It takes more than just sales to run a successful construction company. You need to take good care of your employees to make sure that projects are being done to high standards and you need to ensure that job sites are secured properly. Apart from that, there are a few other things company owners and managers need to keep in mind. Here are some of the best practices to run a construction company and ensure growth and success.
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Prioritize Recurring Business
If you need to make a decision between two customers, one who can give you recurring business and another one who's offering one-time business but with higher revenue, it’s still a wise choice to go with the one who will give you recurring business in the future.
When you're just starting your construction company, resources tend to be limited. Therefore you need to be making sure you prioritize what you're working on so that your resource investments pay off.
Be insured for all scenarios
Construction can be a dangerous industry, no matter how many precautions you take. It’s important to have insurance for all types of scenarios like property damage, lawsuits, and onsite injuries that occur in this industry.
Apart from giving you peace of mind, when bidding for large projects some customers might require this. There are several insurance policies made specific for the construction industry so it’s not too difficult to find them.
Offer Top-Notch Customer Service
The quality of your projects is crucial, and offering customer service can be just as important. These two tend go hand in hand with one another more often than not. By communicating often with your customers and letting them know how their projects are going or any issues that come up along the way you’ll end up with a better-finished project that is satisfactory to both of you.
One key point to mention here is that you want to take a reactive approach to any issues that come up. What this means is that instead of simply telling your customers there is a problem, you want to inform them that there is a problem and a potential solution to that problem.
Clients don’t just remember the end product, but they also remember how the process went. By offering them amazing customer service, the chances of them coming back for more business and even refer you to other customers increases exponentially.
Constantly Bring In New Customers
While having recurring business customers is always an excellent idea, having a system to keep new customers coming is just as important. Often, construction companies rely too much on specific customers, and when these customers stop providing business the financials for companies get crippled.
There are several ways you can go about this. Having marketing in place so that you routinely get inbound leads from either Google or Facebook is a great way to go about it. These might require some upfront investments but can quickly pay themselves off. Don't forget the importance of having quality construction content on your website can help establish authority and help it rank higher on search engines like Google.
Network Like Crazy
Every person you come into contact with is a potential business opportunity. The customers you talk to, the suppliers you get materials from, your subcontractors or contractors in other industries, and even the software vendors you buy from.
Customers can always refer you to other customers or offer recurring business.
Suppliers can often send customers who are looking for contractors that use their specific products your way.
Subcontractors and other contractors can refer you to customers when they either have too much work on their hands already or if the customers are looking for something that isn’t in their industry but in yours instead.
By establishing firm relationships with them and figuring out ways you can work together apart from a simple buyer and seller relationship you can gain more leads and customers for your construction business.
Stay Organized
Having a list of procedures in place for certain events can keep things running smoothly for your company. When things go wrong, you want a list of procedures and steps to take to ensure damage is minimal.
Similarly, you want procedures in place so that every project turns out as expected. By requiring every project to have a pre-construction meeting to set initial expectations and a timeline for progress can help keep customers happy and prevent any costly rework mistakes.
Using construction accounting software to keep data records of your costs/estimates for materials can help improve the process of how you go about bidding and estimating for projects which will increase the efficiency and speed of these steps.
Manage Your Employees With Care
In the construction industry, project management isn’t the only thing you have to manage properly. Properly managing your employees should be the top priority for your company. Keeping your employees motivated and keeping them working at proficient levels will help the growth of the company.
There are several ways you can go about it. You should often engage with your employees, offer new training, offer incentives for quality work, and have a system to monitor their daily tasks and progress on their jobs.
Don’t Pinch Pennies
There are some steps we’re saving on costs is ideal, but then there are other things where you should not be cutting corners.
Construction equipment is one of those things where you pay what you get. It’s better to get quality equipment that will last for years but may have a higher upfront cost than to get low-quality equipment that will need to be consistently repaired.
Similarly, materials are one of those things where companies will try to cut costs on only for it to later backfire. While customers might not initially notice the quality of roof shingles at installation, know for a fact they will be able to tell once they start to rust or break down.
While saving money on initial costs might seem like a good idea at first, it might become more expensive when you have to fix it later.
To make managing a construction company more straightforward — read these construction software reviews
Construction Accounting Software
