Navigating a construction business to success can be a lot to handle without careful planning in place. So this is not going to be the usual advice you will find about the Construction industry. It’s not about undertaking one of the usual roles that may first spring to mind when you think of active sites, work boots and hard hats.
Navigating behind the scene
Oh no! This is looking at what’s going on behind the scenes. You’ve effectively allocated yourself a second job, that you don’t want to take home to the family but you find yourself in a conundrum. Stay late at the office to do the paperwork and miss dinnertime, bath time and bedtime. Alternatively, you could go home with the best intentions of finishing off after showing up as an active member of family life. There’s one small snag, no matter how hard you try you seem to fall asleep before the kids!
You want to experience the best of both worlds, the cuddles and the pats on the back. Having the right structure with solid administration in your company will see you marking out your place in the industry to make others sit up and take notice. I would be the last person to say you can’t have it all. However the more ambitious the end goal, the more contemplation for the plan and the support put in place.
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When you have a strategy beyond site
This is the first duty of your administration team. With proper procedures and complete processes in place with time and practice it will become second nature. introduction letters to the relevant stakeholders with contact details of who to contact with questions. You will give bite-sized information so that relevant people are informed but not overwhelmed with the details.
If you have explained it clearly to the key person in the admin team, they will share the information with others (if there are others) and that will save you from being caught out on your hands and knees, crawling around on the floor inspecting the work whilst trying to answer numerous questions from a client who’s been on the internet doing their own “investigation”.
Elevate your business
Not only do you start to build relations, but you can manage the time of your team and ultimately the budget better. You start to create records, building an understanding of the environment you’re working in and future-proofing your relationship with the client. There is no need for you to stay late or get distracted when the client requests confirmation of the properties that have been visited, and what works were carried out. You can send a link to where all the information is filed along with before and after photographs.
Let’s pause for a moment to consider whether this is something that you want to leave in the hands of an inexperienced person without clear guidelines. My guess is no. Yes, they could work it out eventually, but do you have that time to invest in trial and error? Especially when you have rightfully boasted about the work your crew are capable of providing. Until you give the matter some thought, you tend not to truly realise the weight of responsibilities dismissed as not worth dipping into the budget to cover.
Everyone has to start somewhere and that's why at Corporate Administrative Solutions Limited (CAS Ltd) you have options. Three options:
- Do nothing. From my training to be a solicitor, this was always worth a couple of marks! Bury your head, cover your eyes and hope for the best that it will work itself out. From extensive experience, it has never gotten better without intervention (that’s not to say there are no exceptions to the norm).
- If you’re the leader you must take action and this is where you can work with CAS Ltd to have a structure in place at the start of the project so that your regular person has the guidance needed to be an active member of the team and run the office.
- If you are only just finding out about CAS Ltd and already find yourself in a tricky situation, we can assess what you have, what the client is requesting and work to get your house in order. It will be a case of backtracking and putting in place procedures that are easy to follow and ensure you capture the information needed.
