Construction and Contracting Business. Entrepreneur magazine

Present a professional image. Employees in the field should look and dress like professionals. The best way to achieve this is to require that employees wear clean uniforms while on the job. The uniforms do not have to be fancy or expensive. T-shirts with your company logo are usually acceptable, but they must be clean and well maintained. Smoking while on the job should be limited to breaks. (If you can get away with it, we suggest prohibiting all smoking during the workday.) Finally, vehicles should be well maintained, clean, and the same color. Remember the fraudulent asphalt sealers in the Preface? Their van was rusty and had no name or logo on the side; most likely it spewed black, smelly exhaust as they drove off with poor Mr. Jones’s money.

      

Train employees, and discuss with subcontractors the importance of showing respect to your clients. It’s important that whoever is working on your behalf understand that you don’t really pay their wages—the client does. While working at the job site, your employees should be able to answer basic questions posed by the client. If they do not know the answer to a question, they must tell the client that they don’t know but will either find the answer or refer it to someone in the company who can answer it. Typically they should be able to text or call you, or someone else in the company, to get the answers. Clients appreciate both diligence and honesty; your employees must have both. Your reputation is on the line.

      

Enter (and win) awards competitions. Many contracting business associations have annual competitions that allow members to display their best work; the best are often recognized at an awards banquet. Preparing for an awards competition can be time-consuming and expensive, but shortcuts cannot be taken when preparing an entry. These competitions are usually judged by a panel of your industry peers who know a substandard job when they see it. The publicity that results from winning an award is priceless because clients love doing business with companies that are among the best in their field.

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       There are a lot of associations and organizations covering all types of contractors. If you search online for associations for contractors you’ll find government, independent, roofing, electrical, drilling, and many more associations. Some are quite large, such as the Associated Builders and Contractors of America (at www.ABC.org), with over 20,000 chapter members. Membership in associations enhances your credibility, plus they can help you get answers to questions in your industry and provide guidance on legal or financial issues.

Too Much of a Good Thing?

      While everyone strives for success, too much of a good thing can occasionally lead to problems that overwhelm a business. Each business should strive for a professional and successful marketing and public relations campaign; but each business must also be able to meet the demands that might be generated from successful advertising. Some businesses find themselves in a situation where they are growing faster than their ability to provide quality and timely service. Anticipation of growth before it occurs will help prevent potential bottlenecks in providing goods and services to your clients. In particular, rapidly growing companies often find themselves in trouble in some or all of the following areas:

      

Lack of skilled foremen and workers. This weakness makes it difficult to complete projects with the expected high quality.

Scheduling conflicts. Most clients do not want to wait eight or ten weeks for the commencement of their project, but some fast-growing contractors make unrealistic promises for project start dates.

      

Shortage of tools and equipment needed to complete the project. This situation often results in the purchase of equipment beyond the amount budgeted or the need to rent expensive equipment on a short-term basis.

      

Cash flow. Can the business keep up with expenditures? Increased business usually requires an increase in outlays for materials and labor, so the company must improve efforts to collect funds from clients.

      A contracting company must understand these potential pitfalls and make contingency plans in the event that business activity grows “too fast.” Rapid growth does not always follow successful marketing campaigns, but the company that fails to plan for it may become a statistic on the “business failures” list. There was a television commercial running that showed a group of employees press the button that launched their website. Then within moments, they got flooded with responses. At first they were thrilled, but then their initial smiles of success turned into worried expressions as they wondered what they would do to accommodate all the clients they received. In the real world, many businesses that signed up on Groupon, and other discount sites, got more customers than they could handle and found themselves in all sorts of water—in some instances they even ran themselves out of business. So, before you spread the word far and wide, make sure you have enough employees and/or subcontractors to handle the potential workload.

Wrap-Up

      

Marketing is any activity that connects producers with consumers.

      

Self-promotion is an excellent and inexpensive way to advertise your business.

      

You should have your website designed and posted before you open your company.

      

Word of mouth is the number-one way most contracting companies find new clients.

      

Understanding the potential pitfalls of extremely rapid growth makes good business sense.

      

The use of social media can be a great way of attracting new customers as well as maintaining good communications with existing clients.