring out the kind of NOVEMBER 2022
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