How One Contractor Found Success By Getting Off the Tools.
March 12, 2020
By Steve Payne
He’s a multi-million-dollar renovation contractor now, but there was a time when Andrei Sosnovsky didn’t have enough money to buy food.
Andrei, owner of Sosa Inc., a Vaughan, Ontario renovation firm – one of the most successful firms in his market – is a veteran of our business now. But once upon a time, he was a total newcomer, struggling to learn how to mud a drywall seam – for no pay whatsoever.
Andrei had come to Canada from Belarus – the former USSR republic – in 1996. In his homeland, he was a successful lawyer. But, not having legal credentials in Canada, his first job in this country was teaching martial arts in Timmins. It didn’t work out. Soon, he was reduced to working as a bouncer at the Windsor Tavern in Timmins. He lived on the second floor of this dive bar – and at one point didn’t have enough money to eat for three days.
What turned things around for Andrei? He decided to get into the trades, a year after arriving in Canada. Moving to Toronto, he got a job as a general labourer and then, shortly afterwards, approached a Polish plasterer and begged him to teach him how to plaster and mud. “Andrei, I can’t pay you any money, but sure, if you want, I can teach you,” Andrei recalls. The plasterer, by the name of Caesar, taught Andrei priceless skills with the knife and, in time, handed all of his clients over to Andrei when he decided to relocate to Calgary.
Before long, Andrei had scored a job with P&C Construction in Toronto, doing commercial work. After that, Andrei opened up his own construction firm, doing work for his sole client: Toyota.
The key to getting from this small, one-person firm to Sosna Inc.? Andrei cannot emphasize the point enough: Contractors, if you want to grow your businesses, stop trying to do everything yourself!
“When I started focusing on residential, I was still doing a lot of the work myself,” Andrei recalls. “I remember I was trying to put a screw through drywall when my phone rang. Okay, I put down the screwdriver and answered the phone and then, as soon as I finished talking on the phone, I picked up the screwdriver and… the phone rings again… At that point, I suddenly realized, I either have to put in screws or answer the phone and run the business. I hung up my tool belt.”
Getting “off the tools” is a difficult decision for many contractors, who love building, are good at it, and are proud of their technical abilities.
But Andrei says that he would have built Sosna Inc. into a significant firm without saying goodbye to doing the work himself.
But there’s another step, too, that Andrei recommends to contractors that want to go in the same direction as him.
“As a builder, I had educated myself by continuous learning. I went to every course I could find: air quality control, building science, carpentry… I’ve got a Red Seal carpenter’s license and I read all the books on carpentry because that is what I thought I needed to be successful. But I realized, when I hung up my toolbelt, I had done it all wrong. I didn’t need to be reading construction books. I abandoned them entirely. I started reading books on business. I realized that if I wanted to be successful, I needed to learn about business not building.”
Andrei uses a phrase taught to him by contractor coach Mike Draper, president of Renovantage Inc.: “Work ON the business, not IN the business.”
However, at first, moving on from doing the work left Andrei missing something from his former life. “I was hungry for the feeling of accomplishment that I got from the tools. You know, I would do a very difficult project and it might be the last day, and I might have a difficult issue, like to how install trim around an obstacle or a bulkhead and I would work the whole day. I would find the solution and, oh my gosh, it would look so beautiful. And the client would be so happy, and I would feel tired and exhausted. But I knew the client was happy. And I’d get the money in my pocket and sit down to dinner that night and life was so good. I was hungry for this feeling, this feeling of fulfilment. Now, off the tools, that feeling was gone because I was no longer doing the work.”
It took a while, but Andrei eventually learned to find satisfaction in building his company, not walls. “It is just as much a creative process,” Andrei says. “Now I realize I have a unique opportunity to influence people in other ways.”
Finally, Andrei urges other entrepreneurial contractors to start taking the longer view, rather than getting caught in day-to-day emergencies on their projects.
“Running a business is like a chess game,” Andrei says. “A good chess player thinks a couple of moves ahead. He thinks what is next and what is after that. The further you can see, the better player you are. And the same thing goes with construction. If you are thinking a few moves ahead, everything goes very smoothly. But if you look only at what is happening today, you can’t be successful. I see it all over the place. You can ask a contractor, “What are you going to do tomorrow?” If he says, “I don’t know, I will let you know at the end of the day, you know he has no plan.”
