Anastasios Koutsogiannis is the Content Marketing Manager at GenieBelt…
Expanding your construction company can be tough. There are a number of strategies that you should take into consideration in order to achieve your goal. A lot of planning and solid market knowledge is required.
The good news is that construction is a £7 trillion giant full of opportunities. Furthermore, the steadily increasing demand for new buildings, especially in Europe and the US, has led to a noteworthy building boom globally.
The bad news is that the building sector faces serious productivity problems. According to McKinsey & Company, the productivity gap between the average economy and the construction industry is £1 billion annually. On top of this, a severe skills shortage has made things all the more trickier.
That being said, it becomes understandable that growing your business in construction is a long and demanding process. Nevertheless, there are plenty of ways in which you can tackle these bottlenecks and expand a thriving company. We present below some of the smartest strategies that you could follow in order to expand your construction company.
1. Construction Management
Putting together a proactive and tech-savvy team is crucial for business success. Ensure your construction team consists of people you can trust. They should have the experience and knowledge to overcome numerous challenges that your company will face along the way.
There are two ways to go about this. Choose professionals with whom you have worked with in the past. This way, you know what to expect from your colleagues and can invest in team chemistry. If this isn’t possible, word of mouth is the way to go. Ask your network for references and learn as much as possible about the available candidates. You will then feel safer about your final choices
2. Construction Staff Welfare
Building a solid team is one thing – keeping it together is another. It’s your legal responsibility to ensure good working conditions for your employees and one benefit of this is increased productivity and being able to focus better on tasks.
Guide them with respect and you will gradually earn their trust and give them an extra incentive to work hard. To achieve this, you should get involved with all issues that your team may face on site. Hold frequent meetings where you can discuss the progress of tasks and solve any issues.
3. Digital Construction
In 2016, Mark Farmer – the famous UK construction expert and consultant, published an exceptional report on the future of the global building sector and the importance of investing in digital solutions. The report is entitled ‘Modernise or Die’ and it analyses how digitisation can improve productivity rates (30%) and painful budget overruns (at the moment – 80% of construction projects are struggling with this).
Digitisation is your friend and it’s clear that such an approach is the key to success. Ensure you invest in digital tools and construction software such as EasyBuild. At the same time, you add transparency and accountability to the whole process, as you can easily and quickly monitor every single step. And more importantly, you can communicate with your team in real time and imminently address any problems that may appear.
4. Construction Data
We mentioned above that digitisation is your friend. Now, we also have to highlight and stress that construction data is your best friend. It’s no exaggeration to say that the future of your company depends vastly on this. By keeping and analysing predictive and historic data from every project, you can make better decisions for your current and upcoming projects.
Data can improve the decision-making process of projects and allow you to make the right decisions in the minimum amount of time. At the same time, it can protect you from long and very costly disputes. Data can function as the objective source of truth which can solve almost every type of project dispute. For all these reasons, investing in digital solutions can be your biggest ally in the effort to expand your construction company.
5. Construction Networking
Last, but certainly not least, you need a strong network. The industry is changing and the emergence of a data-driven ecosystem in construction is around the corner. It would be beneficial to become part of this change. The main components of this new ecosystem will be strategic small-to-medium players (the big enterprise era is almost over), who will share and integrate their data in order to create a better future for construction.
You will need essential strategic partnerships to help you acquire project intelligence and establish yourself as a thought-leader and innovator in the industry. Identify the players in your niche with the greatest potential and try to create powerful connections with them. With an approach like this, you can be one step closer to your goal of expanding your construction company.
All in all, it’s apparent that expanding your construction company requires plenty of effort and smart investment. That’s why it’s critical to come up with the right strategies. Creating an effective network, a strong team and embracing digital tools should be seen as the three fundamental pillars on which you can expand your construction company.
https://www.easybuilduk.com/blog/2018-05-08/5-strategies-to-expand-your-construction-company
