I read in Gallup’s book on employee engagement that an employee’s view of the company they work for has everything to do with whom they report to. Even if you have a great culture, history, reputation, etc., if some of your people are working for an idiot, those people will not be engaged and they will think poorly of the company. The power supervisors at all levels have to ruin or make your culture and therefore employee engagement is huge, because employee engagement can make or break your company. That’s why I say you need to measure it.

I’m sure we’ve all had to overcome some kind of adversity to gain the privilege of becoming CEOs. For me, most of my first 25 years on this earth were spent angry, confused and misunderstood. However, I ultimately chose to turn adversity into success by learning to change my mindset.

Many contractors have at least one family member “in the business.” The company I ran for 15 years, Roth Bros. Inc., had the family recipe contained in the name of the company. We had brothers working for brothers, husbands working for wives, sons working for fathers, daughters working for mothers, etc. I have also spent time with several CEOs who run businesses with similar familial situations.

Some people like to say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” but I believe all businesses need to be shaken up and transformed every five to ten years in order to stay competitive. I say this partly because if you don’t, you won’t actually know that something is “broke.”

Within three to seven years, our industry is going to confront technologic change at a pace never experienced before. Will you be ready? Some of you may be thinking, “No way! Never going to happen to our industry or my business.” You may be thinking, “We’ve been doing things pretty much the same way for awhile and have been successful!” Kodak thought the same thing—right up to the time they went bankrupt and vanished. The cab companies thought the same thing before Uber emerged.

There comes a time when it’s time to leave a business, whether because you’re ready for something new or you’ve done what you set out to do and your work is complete. Or perhaps there’s another reason why it’s time to say goodbye and exit gracefully. Regardless of the reason, having an exit plan is crucial. And the time to develop your exit plan is not when you’re ready to exit, but from the very start.

The construction and facilities industries are prone to accidents, some of which can be severe and headline-grabbing. The reality today is that we as CEOs face threats from even more areas than in days of old, because of technology. These days an “accident” can include our systems being hacked or one of our technicians unknowingly granting hackers a gateway into breaching a major customer’s system. Between physical accidents and digital ones, many things can go wrong, resulting in a need for crisis management to be deployed to address a situation.

Bad news is inevitable. If you’re not hearing any bad news as CEO, you have a big problem, and one you need to address, because bad news has to be proactively dealt with…or else.

It is very easy as a CEO to get caught up in the weeds of the business and to allow non-value activities to absorb too much of your day. I often hear: I have too many emails; too many interruptions; too many meetings; too much wasted time and no work/life balance. These are all symptoms that your business is running you vs. you running your business. It all comes down to how you spend time.

Paul spent the last 15 years leading Roth Bros., Inc., a $150 million industry leading national HVAC, roofing and EMS Company. He is an Angel Investor in many tech start-ups; Advisor to BuiltWorlds and Hard Hat Hub; Executive Committee Member of the Young Presidents Organization’s Construction Industry and Sustainability Business Networks and he is being mentored by one of the world’s top innovators and disruption experts. After he sold Roth to a large global company, Paul has been following his passion, which is to help other CEO contractors succeed.