5 Areas Where You Can Gain An Edge In Construction

Is any advantage at all always worth pursuing in business? If you feel as though a certain direction will only grant you a very slight edge, it might not be worth the effort that it would take to claim it in the first place.

That’s a fair consideration to make, especially in a field like construction, where you want to put as much effort as possible towards your results. That being said, if you feel as though you can accrue enough of these advantages easily enough, they could stack up into something much more substantial.

1.     Customer Service

Looking outside of the typical areas one might typically associate with construction businesses could help you get ahead. In any industry, it’s important that you don’t overlook how much of an impact positive customer service can have on the overall experience. Hiring a construction team and being pleased that they delivered a good result is one thing, but if the team is consistently communicative with you and offering opinions and options, that can tip over into something even better. At that point, the customer experience becomes a lot more memorable and worthwhile, and when the time comes again for the client to consider hiring a construction team, the one that left an impact will be at the top of their list.

2.     Efficiency

The desire to deliver a professional result in business is second to none, but how efficiently you can deliver this result is going to have a big impact on how successful your business ends up being. If every job takes far longer than you expect it to and requires a lot of last-minute planning, this positive result might be one that’s consistently hard to come by. Furthermore, it might mean that you’re dedicating time that could be going towards other jobs on one alone when there’s no need to.

Becoming more efficient in any industry is difficult, but in construction, it might be about equipping yourself with the right tools and finding a working rhythm in your team that makes sense. In that way, it might not be enough to just have concrete mixing systems; you need employees who can work with those tools effectively and use them in such a way as to actively enhance the result.

3.     Care Towards Marketing

For many digital businesses, there’s understandably a large focus on digital marketing. These are the spaces where these brands operate, and they are also shared by their audiences. Many businesses have a large interest in the digital world due to these enormous audiences, and that means that the methods opened up by digital marketing are very varied. Naturally, this makes it a tempting place for you to focus all of your marketing efforts as well. While this might end up being a perfectly good idea, it’s important that you’re consistently thinking about your target audience, your branding, and what kinds of marketing might ultimately be the most successful for you.

While it’s always important for any business to have a robust and up to date website, as well as a solid social media presence, it’s unlikely that you need to go as far as something like influencer marketing, for instance. You have to consider your audience – are the audiences of most influencers likely to be the kinds of people who will enlist your services? Instead, you could consider SEO and how that can help to expand your reach. Alternatively, you could look away from the digital sphere altogether and instead see what physical marketing still has to offer.

4.     Consider Your Pricing

When you’re thinking about how to price your services, naturally, you’re going to be thinking about what makes sense in the current landscape. As much as you want to charge more, that might mean that nobody enlists your services, and undercutting the competition could mean you’re simply not making enough money (perhaps even if you account for the increase in customers).

So, when all is said and done, it can feel as though you don’t really have that much autonomy in how you go about setting your prices. What you might have more control over, however, is how you allow your customers to pay. Construction jobs can get expensive, naturally, so allowing some degree of flexibility in how your clients go about paying these costs might help to be more inclusive about who can accept your services. Again, this is something that you have to do with a full awareness of how any given choice is going to impact your own standing, but it’s worth being aware of some of the benefits that these kinds of routes can have for you in the eyes of your audiences.

5.     Employee Happiness

Dedicating time towards nurturing a positive work environment might, on the surface, feel like a time-consuming endeavor that only yields nebulous results, but the truth might be further from that than you expect. Keeping your employees happy has a wide range of benefits. Not only can it increase the chances of your employees sticking around at your business and thereby reduce turnover, but it might also help them to function more productively, helping to solve your efficiency problem. A more positive workspace is one that’s more pleasant and comfortable for everyone and that can lead to a greater degree of trust between you, putting fewer obstacles in the way of the work itself.

To that end, how you interact and engage with your employees is obviously a large part of how you go about making this difference. An understanding, patient, empathetic and communicative approach can all help to foster trust. However, it’s also worth thinking about how they see their own time with your business. They likely want to feel as though they’re furthering their own professional development, and that means you can get ahead by offering them training opportunities and the chance to make the most of what they’ve learned to be promoted into higher positions.