Right and Wrong Ways to Make Your Contractor Business More Efficient

A lot has already been said about the right and wrong ways to make your contracting business more efficient. So why do contractors still tend to struggle when it comes to productivity and effectiveness? 

By Emily Hughes, Job Nimbus. 

Well, it could be argued that working against disorder is just part of the human condition! It’s also true that business is a broad endeavor requiring a lot of skills, so almost every contractor out there has weak areas as well as strengths. This is all part of the territory! But you also don’t have to accept those weaknesses long-term. 

3 Ways to Move Toward “The Good” 

Here are three mindset shifts that represent “right ways” to outrun the “bad ways” too many contractors get stuck in.

1. Stop Equating Creative Ideas with Best Ideas Not every innovative idea is better than more conventional methods. Just because something is creative doesn’t mean it makes sense for your bottom line! 

Ever heard of the term “best practices?” These are tried and true methods, a kind of recipe that yields good results consistently. Best practices are unique to every contracting business, but they’re always outcomes-focused. In other words, yes, you can innovate and throw concrete at the wall, and you can even get to where you do so with artistic finesse! 

But if your desired outcome is anything other than entertaining onlookers–if you’re looking to get jobs done efficiently, for example–you need best practices!

2. Don’t Let Weaknesses Limit You Yes, we all have weak areas and it’s unrealistic to expect people to overcome all of them, even in business. But that doesn’t mean you can’t adopt an attitude of reaching beyond your weaknesses. 

Instead of ignoring or justifying weak areas, team up with someone who’s strong in that area. They won’t look down on you for it, they’ll feel complimented! Or, invest time or attention to overcome the weakness through training–sometimes people who were once weakest in an area become stronger than “naturals,” because they’ve had to truly articulate the problem, come up with a strategy, and follow through. 

This goes for team members as well as other businesses. What if the business in this video had teamed up with a business that had the proper equipment but needed some extra hands on one of their projects?

3. Invest in Straightforward, Powerful Technology There also comes a point when you need to invest in custom tools for your team. Your people are your company’s most valuable asset, but that doesn’t mean you people need to do every job to be done. 

In the video above, this employee is providing a valuable service, but that doesn’t mean his efforts wouldn’t be more effective somewhere else! We all know this as people living in a world with machines. It doesn’t make sense for most of us to spend hours scrubbing our laundry when a machine or a laundromat can be used relatively cheaply. 

So why is it so easy to forget this? Sometimes making the switch represents a mental barrier and confronting that barrier can take us outside our regular workflow. It may feel like the last thing we have time for when we’re busily scrubbing a loud of laundry–but that’s just it. Taking time to decide on a laundry machine, purchase it, hook it up, and learn the controls is much preferred to the alternative. It’s fairly simple technology, but it’s powerful for the time it saves. 

Look for tools like that–ones that may be a bit uncomfortable to pursue at first, but that make a big impact. 

We Can Help! The perfect tool to start with is your contracting software, and Job Nimbus can certainly help you with that. Click here to start investigating the possibilities. 

As you continue replacing what you shouldn’t do with better practices, you’ll keep building leverage toward your goals, so most of all, just keep at it! We’re here to support you with our tools throughout the process. 

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