Starting and Growing an Electrical Contracting Business
As an electrical contracting business, you should always be looking for ways to increase your current business or ensure a successful launch. The fact is that there are many other subcontractors in the field and only so many clients to go around, especially if you plan on targeting a specific niche. As a result, you must have a clear and precise business strategy that will help give you a leg up on your competition. These tips are a great basis for an electrical contracting business at any stage to improve.
Table of Contents
Below I will discuss a few tips for starting and growing your electrical contractor business.
Hire Competent Employees
Your electrical contracting business is only going to be as good as the caliber of employees that you bring in. These are going to be the people out working for your clients and interacting with them on a daily basis, so you want to make sure you are taking the greatest care possible to find people who are both competent and trustworthy. For companies with low budgets for staff, this can make for a difficult balance. How do you draw in the best employees possible without top salaries? You may need to think of other perks that you can offer.
A deliberate hiring process is also better for your company’s bottom line. Many electrical contracting businesses find themselves having to replace someone that doesn’t work out for them. This represents a loss of money, time, and effort in developing and onboarding that employee. You also want to make sure you have retention efforts to keep your top employees from leaving for greener pastures.
Foster Team Relationships
Building relationships and contacts are essential in order to help your electrical contracting business. First, this gives you a steady set of clients that you can count on in order to help you build your business up. In addition, these clients can refer you to other people in their network. The bigger your professional network, the easier it is for you to win contracts. You have people that can serve as references as well as a larger body of work.
But what if you’re starting small and don’t have a lot of working relationships? It’s a good idea to use the opportunities that your team provides through their past connections. If every employee is able to reach out to someone they know and get you a job, this could increase your client list several times over.
Encourage Word of Mouth
Word of mouth is an essential tool for smaller electrical contacting businesses looking to grow, largely because a lot of those early clients are going to be local. There are a few ways that you can encourage word of mouth to grow across social media, directories like Yelp, and other channels. First is making sure that you provide top-notch customer service. Another important thing worth considering is getting involved in the community. Sponsoring a local event or organization is a good way to ingratiate yourself with your client base.
Manage Contacts Effectively
So let’s say that you’ve implemented word of mouth and built a contact base. The organization is essential here. If you don’t have an organized method to easily access client information, you may run the risk of mixing up different jobs, preferences, and contact info. Using a central database makes it easier to scale your operations without hurting the quality of service.
Develop a Clearly Defined Marketing Strategy
Word of mouth is useful, but it can only be one part of a clearly defined marketing strategy. To make sure that you find one that’s a fit, you need to gather your team and brainstorm. Discuss which areas of work generate the most profit, what geographic regions you serve, and what resources you need to deliver this work. This will help you put together the persona for your customers. The next step after this for your electrical contracting business is finding the marketing channels and messages that best reach said, customers.
Receive Feedback from Customers
Getting customer feedback is a mutually beneficial prospect. It gives you valuable information to improve your business while letting customers feel like they are closely connected to your business.
Make sure that you develop a consistent survey system that you implement after every project. Keep this structure in place, and be sure to communicate with your team about the feedback so that you can learn from your past projects. Survey Monkey and Google Forms are popular, but you may want to use phone surveys if that better matches your target audience.
Pay Attention to New Technology and Trends
All the tips that we’ve mentioned so far are relatively evergreen. However, there are going to be some things that shift over time in the world of electrical contracting businesses. To make sure that you’re not left behind the competition, you need to be mindful of new tech advances that develop in the field. In some cases, it’s a matter of opening yourself up to new clients. For example, green buildings are growing in popularity across the board. You want to make sure that you can offer services that are eco-friendly so you can compete.
When we talk about technology, though, it’s not just about how you can use it to directly benefit your customers, but also how you can use it to support your business. Helping to improve your efficiency across the board and better support your operations is ultimately going to pay dividends for your customers, so you want to look into internal tech upgrades as well. Project management software like eSUB is a good example here.
Final Thoughts on Starting & Growing your Electrical Contracting Business
What exactly does it do for your business? For one thing, it helps you save time communicating and planning by making all the details of your different work projects available in cloud storage. The financial tools help ensure that your bids and actuals give you profit on every job. Finally, your office and field teams can work in better harmony, with everyone aware of where the workers and equipment are at all times. Combine all these benefits, and you get a better quality of service to pass to your customers.
Starting and growing a business is no easy task, but you can achieve success if you take the time to know your employees, customers, and industry. Changes might not happen overnight, but with a little hard work and strategic thinking, your electrical contracting business will be turning out record quarters.
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